DEI-viding America: How Biden’s Justice Department Blew $100+ Million on DEI Efforts in Education – Including Over $2.5 Million in Michigan
WASHINGTON, DC (Michigan News Source) – The Biden administration spent over $100 million of taxpayer money on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives from 2021 to 2024 according to a report released recently by “Parents Defending Education (PDE), a national grassroots non-profit organization working to “reclaim schools from activists promotion harmful agendas.”
Many critics argue that these kinds of programs do more to divide than unite and say these grants are aimed to transform America’s classrooms into laboratories for progressive ideologies under the guise of “restorative justice” and “social-emotional learning.”
The PDE report says about the DOJ grants “many projects had an explicit goal of improving school climate for ‘disproportionately impacted’ groups, singling out LGBTQ+ and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).”
According to data from the PDE, 102 grants were handed out by the Biden DOJ in 36 states and included 3,235,414 students in 946 K-12 school districts. These grants were used to promote restorative justice practices, SEL (social-emotional learning) and DEI in the classroom.
Restorative justice: turning classrooms into therapy sessions.
PDE separates the spending descriptions into four different buckets: general restorative practices/ social-emotional learning ($45+ million/47 grants); DEI ($32+ million/30 grants); consulting/ certification ($19+ million/22 grants) and hiring ($10+ million/11 grants).
The money was provided as “STOP grants” where the DOJ gives grant monies to non-profits, school districts, and city and state governments for projects that “increase school safety by implementing solutions that will improve school climate.”
According to PDE, “More often than not, when schools mention ‘improving school climate,’ they mean replacing exclusionary discipline with restorative practices and social-emotional learning. Exclusionary discipline removes the disruptor from the classroom, allowing the rest of the class to continue learning. Restorative practices, on the other hand, often disrupts class time for more students, as both the offender(s) and victim(s) in an incident are brought together to discuss what happened and ‘repair harm.’”
The PDE goes on to say that SEL is even more “insidious” and comments in the report, “While SEL was originally intended to teach children skills like self-awareness, self-management, and goal setting, the definitional shift to ‘Transformative SEL’ prioritizes equity and ‘the collective’ – it has become another avenue to bring DEI into the classroom.”
Knitting circles and bureaucratic boondoggles.
At Bowling Green University, their $1.8 million DOJ grant took the form of using taxpayer dollars to develop student mental health curriculum in rural and high-poverty districts with “mindful medication, yoga and knitting circles.”
In Michigan, The Detroit Association of Black Organizations DABO Inc. got $999,930 for their “Stop School Violence Program” which purports to address the impacts of adverse childhood experiences by offering social-emotional learning, restorative justice circles, diversion interventions and wellness activities.
Over in East Lansing, Michigan State University got $1,545,650 for their “Bringing Mental Health First Aid to STOP School Violence” program which included equipping teens and adults with skills to tackle anger, stress and anxiety in 10th and 11th graders, using training that is designed to promote social and emotional-learning and development. This was slated for eight local school districts that were “identified to represent geographic, racial, economic and ethnic diversity” with the MSUE (Michigan State University Extention) deploying nationally certified instructors to serve identified schools.
Priorities or pandering? Money funneled Into DEI while schools struggle with basics.
Last month, PDE also published a report revealing that since 2021, the Department of Education has allocated over $1 billion in grants to promote DEI initiatives in hiring, programming, and mental health training across American schools.
All this spending – over $100 million by the DOJ and the staggering $1 billion by the Department of Education on DEI programming – critics say comes at the expense of tangible solutions to pressing issues like school safety and academic excellence. Instead of addressing real learning issues and safety threats, Democrats have been prioritizing ideological projects that promote division, drain resources, and distract from the core mission of education.
PDE founder and president Nicole Neily told Fox News Digital “Although the Biden administration claimed they cared about ‘student safety,’ these grants highlight that at the end of the day, federal bureaucrats made a deliberate choice to prioritize ideology and pet projects over protecting American schoolchildren, using the tax dollars of hardworking citizens.”
High-profile corporate leaders like Bill Ackman and Elon Musk have also taken to social media to criticize diversity programs that label groups of people as either the “oppressor” or the “oppressed.”
Additionally, a recent Daily Wire interview with Neily on the Podcast “Morning Wire” recently told the media outlet that the Biden Administration has been funding programs that actually hurt students and pointed to studies that say that DEI programs “increase friction between people” and leads to increased hostility between groups. With schools struggling to address safety and academic basics, many argue these funds could have been better spent on practical solutions rather than divisive social experiments.
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