The Department of Defense's K-12 school system pushed diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology and encouraged children to become activists, according to a new report.
The OpenTheBooks report published Thursday said the Department of Defense Education Activity, or DoDEA, which operates schools globally for the children of American military members, pursued DEI-infused social and emotional learning, or SEL, as well as encouraged students to become political activists.
The report comes as the National Defense Authorization Act is expected to be weighed by the Senate this month.
According to the 54-page report, the DoDEA used "transformative SEL" techniques, which "refers to applying the SEL framework toward the goals of creating equitable settings and systems and promoting justice-oriented schools and civic engagement," according to leading SEL group CASEL. "Transformative SEL" works by telling children to pay outsize attention to "privilege" and "identity," and according to a 2021 Equity and Access Summit from the DoDEA, students being confronted by those issues face "difficult conversations" that can provoke children to cry.
The DoDEA highlighted the "difficult conversations" and the SEL connection to DEI on its now-defunct DEI Division website . While the DoDEA dissolved its DEI Division in 2023 in the wake of controversy surrounding its former chief, Kelisa Wing, who had written anti-white messages on social media, the DoDEA still maintains a DEI "steering committee," representing an ideology that former DoDEA Executive Director Thomas Brady said would be "embedded into everything we do," according to the report.
But the SEL focus brings more than the ideology, according to the report, as "students emotional states are being recorded all day long," and tech platforms such as Google Workspace for Education, Google Classroom, and Pear Deck, which operate in many of the classrooms, are able to collect data on the children's emotional states.
Google Classroom also allows children to change their name at school to an "affirming name," or one different than their birth name, which follows a March 2024 DoDEA policy allowing a student simply to ask an administrator for the change and achieve it within 24 hours.
"In Denmark, regulators have already identified this for what it is: A major threat to privacy of minors. Empowering teachers to constantly monitor children's emotional states and interact with them privately outside the purview of parents is problematic," OpenTheBooks CEO Adam Andrzejewski told the Washington Examiner. "Recording and keeping the student data in perpetuity takes it a step further: It's the data-mining of incredibly private student information. Lawmakers should ensure teachers get back to educating, rather than colluding with big tech to spy on children."
"It's not a teacher's place to interact privately with children about incredibly intimate and controversial topics outside their parent or guardian's purview," Andrzejewski added.
Students get frequent "check-ins" from Pear Deck, which prompt them to explain their emotional state and allows for teachers to message them directly about it. That data get stored, and while administrators and teachers can have access to the data to "see trends" of students, it is unclear whether students or parents would have access to the data.
At the 2021 Equity and Access Summit, one DoDEA staffer suggested conducting brain scans on children to pair with the SEL data in order to track performance, according to the report.
The report also showed several DoDEA staff talking about how closely the government education standards align with the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center's "Social Justice Standards," with a DoDEA physical education expert explaining, "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, and the word 'stand up' is different, the outcome is still the same ... and those are the kinds of connections we need to make, or help students make.”
Andrzejewski said the internal conversations his group discovered suggested Defense Department education officials were "priming kids to be activists" in Pentagon schools.
"The leadership bluntly stated it was about creating a 'school-to-activism pipeline' so kids would be trained to 'challenge systems of oppression,'" Andrzejewski said. "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."
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The report also highlighted other concerning material, such as sexual education materials from Goodheart-Willcox, which the DoDEA bought for over $1 million, claiming students can choose a gender identity and that there are four aspects of sexuality: biological sex, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual experiences and thoughts.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the DoDEA with a request for comment.
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