Education Department Funded ‘Remixing Textbooks’ To Advance Pseudo-Science And Gender Theory
It’s no secret that the Biden administration did everything it could to use the Department of Education to advance its left-wing worldview, but with the agency’s (hopefully) impending dissolution, it’s worth reviewing the exact flavor of evil it’s been involved with sowing.
Open the Books has released a snapshot of a forthcoming, more exhaustive report on waste, fraud, and abuse from the Department of Education. The millions spent on indoctrinating children show that the department has not just been a place where bureaucrats dictate education to states from an ivory tower or collude with teachers unions to the detriment of American students and families, but more malevolently, it’s been a money laundering scheme for Democrats to fund far-left social theories to fundamentally destroy American family and civil life.
“Everyone understands that essential protections for all students must be preserved somewhere in the federal purview,” Open the Books CEO John Hart told The Federalist. “Once we get past that conversation, it hardly takes five minutes to find examples of tax dollars spent to inject progressive dogma into the classroom. It’s not limited to universities; we find it at public secondary schools as well. It’s a misuse of public funds intended to have lasting impact on a generation of students.”
‘Remixing Textbooks’ And DEI Classroom Assessments
From 2021 through 2024, the Department of Education awarded $1.3 million to fund a project at Framingham State University called “Remixing Textbooks Through an Equity-Focused Lens” (ROTEL).
The project covered a wide swathe of pseudo-science and indoctrination, and ultimately published the information in open-source textbooks.
Each book, naturally, begins with a “land acknowledgement” — a tedious process of falsely claiming Native American ownership over American land — stating that “Indigenous Peoples” are the “traditional stewards of the land.”
“We acknowledge that the boundaries that created Massachusetts were arbitrary and a product of the settlers,” it goes on. “We acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced removal from their territory, and other atrocities connected with colonization.”
The “land acknowledgement” is part of the ROTEL grant’s overall mission.
One textbook the project produces is called “Overweight” Bodies, Real and Imagined, which seeks to “decouple weight and health,” apparently in an attempt to falsely claim that obesity is not the health issue everyone knows that it is.
“These readings on dismantling fatphobia/the obesity myth imply the need to decolonize health/fitness culture,” author Sarah Gilleman says in an introductory screed. “Academic literature on ‘obesity prevention’ tends to involve an unseemly depiction of ‘the problem of overweight bodies,’ as though the reader is somehow elevated in regarding the lived reality of unhealthy people as a mere field of study–which is to say, dismissively, judgmentally, without mercy or respect.”
“The true purpose of this text is not strictly to increase students’ knowledge about health and wellness in order to build their capacity in consuming health information and making evidence-based decisions related to their and their families’ health, but to develop students’ ability to effectively transmit their learning in a way that is culturally responsive and equity-minded,” she continued.
On the taxpayer’s dime, Gilleman bravely treads where no one before had trod, asking the essential question: “What does it mean for white people to make statements about the health-seeking behavior of Black and Latinx people?”
Another textbook produced by the project is called Children, Families, Schools, and Communities, which “provides a lens for understanding the evolving definition of ‘family’ through socially constructed and ecological theory frameworks.” The book contains the infamous “Genderbread Person,” which is used to indoctrinate children into believing there are more than two genders, and that they could be any one of them.
“Each semester that I teach this course, I am reminded about the immediate need to share an understanding of culturally sustaining collaboration that strips down hierarchies between children, family, schools, and communities and, instead, centers around a common framework of the whole child,” author Joan Giovanni wrote.
From 2022 through 2025, the Department of Education awarded the University of Virginia $1.6 million for the “Development and Validation of the Culturally- and Racial Equity-Sustaining (CARES) Classroom Assessment System.”
“The ultimate goal is that the actionable feedback from these assessments will help teachers hone their skills in cultivating emotionally safe, culturally sustaining, equity-driven, and inclusive classroom climates,” an extension of the program states.
And from 2019-2024, the department gave $2.4 million to Delsea Regional High School in New Jersey for “The Case for Student Voice as a Change Agent in Schools: A Focus on Culturally Responsive Climate, Equity, and Discipline.”
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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