‘Elementary school is the perfect time’: DEI contractors remain in military’s K-12 education
Topline: Controversial education firms that helped embed diversity, equity and inclusion principles in K-12 military schools during President Joe Biden’s administration are still working with the Department of Defense Education Activity, or DoDEA, and received a total of $171,175 in 2025.
Key facts: Thomas M. Brady, the director of DoDEA from 2014 to 2024, announced in 2020 that DEI “must be a foundational premise in every aspect of our organization.” Changes to that affect were quickly made to the curriculum of DoDEA, which runs 161 schools for the children of servicemembers living on military bases around the world.
Two teachers gave a presentation about how “elementary school is the perfect time” to “show students the diversity of gender expression and gender activity.” Educators were encouraged to hold “critical conversations” about “the relationships between identity and power” and “privilege,” which were meant to result in “crying” and “explicit confrontations.”
Many DEI consultants were removed after President Donald Trump took office in 2025 and ordered a ban on federal funds being used to teach or implement DEI principles, but some of the companies hired under Biden remain.
DoDEA paid $30,175 last year to continue gym teachers’ membership in the professional society, SHAPE America, which instills its National Health Education Standards in gym classes. Board member Cara Grant said of the health standards, “We recognize that systemic disparities exist within our educational systems, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Our approach is not simply to level the playing field but to dismantle the structures that perpetuate inequality.”
During a DoDEA presentation on the SHAPE standards in 2021, one teacher instructed her colleagues that “talking about heterosexuality as the norm” can “inherently cause conflict.”
DoDEA also paid $141,000 last year to the curriculum development company thinkLaw.
ThinkLaw CEO Colin Seale recently wrote a blog post calling on schools to hide DEI within their curriculums through “defiance disguised as compliance,” oddly linking it to a Lil Wayne song in which the rapper declares that “real Gs move in silence like lasagna.”
In one example, Seale tells teachers to discretely teach children that there are more than two genders without “openly” defying Trump’s executive orders to the contrary.
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Summary: Parents should not face any secrecy about what their children are being taught in school, especially when those schools are funded by federal taxpayers.
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