The Department of Education said Monday that it had slashed more than $600 million in grants with groups that trained teachers and educational agencies in “divisive ideologies.”
The canceled grants went toward things like workshops grounded in Critical Race Theory and professional development focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The action comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month directing the removal of “anti-American ideologies” from public schools and ending federal funding for grants or contracts pushing leftist ideology.
The grants funded training in Critical Race Theory, DEI, social justice activism, “anti-racism,” and instruction on white privilege and white supremacy, according to the Education Department. Other grants went toward teacher recruitment programs that were “implicitly and explicitly based on race.”
Under some of the training that was paid for by taxpayers, teachers were required to take responsibility for “systemic” racism and instructed on how to respond to racism, ableism, “gender-based” discrimination, homophobia, and ageism.
Sessions were called things like “Building Cultural Competence,” “Dismantling Racial Bias,” and “Centering Equity in the Classroom,” according to the department.
One grant application was focused on providing “targeted practices in culturally relevant and responsive teaching abolitionist pedagogies and issues of diversity in classroom management.”
Parents Defending Education, a conservative group that has pushed for the removal of leftist ideology from schools across the country, praised the move from the Education Department.
“It’s hard to overstate how radical these teacher trainings are—we are talking about forcing teachers to talk about their race at work, asking educators to ‘take personal and institutional responsibility for systemic inequities,’ promoting abolitionist teaching practices and defining equity as equal outcomes,” Parents Defending Education Director of Outreach Erika Sanzi told The Daily Wire. “And not for nothing but all we see are declining outcomes for the students that these trainings purport to help most.”
Trump has pushed for major reform in the Education Department, even suggesting that he might abolish it entirely. Part of the overhaul has been mandating that federally funded schools stop promoting racial and gender ideologies.
“Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination,” Trump wrote in his executive order on education last month. “In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics. In other instances, young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.”
