Most of the discriminatory programs began after the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
A group of nearly two dozen school districts from California and Minnesota spent over $19 million on left-wing programming from 2016 to the present.
Twenty-one California school districts and two Minnesota school districts have used those funds to institute race and sex-based school programming, according to a new report from the parental rights organization Defending Education, shared exclusively with National Review.
Of those districts, 18 of them have paid over $19 million from their district budgets to progressive organizations to run those discriminatory programs, most of which began after the Black Lives Matter riots of summer 2020.
Left-wing organizations in those states have received more than $33 million in combined federal, state, and local funding, Defending Education found.
Federal funds totaling $7. 6 million came from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, and Title I and Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In addition, federal grants through the AmeriCorps program, Education Department, and National Science Foundation totaled $12.4 million, putting the amount of federal funding at roughly $20 million. The federal funds overlap with the district spending because the funds are given to the districts to use.
“While it is true that young males of color are struggling in school, roughly 70% of all American students are unable to read and perform math at grade level. Spending tens of millions of dollars on programming that targets a very small subset of students based on immutable characteristics is not only unacceptable, it could be illegal,” said Rhyen Staley, a researcher for Defending Education.
Racial hiring and educational initiatives face an increasingly perilous legal landscape because of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling barring race-based college admissions under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
One organization featured in Defending Education’s report is non-profit Improve Your Tomorrow, a group dedicated to helping men who are racial minorities attend and graduate from college. Improve Your Tomorrow has received $30.1 million of revenue from district contracts, federal grants, and state grant funding for their work in 17 public school districts since 2016, with most of the funds coming after 2020.
Defending Education’s report identifies numerous examples of the race-based programming being taught in schools with taxpayer funds. The National Science Foundation gave the University of California, Davis $2.4 million over four years starting in 2021 to develop STEM programming for black girls. The Ujima Girls in a Robotics Leadership initiative was meant to address “equity” in STEM education for black girls in middle school and high school.
The Elk Grove Unified School District in California is singled out in the report for spending $7.7 million on programming for “young men of color” and “black female students.” Over $3 million of federal funds went into that programming, even though it appears to limit its selection criteria based on immutable characteristics.
Another California school district, the Modesto City Schools, spent $2 million in federal funds on “young men of color” programming. A third district, Natomas Unified School District, paid Improve Your Tomorrow $2.5 million since 2016 on similar initiatives for young men from minority backgrounds.
Similarly, the Ravenswood City School District in California spent $50,000 on programs for “girls of African and Polynesian descent” and the Washington Unified School District signed an agreement for 2024-25 to pay $90,000 on programs solely for black girls.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology, a strand of left-wing thought focused primarily on race in the context of group differences, became commonplace across American institutions in the wake of the George Floyd riots. Critics of DEI often argue the ideology is divisive for obsessing over race rather than prioritizing individual character and achievements.
The political grounds for DEI have become increasingly shaky due to several executive orders from President Trump designed to reverse the outgrowth of DEI and its race-based programs in schools and corporations. The Education Department has launched dozens of civil rights investigations into schools for alleged race discrimination in violation of federal civil rights laws under the banner of DEI.