The Department of Education under President Joe Biden spent more than $1 billion on DEI-driven grants to public school districts, universities, and nonprofits since 2021, according to a report released by watchdog group Parents Defending Education (PDE).
The 162 grants funding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives were aimed at hiring, educational programming, and mental health training, according to PDE. Total price tag: $1,002,522,304.81. PDE said that’s a conservative estimate.
“These numbers are based on available data and not exact. The number of districts and students is likely much higher. Some districts, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools, is connected to multiple grants and is therefore only counted once in the numbers,” PDE wrote in its report.
PDE broke down the DEI grant distribution into three buckets:
DEI Hiring: $489,883,797.81
DEI Programming: $343,337,286
DEI-Based Mental health/Social Emotional Learning (SEL): $169,301,221
“Some grants covered two or all of the above categories, in those cases, the grant was counted only towards the most dominant category,” PDE said in its report.
In one example, PDE found that the “School District of Philadelphia was given $3,973,175 for its restorative justice program that is modeled after Oakland Unified School District’s (Calif.), and a program advisor is a far-left activist and former Communist Party USA member.”
