President Joe Biden’s Department of Education dolled out over $1 billion in diversity, equity, and inclusion grants since 2021, a new Parents Defending Education report shows.
Almost half, $489,883,797.81, went to DEI hiring while over 30%, $343,337,286, went to DEI programming, and another $169,301,221 went to DEI-based mental health and social-emotional learning programs.
“You reap what you sow, and it is very clear that this Administration’s Department of Education has been incentivizing the advancement of far-left ideologies into American schools in place of rigorous, proven methods of instruction,” PDE researcher Rhyen Staley told the Washington Examiner.
The top five states with the most DEI grants during Biden’s tenure were North Carolina (with $160,871,561), California (with $118,186,920), Florida (with $74,822,150), South Carolina (with $71,893,882), and Michigan (with $48,018,832).
In total, 42 states and Washington, D.C., received $1,002,522,304.81 in DEI funding from 229 grants.
A number of grants were allocated to initiatives promoting race-based recruitment, hiring, and training, often incorporating race-based affinity groups. Such practices have been the subject of Title VII civil rights complaints accusing school districts of racial discrimination by offering race-exclusionary opportunities.
PDE recently filed two Title VII complaints, first reported on by the Washington Examiner, alleging “racial discrimination” after white employees were reportedly excluded from an employment opportunity at Acalanes Union High School District in Oakland, California, and race-segregated employee affinity groups were created at Boston Public Schools.
Several grants were issued for youth activism programming widely used in ethnic studies courses, while others focused on “anti-racism,” “equity-centered education,” “culturally responsive” programs, and other initiatives relating to DEI and critical race theory.
One of the grants highlighted by Parents Defending Education gave $3,973,175 to the School District of Philadelphia for a restorative justice program, whose program adviser is a far-left activist and former Communist Party USA member.
Staley, who authored the report, said: “The only people or groups to benefit from the enormous amount of grant funding are the universities, administrators, and DEI consultants, at the expense of children’s education. This needs to change by placing children’s learning at the forefront of education, instead of prioritizing race-based policies and DEI.”
The PDE report comes just over a month before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. He previously vowed to cut the Department of Education.
Frederick M. Hess, a senior fellow and director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner that under the Biden administration, the department became “a political entity frequently engaged in promoting particular ideological nostrums” that he called “massively problematic.”
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Hess said he thinks “it’d be fine” if Trump kept his promise to cut the department because “the Department of Education is extraordinarily bureaucratic. It creates extraordinary amounts of red tape for the nation’s schools, especially relative to the money it actually provides.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Department of Education for comment.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
