Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

CORRINNE CARLSON: Biden’s Education Spending Puts Critical Race Theory Over Real Learning

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If President Joe Biden secures a second term, brace for a ramp-up in radical policies and hyper-partisanship.

Throughout his first four years, he has shamelessly championed controversial and anti-American ideologies, and it seems he has no intention of stopping now: His newly unveiled budget proposal for next year is packed to the brim with grants to the Department of Education (DOE). Instead of prioritizing assistance to students and teachers recovering from drastic learning loss, Biden appears to believe that our taxpayer dollars are best allocated towards the department responsible for implementing racially divisive ideologies like Critical Race Theory into our classrooms.

In his proposal, Biden allocates $95 million to the Teacher Quality Partnership program. According to the program’s webpage, its mission seems innocuous enough. Its stated purpose is to improve the preparation and professional development of new and prospective teachers and to “recruit highly qualified individuals, including minorities and individuals from other occupations.” Plain and simple.

However, in practice, the program’s professional development and teacher recruiting blueprint is fueled by racial ideology. Take, for example, the $2.3 million grant awarded to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The proposal explicitly states that their first cohort would be made up of “20 paraprofessionals of color,” who would be trained in “inclusive and anti-racist teaching pedagogy” to become “highly qualified ECE [Early Childhood Education] teachers.” Antiracism is just critical race theory by a different name, essentially fighting discrimination with discrimination.

While embracing diversity in teaching staff is valuable, prioritizing race over merit is both discriminatory and counterproductive in addressing the academic recovery gaps of minority students. Similarly, it’s important for minority students to feel welcome in the classroom, but such efforts shouldn’t have future educators believing “racism in America is no better today than it was 200 years ago.”

UMass Amherst is not the only example. The Teacher Quality Partnership awarded UCLA over $8 million across five years to train prospective middle school teachers in “Cultural Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogies” and “Transformative Social Emotional Learning.” These jargon-heavy frameworks are just new names for racially divisive ideology in the same vein as critical race theory. Culturally responsive teaching promotes the concept of “implicit bias,” the flawed science that makes Americans believe they are subconsciously racist, while Transformative Social Emotional Learning embeds race and gender ideology into what had previously been ideologically neutral student skills.

Almost every one of the first ten Teacher Quality Partnership grants from 2023 includes some form of race-based recruiting preferences or plans to train future teachers to infuse racial ideology into classrooms. UMass Amherst and UCLA are not outliers—this is an Education Department priority fueled by millions in taxpayer dollars.

The Education Department’s focus on racial ideology is even more apparent through the Hawkins Centers of Excellence program. In his budget proposal, Biden allocates $30 million to the Hawkins Centers of Excellence program, with the goal of “improv[ing] the diversity of the teacher pipeline.” The program’s stated purpose is “increas[ing] the number of well-prepared teachers, including teachers of color.” Moreover, the centers run by the program can only be established on campuses that serve mostly racial-minority students, like HBCUs and Tribal Colleges.

To add to this, the Teacher Quality Partnership program awarded Bowie State University a $1.5 million grant for the “Bowie Black Male Educators Project,” which is meant to “recruit and prepare 50 Black male educators in early childhood/special education, elementary, or secondary education,” and train them in “effective, culturally relevant/responsive instruction.”

America’s children need teachers more focused on getting them back to grade-level math proficiencies than teaching them that they are subconsciously racist.

Prioritizing the recruitment, training, and placement of potential teachers based on their race is blatant discrimination. Training teachers to implement DEI initiatives and “antiracist” curriculums, culturally responsive teaching, or Transformative Social Emotional Learning, rather than preparing them to help kids get back on track academically, does a massive disservice to the millions of schoolchildren whose education was disastrously impacted by COVID-era policies. The future generation deserves better.

Corrinne Carlson is a Project Manager for Parents Defending Education.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.