DOJ Spent $100 Million Funding DEI, Social Emotional Learning in Classrooms

Parents Defending Education (PDE) just released a report on the amount of money the Department of Justice spent funding DEI, Social Emotional Learning and Restorative Justice in US schools. Between 2021 and 2024 (under Joe Biden) the total was at least $100 million.

The funds were awarded through the Justice Department’s STOP School Violence Program, which provides grant money to school districts, nonprofits, and city and state governments through projects that “increase school safety by implementing solutions that will improve school climate.”…

“DOJ STOP grants were intended to be used to address and ameliorate school violence, which has been a major issue of concern to parents across the country over the past several years,” PDE president Nicki Neily told The Daily Wire on Thursday.

“It’s appalling,” she added, “although not surprising, that DOJ bureaucrats would prioritize DEI initiatives over student safety. American families deserve better, and the sooner waste like this is eliminated, the better.”

Of course no one wants to see bullying or violence in schools, but the focus on improving the “climate” is an open invitation to woke hucksters who argue their focus on DEI training can improve things. Improving the climate means very specific things to woke administrators and the outside groups who receive funding from this money.

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.”…

Social emotional learning (SEL) is more insidious than it may sound. 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.

SEL seems like a pretty insidious way to mainstream DEI without letting parents catch on to what is actually happening. Last year journalist Abigail Shrier wrote about SEL for the Free Press. In 2022 she attended a convention with over 2,000 public school teachers in California to learn what SEL meant in practice.

School counselor Natalie Sedano advised our assembled conference room of teachers to ask kids: “How are you feeling today? Are you daisy-bright, happy and friendly? Or am I a ladybug? Will I fly away if we get too close?”

This prompted great excitement in the audience, and teachers jumped up to share their own “emotions check-ins.” One teacher said every day, she asks her kids if they feel it’s a “bones” or “no bones” kind of a day, borrowing the verbiage from a viral TikTok video in which a pug owner shares the mood of his 13-year-old pug, Noodle. If Noodle sits upright, it’s a bones day! If he collapses, it’s a no-bones day. 

“That is so fun!” Sedano enthused. “Love it! Thank you!”

I asked Leif Kennair, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of anxiety, and Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, what they thought of practice. Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated…

“If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom,” Dr. Linden said.

And once you’ve turned every classroom into this kind of daylong therapy session it’s not much of a leap for left-wing counselors to start making specific recommendations to some of the kids.

Over the past two years, I have been so inundated with parents’ stories of school counselors encouraging a child to try on a variant gender identity, even changing the child’s name without telling the parents, that I’ve almost wondered if there are any good school counselors. One parent I interviewed told me that her son’s high school counselor had given him the address of a local LGBTQ youth shelter where he might seek asylum and attempt to legally liberate himself from loving parents.

So here’s some of what PDE found the DOJ was actually funding with this taxpayer money, all supposedly aimed at improving the climate for learning.

• Several projects proposed bringing in outside consultants to train staff and students on restorative practices. Outside organizations included CASEL, the International Institute for Restorative Practices, Second Step, and Courageous Conversations About Race.
• Many projects had an explicit goal of improving school climate for “disproportionately impacted” groups, singling out LGBTQ+ and BIPOC.
• The Minnesota Department of Education received nearly $2 million from the DOJ to “create safe learning environments where practices of anti-racism and anti-oppression are embedded.”

Less discipline and more DEI, identity politics and restorative justice does not strike me as a path to a better learning environment. But results never seem to matter as much as good intentions to left-wing ideologues. I can almost hear them explaining away their failures now: ‘Real social emotional learning has never been tried!’