‘It is a massive betrayal’: Group that sets agenda for 130K school counselors pushes woke agenda

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The organization that sets the agenda for the 130,000 school counselors across the U.S. just promoted a left-wing activist program that advocates for transgender ideology and critical race theory, according to a new report.

“While the American people are actively rejecting the harms of transgender ideology, the invasion of women’s private spaces, and the culture of critical race theory, the American School Counselor Association is working overtime to install these very same radicalisms into our daughters,” Alvin Lui, president of the conservative group Courage Is a Habit, told The Daily Signal.

The American School Counselor Association, which counts about 42,000 of the nation’s estimated 131,230 school counselors as members and which releases guidance for the entire profession, held a Feb. 19 webinar promoting the Lean In Girls program. The Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation, founded by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, launched Lean In Girls as a leadership program for girls ages 11-15.

“By leveraging its position of trust, ASCA is using the ‘Lean In Girls’ curriculum as a tactical cover to smuggle a divisive political agenda into our schools under the fraudulent banner of ‘mental health and leadership,’” Lui warned. He said the organization is “using its access to 11-year-old girls to install a curriculum that promotes men in women’s spaces and political agitation, all while telling parents it’s just a ‘leadership’ program.”

“It is a massive betrayal of parental trust,” he concluded.

The Courage Is a Habit report, first provided to The Daily Signal, exposes Lean In Girls’ support for transgender ideology and critical race theory.

Transgender Ideology

During the webinar, “Confidence Counts: Leadership Skills as a Tier 2 Intervention for Girls,” Lean In Girls Senior Manager for Partnership Development Kelly Meredith urged school counselors to adopt the Lean In Girls program as part of the Multi-Tiered System of Support requirements for students who need behavioral or mental health support.

Courage Is a Habit attended the webinar and told The Daily Signal that Meredith recommended the Lean In Girls program. The first step in following the program involves downloading the curriculum. The Daily Signal confirmed that, when downloading the curriculum, the facilitator handbook that Courage Is a Habit analyzed is the first document provided.

“Facilitators require participants to question and deny the most basic biological truth: what a female actually is,” the Courage Is a Habit report notes. “The Lean In Girls Handbook includes additional resources from the Southern Poverty Law Center and GLISTEN (formerly GLSEN in activist circles) for ‘context’—two organizations notorious for pushing radical gender ideology over facts.”

The handbook’s section on “Gender Inclusion” warns facilitators that “some teens in the program may identify strongly with being a girl, while others may be exploring their gender identity or may feel uncomfortable with the label ‘girl.’” The section recommends resources from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the British LGBTQ nonprofit Stonewall, and GLSEN (which rebranded to GLISTEN in February).

The handbook recommends many resources from Learning for Justice, the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, but now it publishes a “hate map” plotting mainstream conservative and Christian groups alongside Klan chapters. Courage Is a Habit appears on the map alongside Moms For Liberty as an “antigovernment extremist group” and part of the “anti-student inclusion movement.” Much of the SPLC’s criticisms boil down to ideological disagreements.

Learning for Justice, formerly known as Teaching Tolerance, has long promoted transgender ideology in schools.

Critical Race Theory

Courage Is a Habit also faults the handbook for promoting critical race theory, the idea that American society is systemically racist despite the progress of civil rights laws and that it requires fundamental change to root out “white supremacy.”

“Group facilitators are directed to rank themselves and each other on an intersectional hierarchy of oppression, a textbook critical race theory exercise that divides children by race, sexuality, and perceived victim status—all disguised as harmless ‘mental health’ support,” the Courage Is a Habit report states.

The handbook’s section on “Counteracting Biases and Barriers in Group Settings” directs facilitators to “educate yourself about ways people with traditionally marginalized identities are stereotyped and treated unfairly.”

While the handbook does not directly state that facilitators should rank themselves, it repeatedly encourages them to consider whether girls have “more or less social power.”

“If parts of your identity give you more social power than your participants have, you may need to work harder to build trust,” the handbook states. This statement encourages facilitators to examine aspects of their identity and compare themselves to the identities of participants.

The handbook also warns that “facilitators can accidentally harm teens” in various ways, and it recommends a resource on “microaggressions.” Critics, such as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, have warned that the idea of trying to protect students from microaggressions, words or phrases that might cause a small amount of harm unintentionally, represent part of a “safetyism” approach that encourages cognitive distortions, harming students long-term.

This section also recommends resources from Learning for Justice.

The Daily Signal has reached out to ASCA and the Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation for comment and will add to this story if comment comes in.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]