Harris and Biden’s Education Department Is Radical
Editor's Note
The goal of the destructive Left is revolutionary: to tear down the American regime and replace it with a new one founded on a new conception of justice. In order to accomplish this, the destructive Left must convince large swathes of Americans that the old conception of justice is flawed, that the regime in which they were raised is evil and must be supplanted. For decades, the Department of Education (ED) has been one of the chief tools of this revolution, enforcing first liberal and then woke orthodoxy in schools across the country.
Few people realize, however, just how bad the situation at ED has gotten. Victoria Manning, a senior investigative researcher at Restoration News, examines the spending and activism of the Biden-Harris Education Department in detail. What she finds is a radical mix of LGBTQ ideology, climate alarmism, racial “equity” and quotas, and illegal immigration — all enabled by the extra-legal power of the administrative state. This is the fourth installment in Educating for Virtue, a series of essays on the potential for a conservative education agenda in a Republican administration.
The Biden-Harris administration’s 2025 budget for the United States Department of Education (ED) highlights the desire to “improve outcomes from cradle to career,” neatly encapsulating the administration’s (and the broader left’s) agenda for education. The message is clear: the Left wants to insert itself in every stage of a child’s development—from the hospital delivery room through college indoctrination.
Through ED, successive administrations have used taxpayer funds to promote LGBTQ ideologies, racist equity agendas, and radical climate change hoaxes. The Education Department has even been used to promote illegal immigration. It is the single biggest promoter of the ethos of the destructive Left in the country, demonizing capitalism and traditional American values.
For millions of families, this indoctrination into radical ideology was exposed during the nightmare of Covid virtual learning, but it goes back decades.
You’re Funding the Racist Equity Agenda
Public schools no longer prioritize academic excellence as their first and final goal. “Equity” agendas have taken over every facet of education. Kamala Harris has championed the definition of equity to mean “we all end up in the same place.” Harris believes that equality is problematic because it suggests that “everyone should get the same amount.”
ED promotes the equity narrative in everything it does. Promoting social justice, the LGBTQ agenda, and illegal immigrant protections are the primary focus of the taxpayer-funded Education Department. The Democratic Party’s left wing dictates the indoctrination agenda and ED implements that agenda through grants given to third-party consultants, non-governmental organizations, and state and local school districts.
ED has funded four regional Equity Assistance Centers at an annual taxpayer cost of $6.5 million. These centers facilitate the equity agenda across the nation. The Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium’s Center for Education Equity (CEE) is ED’s source for equity indoctrination in the Northeast. Its mission is to “promote excellence and equity in education to achieve social justice.” After receiving federal taxpayer dollars on the front end, CEE sells its consulting services to school districts, netting even more taxpayer funds for its ideological activism. Roughly 90% of the center’s total revenue is made up of taxpayer dollars, according to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon.
In 2021, the Montgomery County, Maryland, public school district contracted with CEE for $454,680 (state and local taxpayer dollars) to conduct an “anti-racist system audit.” The audit was to focus on examining practices that fail to create “equitable outcomes for every student.” What that really means is to ensure that black and Hispanic students are achieving the same outcomes as white and Asian students, even if that means taking away resources and opportunities from the latter to redistribute to the former.
The CEE also provides professional development for educators. In 2021 the center offered training on “[h]ow to teach culturally responsive social studies when everything is controversial.” The training praised Black Lives Matter, encouraged fighting against the police, and pushed critical race theory narratives that white people are oppressors and America is systemically racist. The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the center’s key curriculum resources of “culturally sustaining pedagogy.”
Encouraging Illegal Immigration
Illegal immigration is another massive drag on the already failing public education system. Resources are being taken away from American citizens and directed toward the growing number of children who can’t speak English enrolled in U.S. public schools. In 2021, 10.6% of public-school students required English as a Second Language (ESL) services — meaning they couldn’t communicate at school without extra resources. Thanks to Kamala Harris’s open border policies, it’s predicted that one out of four children will be ESL students as early as next year.
ED has an entire department devoted to recruiting aliens who have crossed the border illegally to enroll in taxpayer-funded schools. The ED Office of Migrant Education actively seeks out illegal aliens to add to the growing ESL population. In 2023, ED gave away $3 million to states just for recruiting more “migrant” students for their schools. This is just a small fraction of the total amount of money being spent on “migrant students.” In the 2021–22 school year, over 5 million ESL students were enrolled in government-run schools nationwide.
ED now refers to students in the country illegally as “newcomers.” School districts are offered an ED toolkit that encourages the establishment of “newcomer programs” that offer more resources and special treatment to “migrant” students. These specialty programs have popped up in districts across the nation, at the encouragement of ED, and provide small class sizes and individualized instruction. The toolkit even encourages teacher home visits to welcome “newcomer” families in a “safe and convenient environment.” These same opportunities and resources are not afforded to students who are citizens.
In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that it is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause to deny public education to illegal alien children. One aspect of Plyler that is not discussed is that the legal decision did not overturn an earlier ruling that education is not a fundamental right. This may leave the door open to legislation that could restrict ED’s special treatment and lavish spending on “undocumented” students if a legitimate state concern is established.
Grooming Kids
ED has yet another “toolkit” for the use of indoctrinating students into Kamala Harris’s “New Way Forward” thinking — this one for transgender ideology and other left-wing sexual causes.
ED encourages teachers and administrators to help students establish “gender and sexuality alliance (GSA)” groups at their schools. (Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, served as the faculty leader of a GSA group while working as a social studies teacher in his home state of Minnesota.) The toolkit also encourages teachers to “engage parents in learning” about the needs of LGBTQ students — essentially instructing teachers to have a conversation with parents who don’t affirm their child’s confusion.
ED also advocates erasing the categories of men and women by encouraging the use of gender-neutral terms. The department even opposes using the terms “father” and “mother,” and “brother” and “sister,” favoring the use of “parent” or “sibling.” Schools are encouraged to use grant money, provided by Congress, to further the LGBTQ agenda.
One webinar promoted by ED gives a platform to the extremist group GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network), which promotes transgenderism. GLSEN has an educator “safe space kit” used by teachers around the nation that includes signs that encourage students to talk with teachers about their sexuality or mental health issues around sex, sexual orientation, or transgenderism.
One of the guest speakers in the ED-funded webinar was a transgender teacher who teaches high school biology and promotes the importance of sharing pronouns and using “inclusive” language. She pontificated that it is wrong in a biology class to instruct that it’s “women who produce eggs,” but teachers should teach that it’s “ovaries that produce eggs,” and “not all egg producers are women.”
ED also distributed a welcome message for transgender students at the start of the 2021 school year that stressed support for boys to be permitted to play in girls’ sports and encouraged transgender students to file complaints if they are denied access to sports of their choice. The message was released jointly with the Biden-Harris Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human services.
Most egregiously, the Biden-Harris administration’s Education Department rewrote Title IX regulations, trying to abolish the rights of girls to have equal access in academics and sports by swapping out the law’s actual protections based on sex with ones based on the left-wing category of “gender identity.”
Reckless Spending on the Climate Agenda
In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore made apocalyptic claims that the world would be at a point of no return in 10 years due to “global warming.” Gore became the most visible face of a Democratic push to stoke climate panic and, consequently, force through a host of new “green” laws and regulations. Gore also claimed in 2009 that the North Pole would be ice-free by 2013. Though none of these predictions have played out, the U.S. government is still pushing climate change hoaxes through the Education Department.
In 2022, ED issued a “climate adaptation plan” that instructed schools on how to use Covid relief money to push green ideology on America’s school children. The Center for Green Schools is an ED partner whose “Green Strides” website provides links to resources for teachers that indoctrinate students on “climate justice” issues. Some lessons push the false notion that eating meat causes harm to the environment and encourage students to go vegan. One video instructs that livestock “burps and farts are responsible for over 27% of methane emissions.” From the video: “Beef is the worst: meat and dairy produce roughly the same emissions as all cars, trucks, airplanes, and ships combined.”
So-called “environmental justice” is another pillar of ED’s 2022 climate adaptation plan. One of the partner groups used by ED is the far-Left group Green Schools National Network (GSNN). They claim their work on sustainability education “is situated in a complex, social-political context.” GSNN promotes social justice resources for educators created by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice program.
If ED wasn’t already big enough, in 2023 the Biden administration proposed a budget increase to fund yet another department called the Office of Infrastructure and Sustainability. It doesn’t appear that item was funded, but this hasn’t stopped ED from charging ahead with its climate initiatives. In its 2024 climate adaptation plan, ED stressed the problem of student and staff “climate-related anxiety” and proclaimed that climate change presents a risk of disrupting learning. These doomsday tactics are driving the climate agenda in schools across the nation.
ED admits it has “limited statutory authority to address either school curriculum or facilities and grounds directly, two critical leverage points for climate adaptation,” but it largely chooses to ignore the authority of Congress. To get around this, the federal bureaucrats work “creatively and utilize low-cost public engagement and new capacity building programs to show leadership and highlight innovative practices for climate resilience and school sustainability.”
ED promotes ways around the law, advising the use of funds such as Impact Aid and the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund to promote the climate agenda. Impact Aid is a program meant to provide extra funds to districts that may lose out on tax revenue due to federal installations such as military bases positioned in their locality.
In 2023, Congress gave ED $37 million for “supporting America’s school infrastructure.” That money will go toward grants provided to states, but it will not give one dime toward actual school construction. Instead, it will be used to assess challenges, needs, and training in best practices for maintenance and operations. The money will also help establish databases for tracking school facility conditions. In short, it will do nothing to actually help local school districts build schools but will create more layers of bureaucracy while promoting a “climate justice” agenda.
Creating Student Discipline Problems
In 2014, President Barack Obama issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” on the topic of student discipline in schools. The directive warned schools to reduce the disparity of punishment for black males versus other student groups, implying schools had racist motives for disciplining black males more than their peers. The fact that black males committed more discipline infractions did not matter to him.
After Obama’s directive, local school districts became fearful of disciplining black males. Schools across the nation began implementing discipline policies using racial quota limits. Predictably, this caused discipline problems to skyrocket across all racial demographics because rules were no longer enforced and failed methods of discipline such as “positive behavioral” techniques and “restorative justice” programs were implemented.
In 2023, a teacher in Newport News, Virginia, was shot by a 6-year-old student — a black male. The grand jury report indicated multiple previous discipline problems with this child that should have removed him from school. Newport News schools instead use Obama’s “restorative justice” discipline methods.
The federal government also warned schools about exclusionary discipline practices for students with disabilities. Schools then began to relax the rules for this population of students. The student who killed 17 others in Parkland, Florida, was considered a special education student due to his emotional problems. Andrew Pollack lost his daughter during that massacre and blamed the Obama-era policies enforced by ED for promoting lax discipline practices. Pollack alleges that the shooter was referred to an alternative restorative discipline program rather than being referred to law enforcement for troubling behavior.
School staff across the country reported feeling unsafe in schools in the wake of the Obama directive. In 2018, teacher survey results in southeastern Virginia indicated that 57% of teachers said students at their schools get away with breaking the rules easily. Only 49% of school staff said discipline practices were effective.
President Trump rescinded the Obama era directives, but the Biden-Harris Education and Justice departments put out their own directives in 2023. The Biden-Harris policies again emphasize reducing racial disparities in discipline practices rather than focusing on how to improve student behavior.
ED Is Failing at Its Core Mission
The United States spends much more than the global average per student on education and devotes an enormous amount of time and energy on the topic. Yet American students fall far behind their peers across the globe because government schools focus on woke indoctrination rather than academic achievement.
Among other federal legislation, No Child Left Behind enacted under George W. Bush and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) enacted under Obama increased the federal government’s role in education but completely failed to improve student outcomes. In 2023, Congress authorized a budget of $79.6 billion for ED, yet academic performance among students continues to decline.
American 15-year-old students rank an abysmal 34th in the world in math literacy and 15th in science. The numbers were only slightly better in reading literacy, with a ranking of 9th globally.
Social and political agendas are overtaking academics as the core reason for educating children. Merit no longer matters in government schools. It is nearly impossible for a student to fail and not graduate. Virginia reported a 93% graduation rate in 2023 for all students in the state. Yet in the same year only 65% of students passed the writing standardized test and only 69% passed the math test.
- The ED-Industrial Complex must be dismantled. This will start with Congress reasserting its prerogatives, and restoring oversight of the way ED spends taxpayer money. The firehose of taxpayer dollars being used to indoctrinate children in left-wing ideology must be turned off. The use of loopholes and outright law-breaking to promote the destructive Left’s agenda even in violation of Congressional authority must be quashed.
In addition, political activists such as teachers’ unions (NEA, AFT, etc.) and the National School Boards Association (NSBA) should be banned from having any influence at the DOE. These organizations have influenced policy decisions — including forcing kids needlessly into virtual learning. It is one thing to lobby legislators, but they should not be lobbying unelected bureaucrats who don’t answer to parents or voters.
States must start pushing back against unconstitutional federal government overreach. States can and must push back or refuse to abide by mandates such as ESSA. States may have to forfeit federal money that comes with those mandates, but often the mandates cost more than the money provided to implement the mandates.
ED’s only function should be to promote academic achievement in core content areas or workforce development. Departments and offices within ED that aren’t directly related to improving academic achievement and workforce development should be dismantled. As this dismantling occurs, the education department should be working for the taxpayers and students of this nation and not Washington insiders. As long as the Department of Education serves its current purpose — advancing the agenda of the destructive Left — it will fail to serve its proper one. The children of America deserve better.