“The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal asks Congress to eliminate the Teacher Quality Partnership Program, which has spent millions of tax dollars on ‘anti-racist teaching,'” reports The College Fix. “The program funds training for teachers through discretionary grants to historically black colleges and universities, tribally controlled colleges and universities, minority serving institutions, and educational agencies.”
American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Hess agrees with the proposal, saying that “Teacher training which promotes woke dogma has undermined an ethos of hard work and personal responsibility, nurtured notions of grievance and victimhood, and eroded trust with a huge swath of students and families.”
The College Fix notes that
Since 2016, the Education Department has disbursed millions of dollars to universities through this program. During the Biden administration, some of the grants went to hiring teachers based on their race and to promoting what some have described as “divisive” progressive ideologies.
For example, the program awarded nearly $5.8 million in 2024 to California State University at Monterey Bay to “diversify the teaching workforce” by recruiting, training, and supporting “certified BIPOC teachers.” BIPOC stands for black, indigenous, people of color.
Other grants reviewed by The Fix on the department’s website, such as those awarded to American University and University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2023, emphasized “anti-racist teaching” in their project descriptions.
Four months ago, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Budget and Management, asked the Senate Appropriations Committee to terminate funding for this program in Fiscal Year 2026, removing it from the federal budget.
The Education Department had already cut the program’s 2025 funding. Now, President Trump’s proposed budget seeks to eliminate it next year.
Vought told Congress that the program “weaponized” federal education spending to promote “divisive ideologies” among teachers. Training materials focused on “inappropriate and unnecessary” topics such as Critical Race Theory, DEI, social justice activism, and white privilege, he said.
The program has been used to enrich many academic consultants, such as diversity “trainers.” Such consultants are to blame for “toxic agendas” that have “cropped up” in schools across America, noted AEI’s Frederick Hess.
For example, trainers in Loudoun County, Virginia taught teachers that America is a “race-based white-supremacist society,” and teachers in Eau Claire, Wisconsin were taught that parents are not “entitled to know” their kids’ gender identities.
Hess adds that the government shouldn’t fund the program because the “lion’s share” of activities it supports don’t improve the quality of instruction, and the training it supports is “shot through with politicization masquerading as pedagogy.”
When asked how he would reply to those who claim cutting the program might worsen the teacher shortage, Hess said, “I’d chuckle. To paraphrase Twain, notions of a teacher shortage are greatly exaggerated. The problem is that lots of teachers leave the field because they feel unsafe and disrespected … and because STEM professionals don’t want to endure Mickey Mouse courses to become educators. These programs, with their disdain for discipline and tough grading, and their embrace of faddish nonsense, are a big part of the problem.”
Some schools have became obsessed with “antiracism.” “Antiracism” often involves teaches kids to hate the free-market economy and to support racial discrimination. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” claimed Ibram Kendi’s best-selling book, How to Be An Antiracist. That book was praised as a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” by the leading progressive media organ Slate. The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book was that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book.
Woke “antiracism” has destroyed some charter schools that previously were a lifeline for students of color, turning “no-excuses” schools where kids learned a lot into chaotic places where kids get into fights and learn little.
A study by a California State University professor found that an increase in “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies at a college is linked to rising opposition there to free speech. “The rise of DEI bureaucracies has actually coincided with the beginning of a ‘Free-Speech Crisis on College Campuses,’” noted the study.
Staff devoted to DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) often exhibit high levels of antisemitism.
College DEI staffers have encouraged illegal discrimination against whites and Asians. For example, at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Director of Race and Equity advocated denying white employees leave because of their race. That director, Johnathan Perkins, also claimed that “every white person is racist to some degree”, and falsely claimed that “white people cannot be victims of racism,” and “only white people can impose racist harm.” These claims disregarded court rulings finding that whites can be victims of racism and nonwhites can act illegally in committing racist acts.
Perkins tells whites not to wish him a “Happy Juneteenth” because he will “flip tf out” if they do. He reacted to the death of England’s Queen Elizabeth by saying,“Good riddance.”
