Pentagon’s Secret Teacher Training Reveals Defiance of White House Directives, Contractors as Backdoor to DEI

By Open the Books | Substack

Open the Books has obtained teacher training materials used by the Pentagon’s k-12 school system from the most recent school year. The documents reveal contractors that continue pushing divisive far-left ideology that President Trump has attempted to root out through executive orders, and a bureaucracy loathe to take directions from the White House.

Internal documents replace SEL with “resiliency” to avoid open records requests, contractors continue to push “equity” over equality and make it a goal to turn students into “advocates.”

The leader of one private contractor called such efforts “defiance over compliance.”

BACKGROUND

The federal bureaucracy is notoriously slow to respond to the Executive Branch it is meant to serve and the Congress whose laws it should execute. As the Trump administration attempts to rein in the size and scope of the federal government, the bureaucracy the president oversees has shown resistance to change.

The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) has proven to be a prime example.

DoDEA educates more than 70,000 children of servicemembers around the world and has been the subject of yearslong investigation by Open the Books for its use of divisive “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) frameworks as well as the controversial “Social Emotional Learning” (SEL).

The Trump administration has set upon the difficult task of rooting out harmful DEI practices from the federal government, its contractors and federally funded schools.

DoDEA has come under fire in recent years for promoting far-left content, encouraging children to fixate on their racial, economic, and gender “identities” to understand their place in a “privilege” hierarchy. Teachers have also been caught boasting about hiding “gender transitions” from parents and creating secret student-only online chatrooms to talk about sexuality.

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING PLANS

Given the ideological commitment shown by DoDEA staff, it’s not surprising they would be resistant to President Trump’s anti-DEI measures. But because DoDEA has long been plagued with extreme delays and over-redactions in their public records request process, it is not always possible to find evidence of bureaucratic intransigence.

This year, however, Open the Books was able to receive the annual professional learning plan for DoDEA teachers for the 2025-2026 school year. The plan guides teachers in professional development and the books, technologies, and other materials the school staff can use in their daily work.

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, the plans are drafted in February or March and then shared with regional and district officials and teachers for feedback. A final revised version is sent out in July, before the school year starts.

Given Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth’s hardline stance against DEI in the American military and American schools, DoDEA officials should have the time and motivation to excise the corrosive ideology from the agency.

However, while the terms “equity” and “social emotional learning” have been eliminated from this school year’s professional learning plan (once ubiquitous in earlier years), far-left ideas in conflict with the President’s anti-DEI directive are still being promoted through professional societies and contractors discussed in the plans.

This example raises questions about how bureaucrats are continuing to launder their own favored policies through outside contractors and professional societies.

Examples include:

thinkLaw

ThinkLaw claims to teach children “critical thinking skills” because “rote memorization and spoon-fed learning will not prepare young people for the rapidly changing workforce that awaits them.” At DoDEA, teachers in Advanced Academics, also known as the gifted program, are given thinkLaw resources for their professional development plan. The curriculum and classroom activities can only be obtained through a contract with the organization, but a look through the thinkLaw website show’s a strong commitment to “equity.”

In the wake of President Trump’s anti-DEI orders, thinkLaw CEO Colin Searle authored a blog titled “The Collective Power of Moving in Silence: A Practical Response to the Codification of Anti-DEIA Efforts in Public Education” where he advocates for “defiance disguised as compliance.”

He continues, in one example encouraging teachers to affirm secret “gender” transitions in schools, behind the backs of parents.

“In education, this could look like feigned compliance to the federal standard of only acknowledging two genders: male and female. … maybe it doesn’t make sense to make big, bold statements about pronoun usage or to openly defy federal pronouncements. It’s about the collective work of intentionally affirming the young people in our schools for who they are and understanding that we all have the power to be that one adult.”

The CEO has also written a book called “Tangible Equity” which urges educators to “not just prioritize equity, but go beyond the buzzwords” and leverage “power to really start doing something about equity.”

The DoDEA thinkLaw contract is held by CS Educational Services, LLC, and is worth $539,750 in potential awards. ThinkLaw was recently given a $141,000 obligation in July, 2025, according to data in USASpending.

Other notable language in the Advanced Academics Teacher Training:

Advanced Academic teachers training also states that “there will be an increase in the number of underserved students receiving LoS Ill or IV.” LoS III and IV refers to more intensive “levels of service” for advanced students. The teacher training sounds as though students will be selected for these services based on identity rather than merit.

SHAPE America

DoDEA professional learning plans sign Physical Education teachers up for SHAPE America professional society membership and asks them to follow SHAPE America National Health Education Standards.

Open the Books previously wrote about SHAPE America’s National Sex Education Standards, which includes goals like:

• By 2nd grade, define gender identity
• By 5th grade children should be able to describe the role of puberty blockers on those who identify as transgender. Fifth graders should differentiate between sexual orientation and gender identity and explain that gender expression and gender identity exist along a spectrum
• By 8th grade, define anal sex and describe “pregnancy options” including abortion.

While the Health Education Standards don’t touch on “gender identity” or abortion, they do embed new concepts like “equity” and “misinformation and disinformation:”

The standards aim to turn children into “advocates.” In fact, one standard is exclusively devoted to advocacy.

Parents and policymakers should be troubled by an organization that is explicitly espousing far-left ideology is also making a point of turning students into community activists.

During the rollout of these new standards in 2024, then-board president (and current board member) Cara Grant reiterated that the National Health and the National Sex Education standards were grounded in DEI principles, continuing:

“Equity lies at the heart of our mission. We recognize that systemic disparities exist within our educational systems, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities.

Our approach is not simply to level the playing field but to dismantle the structures that perpetuate inequality.”

Many references to DEI have been removed from the website, including a disturbing webpage stating puberty blockers could “neutraliz[e]” the competitive advantage boys have over girls in sports, but, as in the case of Cara Grant, DEI staffers remain at the organization. Kaitlyn Gaddis-Thompson was touted as the Project Director for the National Initiative to Advance Health Equity in Schools in a 2023 podcast.

On her LinkedIn she lists her job as “project director” at SHAPE America, along with a rousing quote stating teachers can either be revolutionaries or oppressors.

The DoDEA SHAPE America contract is worth $82,245 in potential awards, running until 2027, according to data in USASpending.

American School Counselor Association

DoDEA school counselors are advised to:

“Analyze common ethical dilemmas in school counseling though the lens of the American School Counseling Associations Ethical Standards and DoDEA’s policy specifically for appropriate responses for student well-being. Participants will apply ethical decision-making models to real-world scenarios, demonstrating alignment to DoDEA policies and appropriate responses to all students.”

ASCA Ethical Standards emphasize the need for counselors to “affirm” a child’s “gender identity” and urge counselors to “advocate” for various policy items, including “systemic and other changes needed for equitable participation and outcomes in educational programs when disproportionality exists.”

While DoDEA professional development also asks counselors to align responses to DoDEA policy, it is unclear why they would use resources that have foundational ideological conflicts with President Trump’s executive orders on DEI and gender identity ideology.

American Library Association

DoDEA librarians are asked to “plan collaboratively with teachers to support classroom instruction and embed the National Library Standards within their lessons.”

The National Library Standards are developed by the American Association of School Librarians, which is in turn a division of the American Library Association. ALA has strongly resisted attempts for parents to remove pornographic books from children’s libraries, calling them attacks on First Amendment rights and “Intellectual Freedom.”

ALA also promotes the concept of “equity” and Affirmative Action as a matter of “justice,” rejecting the notion of “equality.”

Equality vs. Equity, from the ALA website.

The National Library Standards DoDEA staff are asked to consult are imbued with the same spirit. In the 2025 standards, published this year, librarians are told:

“Continuing to curate reflective collections and advocate for inclusive perspectives also ensures that the school librarian upholds the belief that intellectual freedom is every learner’s right. School librarians do not censor their school library collections to fit the majority and exclude the minority.” [Page 163. Emphasis in the original]

While it’s a nice sentiment on its face, they are written in the context of ALA’s accusations of “book bans” against pornographic books promoting gender confusion.

The Standards also state “ensuring equity in the school library begins with an ongoing reflective analysis of the school library’s existing digital and print collection, outreach programs, and user services.” [Page 46].

These actions were already implemented by DoDEA staff through “equity audits,” described in the 2021 Equity and Access Summit, during which time-honored authors like Dr. Suess were purged in favor of authors like controversial rapper Lil Nas X, who wrote a children’s book called C is for Country, featured in DoDEA programming.

A slide from the 2021 DoDEA Equity and Access Summit showing an activity students participated in for National Education Association’s Read Across America program at Smith Elementary School. Note C is for Country by Lil Nas X.

SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING

In January of last year high-level DoDEA staffers were recorded in a meeting stating they would no longer be using the term “social emotional learning” because of the negative attention SEL practices had received from Open the Books.

SEL is a quasi-therapeutic practice that elicits and records emotional responses from children throughout the school day to recommend potential mental health “interventions.” Instead of SEL, they would use the word “resilience.”

[Read more about SEL at DoDEA in our 2024 report, Schools for Radicals.]

True to form, there is no instance of “social emotional” in the SY 2025-2026 professional development plan but there are 241 instances of “resilience.”

Example: In School Year 2024-2025 the Physical Education learning plan outcome focused on social emotional learning:

The SY 2025-2026 Physical Education learning plan outcome instead focuses on “resiliency:”