Congress allocated nearly $200 billion in COVID-19 relief funds for K-12 schools over the past year. While this money was intended to help reopen schools and mitigate learning loss, President Joe Biden’s Department of Education is encouraging school districts to spend some of it on a different purpose: providing “free, antiracist therapy for white educators.”
The American Rescue Plan requires districts to reserve 20 percent of funds for “evidence-based” interventions that “respond to students’ academic, social and emotional needs” — a very sensible charge. But the devil is in the definition, and Team Biden’s guidance booklet for spending ARP funds suggests that students’ social and emotional needs include the disruption of “whiteness” and the propagation of critical race theory.
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Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Adapted from City Journal.
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