Defense Department hid DEI relaunch in K-12 schools, emotionally manipulates students: watchdog

As the Democrat-controlled Senate prepares to debate and consider amendments to the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which already passed the GOP-led House with several amendments supported by Anti-Woke Caucus members, a transparency group is shining a light on the curriculum and vendors in the Pentagon's 70,000-student school system.

The K-12 Department of Defense Education Activity, probed in a January hearing on "progressive ideologies in the U.S. military," simply reshuffled its "radical" diversity, equity and inclusion programs and staff after reassigning DEI chief Kelisa Wing and deleting its DEI Division page, according to a report by OpenTheBooks.com published Thursday.

Wing's tweets assailed whites and used racial slurs against them, including "Karen" and "caudacity," meaning the audacity of Caucasians against nonwhites, prompting GOP lawmakers to demand a DoD investigation. 

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., said DoD waited until three hours before a March 23, 2023, military personnel subcommittee hearing on DEI to tell her Wing's outcome, which Undersecretary Gilbert Cisneros Jr. said was "part of a headquarters restructuring," not discipline.

The day after the Cisneros hearing, DoDEA Director Thomas Brady told staff it would integrate "DEI Specialists" into "four key divisions" including human resources and research, according to an email newly disclosed by OpenTheBooks.

DoDEA had already initiated a DEI Steering Committee that he would chair and includes the chief academic and operating officers and an unidentified dozen others, paralleling Secretary Lloyd Austin's Defense Equity Team, Brady said.

That email follows an eight-page "Notification of Personnel Action" form for Wing, effective date Feb. 17, 2023, that says she was made "assessment branch chief" in the Office of the Chief of the Education Directorate.

"Cisneros was actually faking" by claiming the DEI office was closing, OpenTheBooks CEO Adam Andrzejewski wrote in February in disclosing what the watchdog had learned and what remained hidden by DoDEA's FOIA stonewalling.

Pentagon schools use "[c]hat rooms to facilitate teacher-student conversations that are closed off to parents about sexuality and gender" and engage "four-year-olds in LGBTQ+ conversations" on the "diversity of the gender expression and gender activity," Andrzejewski wrote.

They tell teachers to show "[s]olidarity with the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter organization" and a handbook recommends teachers have "explicit conversations" with students on race, identity, privilege and "injustice" that are expected to provoke "strong emotions," including crying.

Neither DoDEA nor DoD public affairs responded to Just the News queries for its response to Thursday's report.

It's compiled from USASpending.gov data on vendor contracts, Freedom of Information Act requests with "heavy-handed" redactions of emails, calendar invitations and even the members of the DEI Steering Committee formed after Wing's reassignment, and "videos from the [DoDEA 2021] Equity and Access Summit provided by a whistleblower." 

The report covers "primarily fiscal years 2017-2023, with a specific focus on policy at the agency from 2020," OpenTheBooks said.

DoDEA's federal grant spending jumped from $20 million in 2020 to $70 million now, with $5.2 million in grants "to address learning loss during the pandemic" since 2022, OpenTheBooks said. Salary spending in fiscal 2022 was $1.3 billion, but the entity refused to disclose individual salaries, "unlike nearly every other federal agency or school district across the country."

The entity hid links to summit videos "days after" the clips went viral through a Claremont Institute report in September 2022  titled "Grooming Future Revolutionaries," according to OpenTheBooks, which confirmed through FOIA they were removed because of that exposure.

The clips show participants describing how they train students in social justice activism, Thursday's report says. "These children are subject to frequent moves and unique family stressors, making them particularly vulnerable to the emotionally manipulative pedagogical methods described in the report."

The American military is peddling critical race theory, white shaming, queer theory, and left-wing activism to children in its K–12 military schools. pic.twitter.com/gDH0KW4oFD

— Center for the American Way of Life (@CenterForAWL) September 19, 2022

DoDEA appears to have scrubbed all traces of the summit by that name from its website. Its website search box says there are more than 1,100 hits on "equity and access summit" but returns only three, none related to that name. 

Last year's Student Services Summit appeared to cover the same subject matter, and a Google search for "equity and access summit dodea" returns the new summit name.

Obtained materials show DoDEA promotes "transformative SEL," which OpenTheBooks calls a "mashup" of DEI with social emotional learning, which uses "students’ natural desires to be liked by their peers … towards ends that are fundamentally ideological and political."

The framework trains students to be "hypervigilant of their own and their classmate’s emotional states" and express emotions and personal information to "build trust" with administrators and teachers, the report says.

The Chicago-based Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, which first started promoting SEL 30 years ago, defines transformative SEL as "applying the SEL framework toward the goals of creating equitable settings and systems and promoting justice-oriented schools and civic engagement."

As implemented by DoDEA, however, teachers use Pear Deck – paid nearly $400,000 since 2020, with the current subscription running through September – to prompt emotional "check ins" from students as often as daily and privately message them. 

Teachers also use Google forms to conduct a "Social Emotional Wellness Inventory" on students, and their "affirmed name" by gender identity is stored in Google Classroom, the report says. DoDEA has paid over $5.4 million in Google Workspace contracts and over $29 million on Google Chromebooks, which it now offers to every student, since 2016.

"It’s hard to see how that would be useful, easy to see how it could be abused, and obvious to imagine how it could be exploited by hackers for blackmail and phishing purposes," OpenTheBooks says.

A DoDEA guidance counselor at the 2021 summit even suggested scanning the brains of students, using an "Objective Brain Gauge Device" she had used in her clinical research, and pair the data with SEL surveys they had taken.

Made by Cortical Metrics, the device shows the student "how their brain is actually performing" after, say staying up "up all weekend doing homework," the guidance counselor said, according to OpenTheBooks.

"This quote was in the context of the negative effects of sleep deprivation, but it is obvious how the technology could be used to inappropriately pre-diagnose or otherwise encourage children to fixate on mental health conditions," the report says.

DoDEA refused to provide emails to and from the guidance counselor mentioning Cortical Metrics in the name of privacy when OpenTheBooks requested them in December 2022, and told the watchdog its appeal wouldn't be decided until July 2024, according to the group.

"The extreme length of time to process FOIAs and appeals highlights the difficulty of providing oversight to this agency," the report says.