Diversity Whack-a-Mole: Controversial DOD Employee Pops Back Up at Education Department
For the better part of two years, the Pentagon’s K-12 school system has been embroiled in controversy over its focus on adding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) to every aspect of the programming.
It all began when the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) hired its first-ever Diversity Equity and Inclusion chief, Kelisa Wing. She was eventually exposed for her history of racially inflammatory statements.
As Congress investigated how her office promoted oppressor-oppressed narratives and radical gender ideology in the classroom, the Biden-Harris administration agreed to shut down the DEI department. In a letter to Congress, they said they would re-assign her to a role that didn’t involve the neo-Marxist worldview.
Well, re-assign her they did, but only briefly. A few months later, she had left DOD entirely and popped back up at the Department of Education, and at higher pay.
Had Wing simply flown the coop to spread DEI elsewhere in the administration?
Last year she made $152,937 as a senior advisor at the Department of Education, about $10,000 more than she made at DoDEA.
Earlier this year, using her new title, Wing gave a talk called “The Backlash Against Equity” at the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) conference. The talk was on how to pursue “equity” in education “in spite of the times we are living in.”
Although the presentation used her professional affiliation, someone familiar with the matter told us she gave the talk in her personal capacity.
BACKGROUND
Wing made headlines in 2022 for Tweets she had written disparaging white people, stating a woman in a professional development session with her “had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too” she continued that “she had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS.” She also posted, “I am exhausted by 99% of the white men in education and 95% of the white women. Where can I get a break from white nonsense for a while?"
Kelisa Wing was the first DEI chief of DoDEA, a subagency of the Department of Defense charged with educating around 65,000 children of service members stationed worldwide.
The Tweets bolstered accusations of left-wing extremism at DoDEA.
Open the Books then unearthed video from the subagency’s 2021 “Equity and Access Summit,” featuring a presentation by Wing. It showed teachers eager to discuss sexuality and gender ideology with children, revealed teaching training materials meant to make children cry, and promoted classroom content explicitly intended to turn students into social justice activists.
GET THE FULL STORY: Schools for Radicals: The Secret Push to Institute Radical DEI Curriculums Within the Pentagon’s K-12 Public Schools
During a Congressional hearing in March 2023 concerning wokeness at DoDEA schools, then-Under Secretary for Personnel Readiness Gil Cisneros announced that the Pentagon was closing the DoDEA DEI office and reassigning Kelisa Wing, stating she would no longer be involved in DEI initiatives.
Rep. Stefanik questions Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness Gil Cisneros over Wing’s social media posts.
The announcement was a head fake for multiple reasons. DoDEA created a secretive new “DEI Steering Committee” as the public-facing DEI department was dissolved. The nature of the DEI Steering Committee—who is on it, what they talk about, what power it has over the agency—is hidden behind heavy redactions in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
While Kelisa Wing was indeed transferred to a new role as “Assessment Branch Chief” starting in February 2023, later that year she moved to the Department of Education. Records indicate her salary went from $141,192 to $152,937.
A deep-dive into Kelisa Wing’s history of public statements show her infamous Tweets are far from unusual. During a 2020 presentation she said:
“I am anti-racist, that means I am actively taking a stand to completely tear down, uproot, rebuild, and create something new, and that's exactly what we need to do in education. I know that sounds really revolutionary and hard but there are a lot of mechanisms and tools out there that can help us get there.”
An audience member during that panel asked Wing:
“As we go through this racial reckoning is it time to really transform education, transform curriculum--is it time for a revolution?”
Wing’s reply? “Most definitely.”
A blog she wrote in 2020 exhorted teachers and administrators to create a “School-to-Activism Pipeline”
At another 2020 presentation, she told listeners, “It is your personal decision to show up and be a person who’s going to interrupt this White dominant culture that our education systems have been built upon.”
MORE OF THE SAME AT THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT?
This posture has not changed since she switched departments. In April of this year Kelisa Wing went on an ASCD podcast to discuss the importance of Transformative Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in the classroom. She did not use her ED affiliation this time.
Transformative SEL is a controversial practice that, according to leading SEL organization CASEL, is aimed at creating “equitable settings and systems and promoting justice-oriented schools and civic engagement.” This is done by having children fixate on their “identities” and “privileges” and those of their peers and then having conversations about past or current “systemic” harms. The practice is promoted at DoDEA.
In the podcast Wing describes how “collective cognitive empathy” promoted by SEL works in theory: “When I can heal my hurt, then I can help others to heal their hurt, Then I can show up, healed and whole to a situation. Then I can create an ecosystem and an environment where people are allowed to hurt and heal and grow, where I can normalize the fact that harm will happen and what are we going to do to address the harm.”
Besides SEL, she spent much of the podcast discussing her own journey of cultivating love for herself and humanity more broadly in recent years, and highlighted a new eagerness to engage with people she thought might disagree with her.
To her credit, Kelisa Wing has always been her authentic self. For years now she has been open about her perspective on K-12 administration. She supports DEI and Transformative SEL and truly believes they are beneficial to schools and children. It is not at all surprising she continues her advocacy. When you hire Kelisa Wing, you know exactly what you’re getting.
What’s different is that DoDEA educated roughly 65,000 kids. At the Department of Education, we’re now talking about all American children attending public schools!
NOTE: Open the Books similarly found Wing used her DoDEA title and imprimatur to speak in other capacities on the same controversial topics.
OBFUSCATION IS THE NAME OF THE GAME
What is disheartening is the woke shell game that the Biden-Harris Administration has been playing, hiding and obfuscating controversial, objectionable policies and spending from the public. This has been part of a pattern where Congressional leaders have called out their concerns about DoDEA and its equity agenda, then been stonewalled for months before being assured the matter would be handled – only later to reveal it was a strategic feint.
The back-and-forth with the Pentagon culminated with a July 2024 letter signed by 18 members of the House Armed Services Committee, calling for an end to all the fibbing and the removal of top DoDEA leadership:
“After nearly two years since our first letter on this topic, we are once again writing to express our concerns and outrage with the Department of Defense’s refusal to address the ongoing attempted radical indoctrination of our service members’ children....It is evident that the dissolving of the DEI Office and the removal of Kelisa Wing only served as coverups to enable DoDEA to further integrate DEI into every aspect of our nation’s military schools.”
As they wrote it, the group of lawmakers led by Rep. Elise Stefanik still didn’t know about the other half of the farce, that Wing would join a department involved in the education of all of America’s school-age children.
OPAQUE AGENCY AWARDS & CONTRACTS
Americans were rightly outraged by Kelisa Wing’s comments and were told she would not be working in equity at DoDEA anymore. They likely didn’t think that she’d move to another Cabinet department serving even more kids.
It’s high time education policy at the federal level faces a transparency revolution. DEI policies must be truly eliminated, and it must go deeper than just federal staffers. Federal contractors and grantees must be scrutinized as well for objectionable ideological bias.
Case in point, ASCD, which hosted Kelisa Wing on their podcast and at their conference, has received $110,000 in contracts since 2021: $80,000 from DoDEA, and $30,000 from Department of Education. But her participation fits right in with ASCD programming, which is peppered with advice to teachers on becoming more “equitable” and “antiracist.” Giving tax dollars to organizations that promote policies adverse to American interests must end as well.
And ASCD is not the first problematic federal education contractor Open the Books has found. Others include:
$2.4 million from DoDEA to Discovery Education, which offers content 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.”
$1.9 million to Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID). Instructors with AVID promoted SPLC’s “Learning for Justice” handbook to DoDEA teachers
$1 million to the Goodheart Willcox Company, which stocks DoDEA with a health book that teaches children that “people have the power to choose a gender identity”
There are likely many more, but because programmatic content from private companies is often not publicly accessible or available via Freedom of Information Act request for most contractors, it is difficult to survey the extent to which DEI is promoted through contracting arrangements from the outside.
Every organization with a relationship with the federal government must be scrutinized. When the Department of Government Efficiency project (known as DOGE) gets under way, there will be a unique opportunity for true reform and transparency in these opaque agencies.
Ultimately, Wing isn’t the problem; it’s the system that allows her philosophy to keep floating throughout government and evading public oversight.
Open the Books requested comment from Kelisa Wing, Department of Education, and ASCD.
A spokesperson for Department of Education replied:
“While the Department does not comment on personnel issues, we can confirm that Kelisa is the Senior Advisor to the Performance Improvement Officer in Office of the Deputy Secretary and her portfolio does not include DEI work.”
We noted that the Performance Improvement Office works on implementing the agency’s strategic plan. In his introduction to the agency’s most recent strategic plan, ED Secretary Miguel Cardona stated, “Equity is a cross-cutting priority integrated into every goal, objective, and strategy within the FY 2022–FY 2026 Strategic Plan." We asked for clarification on how Wing does not work in DEI when equity is embedded in every aspect of the agency’s strategic plan. We didn’t receive a response to that inquiry.
This story will be updated with any further comments from Department of Education, Kelisa Wing, or ASCD.
Flush the trash…no recycling rotten garbage.
Transferring instead of terminating: just how do they explain the efficacy of that transaction to We the People?