House Armed Services Committee Republicans Press Pentagon over DEI-Infused Education for Children of Service Members

Representatives Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.) led a group of Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee to demand answers on the influence of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies on the Pentagon’s school system in a Monday letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

As National Review reported earlier in July, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) — the educational system for children of U.S. military personnel — uses professional-development materials that push progressive activism on teachers and lesson plans that promote left-wing politics in the classroom.

Those materials, recommended by DoDEA staffers, include books such as Alice Austen Lived Here, which tells the story of a person named Sam who “is very in touch with their own queer identity” and whose teacher “seems to believe that only Dead Straight Cis White Men are responsible for history”; The One True Me and You, in which a girl decides to “try out they/them pronouns to see how it feels”; and A Color Named Love, which follows a girl with four polyamorous parents.

DoDEA has also promoted a book titled “Coaching for Equity: Conversations that Change Practice” by education consultant Elena Aguilar.

“Coaching for Equity offers extensive strategies for talking about race, power, and systems of oppression, strategies which lead to changes in a teacher’s practice,” a blurb about the book in a DoDEA teaching guide reads. “This book is for teachers, leaders, and coaches who accept responsibility for interrupting inequities in schools and who want to build the knowledge and skills to coach for equity.”

Coaching for Equity ends, the OpenTheBooks report notes, with a list of reading recommendations. That list includes such titles as the 1619 Project, Dying of Whiteness, Me and White Supremacy, and White Fragility.

One vendor supplying curricular materials to the school system is Discovery Education, which received $2,410,603 in taxpayer money to provide products to the Pentagon.

A Discovery Education “channel” recommended by DoDEA is called “Dissent, Equity, and Inspiring Change.” That particular program is intended to “help educators facilitate classroom conversations and much-needed discussions about implicit bias and systemic racism, human rights, equity, social justice, dissent, protest, and empathy.”

Stefanik, Banks, and the other House Republicans wrote that the continued existence of left-wing ideologies in DoDEA schools demonstrates an urgent need for light to be shed into the agency. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act put into law a “Parents Bill of Rights” for service members, but the Department of Defense has yet to provide a report that was due in January of this year.

“Radical woke ideology is rotting out the schools of our service members’ children and instead of addressing this, you have only exacerbated it,” the lawmakers wrote. “Our service members should not have to choose between serving their country or saving their children. You owe the American people and especially our service members answers and accountability.”

The House Republicans who signed the letter demanded that Austin provide information about DoDEA’s “Social and Emotional Learning” curriculum and how the department plans to protect the privacy of students whose personal data are shared with platforms such as Google Workspace, whether parents have access to teacher-training materials and lesson plans, and how the Pentagon might reshape its educational programming to provide “a high-quality education to our service members’ children.”

They also called for immediate leadership changes within DoDEA.

While DoDEA officially disbanded its DEI office in 2023, a report from nonprofit watchdog organization OpenTheBooks revealed the extent to which progressive ideologies have permeated curricula at schools designed for military families — and the extent to which the change was purely cosmetic.

“Within the next month, we will integrate our DEI Specialists into four key divisions at headquarters: Research, Accountability, and Evaluation; Strategic and Organizational Excellence; Professional Learning; and Human Resources,” DoDEA leader Tom Brady wrote in a March 2023 email to the entire DoDEA system. “To maintain a strategic focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organization, we initiated a DEI Steering Committee at headquarters.”

In a statement to NR, Stefanik repeated arguments she has made in the past that Austin must make a strong effort to ensure progressive politics stay out of classrooms run by his department.

“Protecting our service members’ children from the Biden-Harris administration’s DoDEA remains one of my top priorities, which is why I successfully led calls to dissolve their office of DEI and had my legislation, the Service Members’ Parents Bill of Rights, signed into law,” Stefanik said. “Now I’m calling on Secretary Austin and the Biden-Harris administration to completely end all efforts to indoctrinate our service members’ children with Far Left DEI propaganda. Our service members face many challenges, and ensuring their children receive a high-quality patriotic education should not be one of them.”

House Armed Services Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R., Ala.) told NR in a statement that he and his committee members are set on keeping politics out of DoDEA classrooms, pointing to the Parents Bill of Rights that Stefanik mentioned and provisions in the 2025 NDAA that ban DEI departments within the agency’s schools.

“The House Armed Services Committee has remained laser-focused on supporting military families with children in DoDEA schools,” Rogers said. “The FY25 NDAA budget prohibits DEI bureaucracy in DoD schools and the FY24 NDAA created a Parents Bill of Rights to ensure parents of children in DoD schools have a say in their child’s education, as well as prohibited funding for the teaching or training of CRT [critical race theory]. The Committee will continue to conduct robust oversight of DoD schools to ensure DoDEA students’ education is free from divisive far-left indoctrination.”

For letter co-author Banks, who chairs the Subcommittee on Military Personnel, step one in doing so is shedding light on educational practices within the Pentagon’s school system.

“It is shameful and unsustainable that while our servicemen and women are risking their lives to defend our nation, their children are being taught that America is a racist country not worth fighting for,” Banks said in a statement. “My House Republican colleagues and I will continue to expose and eradicate the woke indoctrination that is destroying our service members’ trust in DoDEA schools.”