A Big Win for Military Families on America’s 250th

The Founders’ transparency vision delivered once again.

Open the Books worked for three years to uncover the ideologically charged philosophies guiding the Pentagon’s K-12 school system. The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, now known as DoWEA) educated roughly 67,000 children of active-duty military across more than 160 countries and territories at a cost of roughly $2.3 billion per year.

For that expense, the schools were a hotbed of content related to DEI, social and racial justice, and gender identity politics. The philosophy permeated not just curriculum and classroom activities but also teacher training materials.

Further, parents complained of being locked out of an increasingly byzantine set of steering committees, making it all but impossible to get their concerns heard by the policymakers in Washington.

But last week, the key committee advising the school system discussed a new series of priorities and posted video of their meeting publicly for the first time.

The public meeting was a huge win for transparency, but more importantly, the discussion contained a number of major wins for military servicemembers and their families deployed in the United States, its territories and abroad.

From teaching priorities to staffing to pilot programming and performance standards, it’s clear the Pentagon’s school system has an overhaul underway.

BACKGROUND

The saga began when racially charged X posts from DoDEA’s first-ever DEI chief, Kelisa Wing, began circulating in the media. Open the Books followed up and found her radical children’s books (e.g., What Does It Mean to Defund the Police? and What is White Privilege?) available in some school libraries. Wing was promoting her books and outside consulting business on taxpayer time and dime.

The Pentagon’s then-Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness Gil Cisneros, told Congress in Spring 2023 that the DEI unit would be dismantled at the school system’s HQ and Wing would be reassigned.

Adapted from our previous report:

The Pentagon’s climb-down was a big win for Open the Books. We had worked alongside whistleblowers, journalists, other investigative nonprofits, and ranking members of Congress to expose alleged conflicts of interest, violations of military ethics policies, and radical ideologies being forced on the kids of servicemen and servicewomen.

Unfortunately, Cisneros wasn’t totally honest. Further Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests uncovered evidence that the radical curriculum was not dismantled. Instead, it was stealthily embedded into the lesson plans and classrooms throughout the entire school system.

Equity and Access Summit presentation slide.

…It was critical that taxpayers understand the scope of the DEI philosophy within the DoD’s schools because deployed servicemembers often have no alternative.

Here are some examples of what was happening in the Pentagon’s schools, found in teacher training materials and internal webinars:

• Chat rooms to facilitate teacher-student conversations that were closed off to parents about sexuality and gender, and likely without their knowledge or consent.

• Engaging four-year-olds in LGBTQ+ conversations. Elementary schools are the “perfect time” to “really show students the diversity of the gender expression and gender activity.”

• Video content on “dissent” and “equity” 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.”

• Activism to dismantle systems of “power” and “privilege.” Suggesting a refusal to teach a “white-washed” curriculum and instead teach “social justice rather than heroes, holidays, and celebrations.”

• A teaching handbook that recommends “critical conversations” with students about race, identity, and privilege and the way “injustice” affects our lives and society. These “explicit conversations” provoke “strong emotions” and crying students are expected.

• Social Emotional Learning (SEL), which involved collecting sensitive information about their emotional state from students daily. It was not at all clear how or how securely this data was stored and DoDEA refused to specify.

Read the details about these vendors, their payments, and the full background dossier on our investigation here.

BACKGROUND: RADICAL TEACHING GOES UNDERGROUND

In February 2025, the popular social media account LibsofTikTok posted audio of an internal conversation at the school system. The prior month, high-level DoDEA staffers were recorded stating they would no longer be using the term “social emotional learning” because of the negative attention SEL practices had received thanks to reporting from Open the Books.

SEL is a quasi-therapeutic practice that elicits and records emotional responses from children throughout the school day to recommend potential mental health “interventions.”

At a teacher training summit in 2021, DoDEA staff had referred to the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and their concept of “Transformative SEL,” which deploys SEL to create “equitable” environments. This is done in part by asking children to fixate on their “identities” and “privileges.” Techniques for doing so were discussed in-depth during the Equity and Access Summit, including through “difficult conversations” where children are expected to cry. Once children divulge their socio-economic, racial, ethnic, sexual, and other “identities,” they can situate themselves and others in a hierarchy of “power,” or as SEL proponents say, become “self-” and “socially” aware.

Per the February 2025 recording, instead of SEL, staffers would use the word “resilience” to avoid being detected by FOIA requests like the ones filed by Open the Books.

True to form, there was no instance of “social emotional” in the SY 2025-2026 professional development plan but there were 241 instances of the term “resilience.”

BACKGROUND: SCHOOL PERFORMANCE AND PARENT CONCERNS

In our most recent report, “No Voice, No Choice,” Open the Books reported survey responses from parents of DoDEA students via FOIA request. They uncovered frustration about their inability to have their concerns heard by decisionmakers, including frustration about teacher shortages, classroom content and test scores. Because military families tend to be more transient, it was the view of many parents that individual schools could skate by on shortcomings because families would depart before their complaints gained any traction.

DoDEA has never had traditional school boards due to the transitory nature of the military, and four decades ago, parents were denied a representative on the school system’s highest-level advisory committee. Under the Biden Administration, DoDEA President Tom Brady’s leadership saw even further restriction:

• There are five levels of committees or councils that can provide recommendations and advice to DoDEA leaders, ranging from school-specific (School Advisory Committee) to agency-wide (Dependents Education Council). Historically, parents could only be elected into the lowest two committees, and then could be selected into the next two highest levels. There are no parents on the Dependents Education Council (DEC).

• In a congressional hearing in 1988, parents testified about the ineffectiveness of the school advisory board system and recommended that elected parents sit on every level of advisory board, including DEC at DoDEA headquarters (HQ).

• Recent changes to DoDEA governance drastically altered the form and function of the advisory committee system, diluting parent presence and influence within the organization.

• The names of DEC attendees were no longer published—as used to be standard practice.

Are members of unions, nonprofits, or other “experts” pushing radical ideology onto military children involved with the DEC? For example, we know Modern Military Association of America and PFLAG have worked with DoDEA to craft policy, like allowing “chosen name” updates in Google Classroom. There were no official channels for parents and the public to find out who is attending DEC meetings.

Feedback and School Performance

• In 2016, DoDEA created its own Inspector General (IG) office, so the agency now investigates itself rather than the Pentagon IG. The parent of a special needs 4^th grader called it “the fox guarding the hen house.”

• DoDEA leadership often brags about its place as the top public school system due to higher-than-average NAEP scores, while ignoring its own College and Career Ready Standards assessments. Those are a truer picture of how well students are learning material taught in the schools over the course of a year, and those results are not as flattering.

• For results from the 2023-24 school year, English Language Arts and Math shows widely varying results for 160 schools. Some schools show 0% of students exceeding or meeting expectations, while others post high percentages of students exceeding or meeting expectations.

• Tests like NAEP “don’t provide scores for individual students or schools,” so they’re not the best way to measure a student’s success.

Because of these wide-ranging challenges, Open the Books advocated that the Pentagon allow military families to choose the school that best fits their family’s needs, whether that be a charter school, their local DoDEA school, or homeschooling. Families of State Department diplomats already enjoy that choice when on assignment overseas.

BREAKTHROUGH: REFOCUSING ON STUDENT OUTCOMES

After sharing our reports with the media, lawmakers and public officials in Washington, changes are coming.

Current Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata (Cisneros’ successor), Director Paul Craft and Chief Academic Officer Tiffany Hoben laid out several changes during last week’s Dependents Education Council meeting. They indicated the school system will:

• Prioritize getting prepared teachers in front of every student, including building a talent pipeline and reducing hurdles for military spouses

  • Craft contrasted hiring challenges (such as mid-year attrition) with measurable improvements in onboarding rates. Leadership discussion emphasized proactive problem solving, including the goal to “get good, well-qualified licensed instructors in front of every one of our kids.” He went on to explain his focus on recruitment innovation, prioritizing military spouse hiring to make DoWEA a more reliable job prospect, and pipeline development through student teachers.

  • Using the DoWEA “Hiring Tiger Team Initiatives” and Senior Leadership Support, the projected onboard goal is 100%+ for School Year 26/27.

• Instill uniform performance reporting up the chain of committees

  • On the topic of Advisory Committees, Craft emphasized the critical role of stakeholders, and the need for structured communication. He stressed the importance of improving transparency and engagement, noting past gaps in communication and reporting. He added he will strengthen the connection between schools, installations, and leadership through a more standardized and accountable advisory framework.

• Refocus on academic rigor and life skills over ideological teaching

  • Hoben emphasized the importance of data-informed decision making, noting that “one assessment alone will not show us what we need to know.” She highlighted improvements to assessment systems that provide timely, validated results for families. She emphasized building a more coherent academic system, while reinforcing transparency and alignment across curriculum, instruction, and accountability measures.

  • Craft emphasized literacy as a foundational issue, stating that DoWEA is “behind the times on the science of reading implementation.” He also highlighted the need to return to foundational learning methods, remarking on the importance of “books back in the hands of kids” and reducing excessive screen dependency. He told the council his focus is on curriculum rigor, parental engagement, and the integration of classical education and AI-enabled learning.

  • Both clearly focused on reading, math, civic understanding life skills rather than the ideological agenda we covered extensively before.

In perhaps the biggest win of all, the school system is taking the advice of parents and Open the Books, requesting funding for an FY27 pilot program to bring school choice to the Pentagon.

The program would offer “financial assistance to active-duty Servicemembers in the United States to support educational choice for their dependents, including tuition and related costs for private, faith-based, or public charter schools; support for homeschooling; and other allowable expenses as determined by the Department.”

As we wrote in The Federalist:

“The Trump administration has both the will and the ability to undo the damage of the Biden-Brady era and has already made remarkable headway. Helping parents formally advocate for their own children can make the fixes durable.

“Finally, few things are more American than competition. Should a future administration return to ideology as a guide, military families deserve a chance to choose a school that works for them. The State Department gives Foreign Service families education allowances to select a school abroad that meets their family’s needs. Our servicemembers should be offered the same.”

CONCLUSION

The major turnaround underway at the Pentagon’s K-12 schools demonstrates the power of transparency. That’s why Open the Books spends its days fighting to maximize it across every unit of government, and to make it real-time.

Years of dogged investigation into how these schools were spending their budgets surfaced controversial teachings and parental concerns that had gone unheard for too long.

The Founding Fathers built transparency into our Constitution because they understood that citizens had the right to inspect the government’s books, and that transparency was fundamental for accountability.

Just in time for America’s 250^th birthday, their vision delivered again for military families.

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