President Joe Biden’s Department of Education spent over a billion dollars in the past four years on grants to local school districts for hiring, programming, and training, all designed to promote the Left’s toxic and divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. President-elect Donald Trump’s new education secretary, Linda McMahon, should turn off the spigot on Day One.
According to a new report from the parental rights advocacy group Parents Defending Education, the grants went to a range of areas in education and were disbursed to K-12 schools and postsecondary schools alike. To fund hiring initiatives based on DEI, $489 million was given, while $343 million was spent on DEI programs that included training and activism, and an additional $169 million was granted to school districts to pay for DEI-centered mental health programs.
On an individual level, the grants are even more egregious. More than $21 million was given to Montgomery County Public Schools in North Carolina for a program that taught teachers that they should treat students from racial minority backgrounds differently. Ypsilanti Community Schools in Michigan received $15 million for various programs, including hiring a consultant who was paid nearly $20,000 to instruct teachers on “culturally responsive teaching.”
The Biden administration’s adherence to DEI in policymaking is hardly a secret. Within minutes of taking the oath of office in 2021, Biden signed an executive order that directed the federal government to make racial equity a primary goal of government policy. However, the scale to which the Department of Education, an agency ostensibly charged with ensuring better education outcomes for students, has embraced this partisan ideology at the expense of students is astounding.
Every dollar the agency has spent pushing DEI ideology is a dollar it did not spend improving education outcomes at a time when school achievement rates have plummeted, especially following the school closures of 2020-2021. This blatantly ideological approach to grant-making would be laughable if it were not so scandalous.
Instead of being good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars, the Biden administration wasted a billion dollars on a brazenly partisan agenda that benefits no one except the individuals and organizations that have so effectively grifted off the collective racial guilt of the liberal establishment. Besides pushing a divisive political agenda, this DEI grant-making project was a colossal waste of money.
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Grant-making is the primary way that the Department of Education exercises its authority. Each year, billions of dollars are disbursed to schools covering all grade levels, from elementary to postgraduate. These grants come with strings attached to ensure that the taxpayer is not footing the bill for spurious or wasteful programs and initiatives.
When incoming Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and the Trump administration get to work in January, ending the odious practice of using U.S. taxpayers’ dollars to fund ideologies meant to divide young and impressionable students should be a Day One priority in order to restore an approach to grant-making that is actually focused on improving student outcomes.