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While military members are selflessly serving their country, their children are being indoctrinated in radical leftist ideologies in a “school-to-activism pipeline,” where they are trained to hate America and “challenge its systems of oppression.”
A nonprofit organization is exposing how children of military members are being indoctrinated with controversial ideologies within their K-12 classrooms.
Schools run by the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), a subagency of the DoD, educate military servicemembers’ children in countries around the world, including in the U.S.
In 2022, it was discovered that Kelissa Wing, DoDEA’s former chief of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) division, had made a number of anti-white posts on social media. Following backlash, Thomas Brady, DoDEA’s executive director, stated in a congressional hearing that the DEI division was being disbanded.
That was only partially true.
DoDEA did dissolve the DEI division, but in internal emails Brady wrote that DEI specialists would be embedded into different areas of the agency and that a new DEI Steering Committee would be formed.
OpenTheBooks, a nonprofit that seeks government transparency, released a report on July 11 which shows how DoDEA has continued to push divisive ideologies, including DEI, CRT, Social Emotional Learning (SEL), and gender ideology, onto children attending DoD schools.
OpenTheBooks auditors used publicly available spending data and other information derived from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and from a whistleblower to lift the lid on what actions DoDEA is currently taking to turn students into social justice activists.
Much of the content in the report stems from trainings and presentations given to DoDEA staff.
Some of the material was aimed at convincing teachers and staff that they are racist and that they should fight for social justice.
For example, OpenTheBooks obtained a video from a training where two elementary school teachers talked about professional development based in part on a book study of Ibram Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist.
One of the teachers stated, “I think inaction is something I didn’t realize that I was doing…I realized maybe even though I thought I was openly antiracist, maybe I wasn’t actively antiracist.”
Another teacher said she didn’t realize the damage she was doing with her “white silence.”
The video was allegedly cut short as OpenTheBooks claims DoDEA was trying to keep the training from being made known.
DoDEA staff were also offered Coaching for Equity, a book that details “strategies for talking about race, power, and systems of oppression which lead to changes in a teacher’s practice.”
OpenTheBooks says that Coaching for Equity “rebukes capitalism, ‘patriarchy,’ traditions like Thanksgiving, and America’s existence as a country” founded on stolen land.
The book follows a coach discussing equitable class instruction with a young white teacher. The teacher asks the coach if she is a racist; the coach responds that the teacher is a racist and asks if the teacher is “ready to explore the ways you’ve unconsciously acted on racist beliefs.” The coach also is upset that the teacher is not of a different race.
Teachers are encouraged to undergo struggle sessions over equity as part of a professional learning standard called “Equity Drivers.”
In this, the report explains, “Educators discuss instances of privilege and bias in their day-to-day experiences and articulate their own assumptions about key concepts like equality and fairness…. They implement and model norms that encourage educators to reflect on how their own privilege, race, and class might be impacting their mindsets, practices, and expectations of themselves and each other.”
DoDEA then has teachers pass these ideologies on to students.
For example, the report states that DoDEA uses “Comprehensive Health Skills for Middle School” across its schools for health education. It teaches students that there are four aspects of sexuality which are biological sex, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual experiences and thoughts.
The book tells middle schoolers that “understanding sexuality is an important part of knowing about yourself.”
It goes on to state that gender is socialized from birth and that people can choose their gender identity.
The book tells students to choose a topic discussed in the lesson related to sexuality and create a flyer to “educate others about your chosen topic and promote acceptance.” It encourages them to ask teachers to hang the flyer in the school hallways.
DoDEA’s education standards are similar to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Social Justice Standards: Teaching Tolerance Anti-Bias Framework.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a left-wing group that creates a list of “hate groups.” Its list is entirely ideologically biased, placing mainstream Christian and conservative groups on the list with actual terrorist groups.
In a presentation, one DoDEA staffer encouraged the use of the group’s standards.
A DoDEA Headquarters physical education specialist told staffers, “In [the National Health Education Standards] we teach students to advocate for personal, family and community health. One of the Social Justice Standards teaches students that ‘it is important to stand up for myself and others’…so the idea is that even though the wording of advocacy is different…the outcome is still the same…and those are the kinds of connections we need to make, or help students make.”
DoDEA also uses SEL and encourages students to focus on their identities and feelings. Students are encouraged to engage in so-called difficult conversations in which it is expected that they will cry.
SEL technologies used by DoDEA also include invasive data collection of students, such as asking them to check in with their emotional state. The data collection is then used to create a social-emotional wellness inventory of each student. One staffer even suggested taking brain scans of students.
In discussing the report, Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of OpenTheBooks, concluded:
“The leadership bluntly stated it was about creating a ‘school-to-activism pipeline’ so kids would be trained to ‘challenge systems of oppression.’ Now, though the words may be different, the message is the same: American principles and institutions should be challenged, and students should advocate for themselves and others on the basis of complex identities — not their shared American ideals.”
While American servicemembers are fighting to defend American principles, the Department of Defense is working to undermine those principles with their children. This is a grotesque betrayal of American military families and their sacrifices. All such ideologies should no longer be taught in any schools run by the U.S. government.
It is important to note that some progress has been made recently to blunt the effects of this effort to indoctrinate military children. Under the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, military families were given the right to:
While that is a victory, Andrzejewski says families require more.
“Given what we’ve seen here from the mouths of teachers and administrators, along with the clear intent to obscure this DEI content, we don’t believe the current protections go far enough,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “DoDEA staff could easily withhold all of the controversial teacher training materials on the basis that it’s not literally handed out in classrooms.”
Americans should have a government and schools that honor our nation’s founding values and pillars. Sadly, the federal government and many in the education field have proven they aren’t interested in educating children or teaching them to respect and celebrate American ideals nor those who sacrificed to advance those ideals. Rather they want to create revolutionaries and allies for their fight to undermine and change America.
This is unacceptable, and America’s leaders must step in and purge the military and its education system of all such subversive ideologies.
As seen in this article, many K-12 schools now embrace the secular woke agenda and are hostile to Christian beliefs and parental rights. Fortunately, parents don’t have to settle for this. Liberty University Online Academy is a K-12 program designed to educate your children in the ways of the Lord while preparing them to stand firm in their faith when they graduate. Our flexible online curriculum ensures that your student is trained at your convenience and keeps YOU the ultimate educator of your children.
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