By Max Eden | AEI
Tom Brady retired earlier this spring. He’d led his organization longer than anyone else on the scene and posted record numbers and results right up to his retirement. But if former President Donald Trump is elected again this November, Brady’s legacy must be completely undone.
We’re not talking about the famed NFL quarterback. We mean the former director of the Department of Defense Education Activity, or DoDEA, schools, which are the Pentagon’s K-12 public schools serving the children of American military service members.
In 2020, Brady promised to use DoDEA schools to promote “social justice” and vowed that diversity, equity, and inclusion would “become embedded in everything that we do,” and would be “a foundational premise in our organization.”
For a full run-down of how that went, you can check out the report one of us recently published at OpenTheBooks.com: “Schools for Radicals: The Secret Push to Institute Radical DEI Curriculums Within the Pentagon’s K-12 Public Schools.”
Long story short, the DEI curriculums were offensive, creepy, and manipulative. DoDEA appointed a new DEI leader, a self-proclaimed “woke administrator,” who had a history of anti-white racist tweets and who shilled her own books to her colleagues.
After our reporting brought congressional scrutiny, DoDEA dismantled its DEI office and reassigned its director. Last year, a “parents’ bill of rights” passed in the National Defense Authorization Act that governs DoDEA, giving parents the right to see their children’s lesson plans.
But, as OpenTheBooks.com reported, DEI is still alive and well in DoDEA schools. It just went underground via a secretive “DEI Steering Committee.”
Last month Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) put forward an amendment to the NDAA that would abolish the secret steering committee and begin to provide school choice for DoDEA students.
But Congress can’t fix the systemic problems introduced by Brady. DoDEA delivers DEI concepts in part through “social and emotional learning” programs, steering students into ideological, purposefully upsetting conversations and collecting data on students’ emotions.
Teachers are also not safe from DoDEA’s institutional emotional abuse. Teacher training and professional development standards are adopted from an organization known as Learning Forward.
Four of the 11 new standards adopted since 2022 “center equity” and include demands that teachers use their “knowledge about privilege, power, historical biases, and institutional racism to communicate about their own experiences.”
Teacher training books could include titles such as Coaching for Equity, which OpenTheBooks discovered via a Freedom of Information Act request.
In it, a teaching coach accuses a white teacher of being racist until she, in tears, confesses it. The coach then berates the teacher for being white. Her job, according to the book, should have gone to a minority.
Finally, Coaching for Equity encourages school leaders to advocate “systems change” by embracing other books, such as White Fragility.
Suffice to say, this is all not only an insult to the honor and sacrifice of America’s military service members but also a threat to American national security.
America’s military recruiting crisis surely can’t be helped by the realization that if you stay in the military while raising children, they will be indoctrinated in a far-left political ideology.
At the bare minimum, DoDEA will need a leader that can excise the ideological tumor of DEI and eliminate social and emotional learning from these schools.
If elected, Trump should find a leader who can do far more than that — a leader who can make DoDEA schools into a national exemplar for patriotic education.
The next DoDEA director could, for example, adopt a knowledge-rich curriculum much like what was recently published by the Texas Education Agency. DoDEA schools have long had standardized tests that are more directly tied to its curriculum than many traditional public schools. By embracing a rich curriculum and testing to make sure that students actually know the material, DoDEA could pioneer a new and long overdue path for public education writ large.
Similarly, DoDEA could chart a course back toward traditional school discipline. About half of American school districts, including many in red states, have embraced the lenient and critical race theory-derived “restorative justice” approach that engenders disorder and violence. There are very few examples of major school districts bringing back discipline and order; DoDEA could lead the way.
Finally, DoDEA could become the first major school district to undertake a focused, groundbreaking initiative on excellence rather than equity. Ideologically charged contractors such as Discovery Education, with its “Dissent, Equity, and Inspiring Change” content, can be shown the door.
Alternatives could include artificial intelligence tools, such as Khanmigo, that can help advanced students blaze through coursework at a rapid rate, freeing up time for the most gifted students to actually reach their fullest academic potential.
Rather than trying to cut all students down for the sake of “equity,” DoDEA could actually help gifted students be “all that they can be,” as the Army recruiters would say.
All of this would require a leader with courage and clarity. Here’s hoping Trump’s team is starting the search.
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