The one bright spot amidst the academic carnage disclosed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress was among the schools run by the Department of Defense, which maintained steady results for children of military service members. 

Unfortunately, that bright spot has recently been sullied by the political indoctrination being propagated within the Defense department schools under the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, launched in 2021. The content of the “equity” training and the character of its DEI chief have made it clear that DEI means indoctrination.  

The Claremont Institute got a hold of the school system’s 2021 “Equity and Access” summit and published an analysis titled “Grooming Future Revolutionaries.” Teachers were trained to initiate elementary school students into gender identity ideology, because “kids as young as 4-years-old are already starting to develop a stable understanding of their gender identity.”

Teachers were also encouraged to keep gender “social transitions” secret from parents. Teachers were given extensive training in how to promote “anti-racism,” as defined by Ibram X. Kendi. According to Defense’s school systems DEI chief Kelisa Wing, anti-racism does not mean opposing racism. 

Rather, according to remarks uncovered by an Open the Books investigation, Ms. Wing believes being an anti-racist “means I am actively taking a stand to completely tear down, uproot, rebuild, and create something new.” 

In these remarks, Ms. Wing closed her “equity” session with a call to arms to “agitate, agitate, agitate.” She has also spoken of the need to recruit students into political activism by building a “School-to-Activism Pipeline.” 

Ms. Wing recently came under official investigation after her history of anti-white tweets was unearthed by Fox News. Ms. Wing declared that she was “exhausted by 99 percent of white men in education, and 95 percent of white women. When can I get a break from white nonsense for a while?” 

She also wrote that she “was exhausted with these white folx in these [professional development] sessions,” Fox News reported. “[T]his lady had the CAUdacity [Caucasian audacity] to say that black people can be racist too… I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS.”

If a white woman publicly referred to Black women by a slur-name, and declared that she was “exhausted” by 99-95 percent of Black men and women, we would readily label that as racist. But apparently the reverse can’t be racist. Not according to DoD’s education DEI chief. 

The military has not yet decided whether to retain Ms. Wing. But the head of the Defense Department’s schools, Tom Brady, chose her to lead their DEI work for a reason. 

Mr Brady described her as “exactly the right person to lead our efforts” to “take a holistic approach to identifying and improving how we integrate the practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion in every aspect of DoDEA, from curriculum and assessment to hiring and professional development.”

Pedagogy that’s encouraging secret social gender transitions, recruiting students as “anti-racist” activists, and openly slandering white people based on their race, these are all features – not bugs – of “DEI” in education. 

It would almost be unfair for Ms. Wing to take a professional fall for her tweets. They were part and parcel of what anyone paying attention might expect from a DEI education bureaucrat.

Unfortunately for American schoolchildren, such positions are proliferating across public education. Fortunately for children of America’s military servicemembers, though, Republicans have won control of the House of Representatives. 

A good first order of business would be to bring Mr. Brady in front of a committee, grill him about his embrace of DEI, and pressure him to abandon it and double down on academic excellence. Anything short of a full course reversal would be a betrayal to the men and women who sign up to serve.