The Department of Education isn’t the only arm of the Biden administration doling out federal grants to promote diversity, inclusion and equity in the classroom.
A Parents Defending Education report released Thursday found that the Department of Justice gave more than $100 million in federal grants to support concepts such as DEI, “restorative justice,” and “social emotional learning” in K-12 education from 2021-24.
The findings come less than a month after the organization issued a report showing that the Education Department sank more than $1 billion in grants to fund DEI hires, programs and “mental health/social emotional learning” during the Biden administration.
“[W]e looked into the Department of Justice too & found that even they spent over $100 million pushing garbage initiatives that made schools less safe,” said Erika Sanzi, PDE director of outreach, on X.
From 2021-24, the DOJ issued 102 grants totaling $100,113,942 to school districts, universities, nonprofit groups and others aimed at fostering the charged concepts at nearly 950 school districts in 36 states.
Nearly half of the funding, or $45 million, went to programs that “broadly mention restorative practices or social emotional learning,” while $32 million went to DEI-related efforts, the report said.
Another $20 million went to hire outside consultants known for promoting “divisive concepts such as critical race theory, critical gender theory and queer theory,” while more than $10 million was intended to bring on a “new administrator, such as a restorative justice facilitator.”
The recipients included the Minnesota Department of Education, which received nearly $2 million to “create safe learning environments where practices of anti-racism and anti-oppression are embedded.”
Bowling Green State University in Ohio was awarded $1.85 million “to develop student mental health curriculum in rural and high-poverty districts,” which involved “mindfulness meditation, yoga, and knitting circles,” the report said.
Penn State received $1.78 million for a project to decrease cyberbullying in central Pennsylvania schools by advancing “equity in violence prevention” for groups including “People of Color (POC), women, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQIA+ community.”
Since 2018, the DOJ has offered STOP Grants as part of its STOP School Violence Program seeking to “increase school safety by implementing solutions that will improve school climate.”
The goal of improving school climate has increasingly come to mean phasing out “exclusionary discipline,” namely student expulsions and suspensions, in favor of “restorative practices and social emotional learning,” the report said.
The problem with the restorative approach is that it “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.’”
Social emotional learning is “more insidious than it may sound,” the report said.
“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,” said the parents’ group.
The back-to-back reports show how spending on the $8 billion DEI industry rose under the Biden administration, but recent events indicate that the federal gravy train may be coming to a halt.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaires tapped to head President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have already shown an interest in taking on the DEI grant complex.
“This grant program—like so many others under the Biden administration—was hijacked to bankroll activist priorities, undermining congressional intent,” said PDE President Nicole Neily in a Thursday statement. “It’s little wonder the American people voted for change in November—bureaucrats beware, because DOGE is coming.”
The Washington Times reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.