The Pentagon’s education department is pushing an ideology of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) recommended for grade levels as young as Kindergarten through third grade. Internal documents show the education will effect the children of United States service members, and “promotes progressive activism among students and faculty” reports National Review.
But it doesn’t stop at education. In the guide is a quote from DoDEA director Tom Brady: “We seek to integrate DEI into everything that we do — recruitment and retention, development and promotion, teaching and learning, and our culture and climate.”
Nonprofit watchdog organization OpenTheBooks, revealed in a new report based on curricula guides for teachers and internal communications that the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), the federal school system for children of U.S. military personnel, uses professional development materials that focus on concepts like “privilege,” “institutional racism,” and “patriarchy” in training its teachers.
The document defines diversity as “the presence of differences that may include race, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, language, (dis)ability, age, religious commitment, or political perspective,” as well as “populations that have been — and remain — underrepresented among practitioners in the field and marginalized in the broader society.”
Equity, according to the document, entails “promoting justice, impartiality and fairness within the procedures, processes, and distribution of resources by institutions or systems.” According to the DoDEA guide, “tackling equity issues requires an understanding of the root causes of outcome disparities within our society.”
National Review’s report adds that while DoDEA officially disbanded its DEI office in 2023, internal documents show that the change was purely cosmetic:
“Within the next month, we will integrate our DEI Specialists into four key divisions at headquarters: Research, Accountability, and Evaluation; Strategic and Organizational Excellence; Professional Learning; and Human Resources,” Brady wrote in a March 2023 email to the entire DoDEA system. “To maintain a strategic focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organization, we initiated a DEI Steering Committee at headquarters.”
Among some of the books recommended by DoDEA staffers include titles like Alice Austen Lived Here, which tells the story of a person named Sam who “is very in touch with their own queer identity” and whose teacher “seems to believe that only Dead Straight Cis White Men are responsible for history; The One True Me and You, in which a girl decides to “try out they/them pronouns to see how it feels; and A Color Named Love, which follows a girl with four polyamorous parents.