BY: SABRINA CASERTA 

In the wake of the announcement of the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) Implementation initiative awarding $600,000 in grant money for K-5 Pilot Projects in Civics Education in five states, Freedom in Education has linked the passing of Georgia’s SB 220 in April of 2022 to ushering in neo-marxist curriculums into our schools under the guise of ‘grants.’ More specifically, the bill’s creation of the Georgia Commission on Civics Education provided the trojan horse of a radicalized left-wing agenda to covertly enter our childrens’ classrooms. 

In fact, The National Endowment for Humanities (NEH)- in collaboration with Harvard University, Tufts University, CIRCLE, and Arizona State University- gifted iCivics, a 501c3, a whopping $1.1 million grant to identify weaknesses in history and civics education and to develop what is now the EAD Roadmap: for Excellence in History and Civics Education for All Learners. This project would run from Jan 2019 through Dec 2021. In 2022, NEH gave iCivics another $1.75 million grant to fund the five pilot programs for the implementation phase of the EAD Roadmap dispersing $600,000 in funding directly to other nonprofits or educational entities in Georgia, California, Wisconsin, Missouri and New York. The following applicants were the recipients: 

• Wisconsin Cooperative Educational Service Agency (CESA) #1, in partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Region 10 Comprehensive Center, and Wisconsin’s 11 other regional CESAs
• Digital Inquiry Group, in partnership with Los Angeles Unified School District
• Georgia Council for the Social Studies, in partnership with Georgia Center for Civic Engagement and the Georgia Department of Education
• Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, in partnership with New York City Public School 51, Elias Howe School 
• University of Missouri, Saint Louis, in partnership with the School District of University City, Missouri

These five projects alone will cumulatively reach over 900,000 students throughout the country. Selected grantee activities include: designing K-5 curricular resources aligned with both the EAD Roadmap and state standards; offering EAD-aligned curriculum implementation supports and professional learning opportunities; and developing and delivering EAD-aligned programming for schools in a museum context. 

It is important to note that subsequent to Dr. Marc Bauerlein’s January 29th, 2024 article on this very issue, Freedom in Education (FIE) reached out to Dr. Randall Trammell, CEO of the Georgia Center for Civic Engagement, who told FIE that the Georgia Council for the Social Studies  (GCSS) discovered the alarming content and decided it was not in the best interests of Georgia students to pursue the pilot program. FIE emailed Dr. Rhonda Webb, GCSS Executive Director, requesting written confirmation of the cancellation, as well as any liability for grant money used to date, but have received no response at the time of publication. FIE still pursuing written confirmation. 

Nonprofits are not subject to the same Open Records and FOIA laws that govern public agencies- hence they’re the perfect way to hide and transfer money. Because iCivics is a non-profit organization, we are unable to determine where the remaining $1.1 million from NEH went.

Grant Writing Hides Dark Money Laundering

Since the Citizens United decision in 2010, politicians from both major parties have utilized non-profits as a political vehicle to funnel millions into their campaigns- in fact, a 2018 report by the Brennan Center uncovered that two presidents, seven governors, several mayors and a host of other elected officials from both the Republican and Democratic party have partnered with nonprofits that are able to collect millions from donors that largely remains anonymous to the public. 

However, dark money in elections isn’t a new discussion, but utilizing nonprofits to partner with government agencies to influence policies, standards and curriculum is just as insidious and rarely spoken of.

So how have nonprofits been affected? The environment, social and governance (ESG) movement is pushing foundations to award endowments and champion ‘prescriptive causes,’ and it’s growing quickly. According to a report by the Heritage Foundation, in 2019, Americans invested $20 billion in ESG funds, a fourfold increase from 2018. 

In an article ‘Wokeness Comes to Philanthropy’ by the National Review, it states: 

“The bad news is that it is everywhere. From the biggest foundations to the smallest nonprofits, an agenda of racial equity and identity politics is pervasive”

In 2021, a survey from the Center for Effective Philanthropy of 800 foundations found that 75 percent “had initiated efforts to support nonprofits that serve communities of color.”

In fact, just this February, the watchdog group Americans for Public Trust (APT) has filed a campaign finance complaint against clothing company, Patagonia’s tax-exempt arm, alleging the nonprofit is misrepresenting donations and “funneling its profits to an array of groups working on everything from dam removal to voter registration.”

We saw a dramatic push in the form of $68 million in grants by the Biden Administration in summer of 2022, with an additional $468 million ask for the 2023 fiscal year to fund ‘Full-Service Community Schools,’ which is in reality a means to advance the radicalized left-wing agenda on students without parent’s knowledge. These Full-Service schools boast ‘integrated school services’ and ‘wrap-around services’ which are thinly veiled partnerships with Planned Parenthood, LGBTQ activist organizations and other neo-marxist community organizations seeking to usher a radical worldview on children. 

“We oppose such (private/public) partnerships because they lack accountability–the public school farms out its curriculum-creation to private groups, who often claim “confidentiality” or “trade secrets” to keep the public from knowing exactly what is being taught to teachers and to students. How to deal with the problem? We have three model bills for Academic Transparency, Financial Transparency, and Contractor Nondiscrimination,” said the Executive Direct of Civics Alliance, David Randall. 

The Capturing and Corruption of Civics 

In an effort to indoctrinate students, the Biden Administration pivoted to corroding modern-day civics as a vehicle to usher in critical race theory and their highly controversial 1619 Project in educational institutions across the nation. On the federal level, they proposed a federal rule in 2021 to use taxpayer dollars to award schools grants to promote the ideology that America is systematically racist. This sentiment has trickled down into the nonprofit sector and is much more difficult to openly identify. 

When looking at the aforementioned iCivics grant issued to the five aforementioned projects, we can see that despite their carefully selected verbiage such as to send kids to higher grades with “grounding and an inquisitive mindset towards civics and history,” the EAD Roadmap is chock full of neo-Marxist content, including key concepts for grades K-5 students to learn “about the conflicts and histories of oppression and power, and explore constructive ways to discuss hard histories.” K-2 students will learn about the “push and pull factors” of immigration and to answer the question of “Who is a refugee?” and will spend 6 weeks learning about “The Place of Women: Home, Economy & Politics.” 

They will also explore their “identity” to understand their “sense of self,” and learn about developing strategies to respond to “hate and bias in the community.” Grades 3-5 will be asked “How do we engage with hard histories?,” while 6-8 graders will be asked “What is power? How is power reflected in your lived experiences?” For 9-12, “How is “power analysis” relevant to the project of bringing change?”

When exploring “diversity in our community,” students will learn that the EAD Roadmap identifies diversity based on only certain races and ethnicities, specifically excluding European ancestry. All grades will focus on America’s “moments of resistance and protest to government policies and other symbols of authority” in connection with the “Picturing Change” unit.

“What’s left out of standards, curricula, classes, is as important as what’s put in as distortion. If you never mention (say) John Woolman and 18th-century Quaker antislavery activism, you don’t know that American abolitionism is older than the republic itself,” said Randall. “If you don’t know what’s good about America’s history and government, you don’t know why it’s worth conserving.”

The EAD Report’s Executive Summary blatantly conveys the intentions of its Roadmap by telling us “Our civic strength requires excellent civic and history education to repair the foundations of our democratic republic.” It states its focus is on “what and how to teach.” The Roadmap affirms that a formal process of ‘reconciliation and truth’ are needed in order to arrive at a shared understanding of our past- deeming it  is necessary for “an honest accounting of the past and through that, a more honest American identity.”

It continues by letting us know that “we are fortunate to live in a time when historical narratives… can point to agency of those who experienced oppression and domination…. and should be integrated into the K-12 curriculum.” More specifically, it mentions groups they have assigned as ‘oppressed’ which includes women, indigenous Americans, immigrant communities, sexual minorities, and those who are differently abled. 

A goal of the EAD initiative is to “transform” history and civics education- reaching  a startling 60 million students by 2030. Other goals include developing “a diverse supermajority” of activists, 100,000 schools to be “civic ready,” and to have 1 million teachers by “EAD-Ready.” The goal is to mobilize an army of activists. The Roadmap is a call to action. EAD Teachers should “support the development of student agency,” and to start with a “dispositional shift to expect and support success in civic life from all students…” Activism is not only encouraged, the EAD Roadmap requires it. 

According to A. Joy Hatcher, the Social Studies Program Manager at the Georgia Department of Education (DOE), “Currently, the focus on standards is with the implementation of Georgia’s K-12 Mathematics standards during the 2023-2024 school year, followed by full implementation of Georgia’s K-12 English Language Arts standards in 2025- 2026. It is my understanding that decisions about additional standards revision will be made after that time.”

Civics and social studies in general has become a way to push the leftist agenda further into the minds of students. Instead of teaching them about government and the Bill of Rights, they’re being called upon to become activists for the LGBTQIA+ agenda, Black Lives Matter, abortion and immigrant rights. The philosophical push for students to view themselves as ‘global citizens’ and ‘social justice activists’ is directly being funded in the conservative state of Georgia, where HB 1084, the ‘Protect Students First Act’ was signed into law. This ‘divisive concepts’ law is meant to safe-guard students from being indoctrinated with harmful leftist ideology, yet these pilot programs are springing up throughout the state. 

“The education establishment has been heavily politicized, in ways that aligns it against American Birthright (and similar reformed standards) and for radical pilot programs. Aside from reasserting popular control generally over our public K-12 schools, we are working on model curriculum, Civics first, among other things to provide the material for equivalent pilot programs,” said Randall. “We saw absolutely radical standards coming in and realized that America needed a positive counter-model for social studies standards, and not just criticism in detail. We modified the best of a previous generation of social studies standards to provide excellent social studies standards to appeal to a broad majority of the nation.”

As with every problem identified- there are people behind the scenes working on solutions. Curriculums to counter the radicalized agenda of the EAD Roadmap already exist- getting them into our schools is the next challenge.