Education Dept Slashes $600M For DEI Teacher Training

The U.S. Department of Education announced Monday it cut over $600 million in grants spent on training teachers in “social justice activism,” critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology.

The grants were used to fund institutions and nonprofits involved in training teachers on concepts like “anti-racism” and claims about white privilege and white supremacy. The grants also helped fund discriminatory staff recruiting strategies that targeted candidates based on their race.

“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,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, said in a press release. “And not for nothing but all we see are declining outcomes for the students that these trainings purport to help most.”

The Department of Education noted several of the trainings — meant for future classroom teachers — the grants funded, including “Requiring practitioners to take personal and institutional responsibility for systemic inequities (e.g., racism) and critically reassess their own practices,” and “Receiving professional development workshops and equity training on topics such as ‘Building Cultural Competence,’ ‘Dismantling Racial Bias’ and ‘Centering Equity in the Classroom.’”

Other trainings were aimed at “building historical and sociopolitical understandings of race and racism to interrupt racial marginalization and oppression of students in planning instruction relationship building discipline and assessment” and “acknowledging and responding to systemic forms of oppression and inequity, including racism, ableism, ‘gender-based’ discrimination, homophobia, and ageism.”

These training programs are designed to ensure that teachers obsess over race and gender as the top qualities upon which to judge others, and then eventually weave that thinking into curriculums, classroom discussion, and policies.

The Monday cuts follow other significant cuts within the department, including $900 million to the Institute of Education Sciences and over $350 million for Regional Educational Laboratories and Equity Assistance Centers.

President Donald Trump promised both on the campaign trail and in the few short weeks he has been president to significantly curtail the regulatory and bureaucratic reach of the Department of Education (He has also said he wants it abolished “immediately”). Ending far-left ideologies like DEI and critical race theory have been on the top of the list, but the Trump administration is also looking to redirect education funding out of many of these federal programs, giving the funding directly to states in the form of block grants, as Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon said in her Senate confirmation hearing.