Hundreds of millions in tax money goes to contracts for DEI groups, watchdog finds: 'Total racket'

Fox News

02-06-2025

EXCLUSIVE: Over the last several years, a few dozen diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consultant groups have racked up over a hundred million dollars in taxpayer-funded contracts from K-12 schools across the country, a new report by Defending Education found.
The report, shared with Fox News Digital, details how 41 DEI consultant groups garnered millions in taxpayer-funded contracts from 303 school districts and public education entities from 2021 until now.
In total, the groups collected over $123 million from public schools in 40 states. The report found public school DEI contracts in both red and blue states, from Florida and Alabama to California and Washington.
Erika Sanzi, a spokesperson for Defending Education, described the schools-consultants partnership as a "total racket that makes schools worse" and often takes no consideration of age-appropriateness in curricula.
According to the report, the biggest winner in the scheme was Amplify, a firm that provides professional development and curricula to school districts, which scored a total of over $70,500,000.
The report states that in a now-scrubbed statement on its website, Amplify said its mission is to "make education, and thereby the world, more equitable and accessible" and to "help teachers support their students in constructing, questioning, expanding, and strengthening knowledge of where they come from and who they are becoming."
In response, a representative for Amplify told Fox News Digital that the group "publishes textbooks and other instructional materials that help students learn reading, math and science" and that "there is no place anywhere in Amplify's products, or in the training programs about how to use them, for ideologies or political agendas."
The representative said "our programs help students learn how to think, not what to think."
The report highlights another consultant group, Adjusted Equity Solutions, which it says is associated with the Culturally Responsive School Leadership Institute, that claims to help schools challenge "whiteness and hegemonic epistemologies in school," use "equity audits to measure student inclusiveness, policy, and practice" and serve as "advocate and social activist for community-based causes in both the school and neighborhood community."
This group took in over a million dollars from public schools during the study period.
"Tinkering in the minds of other people's children is big business and countless K-12 schools across the country are active participants," Sanzi said. "They pay big bucks to enter into contracts with ideologues and activists who, in turn, gain access, directly or indirectly, to a captive audience of young minds."
Speaking with Fox News Digital via Zoom, Sanzi said that "rather than this being a focus on sort of academic interventions, it's a lot of jargon that so far has not proven itself to be measurable. And there's really not much evidence, if any, that any of this is helping students or helping schools or helping staff."
Sanzi said that though these DEI groups couch their activities in agreeable terms like "belonging" and "empathy," they often end up being a "wolf in sheep's clothing."
"At first, you're thinking lesson on empathy, like that's good," she said. "Who wouldn't want their child to be empathetic? We want that. Until you realize that the lesson on empathy is going to be about something like a little girl in her bathroom at school, a staff member who's trans, so biologically male, but identifies as female, comes into the restroom with her. She naturally feels uncomfortable because that's a very natural feeling in a circumstance like that. But she's told that she needs to have 'empathy' for this grownup who identifies as female, right? And that her discomfort is the problem… That feeling discomfort in that situation is wrong or makes her un-empathetic."
The Trump Department of Education has warned state education departments in all 50 states that they must remove diversity, equity and inclusion policies or risk losing federal funding.
Despite this, Sanzi said many of these consultant groups have adjusted by scrubbing references to DEI on their websites and using other words to describe the same thing.
"We see a lot of renaming," she said. "So, they might say, 'Well, we're getting rid of our DEI office or we're getting rid of our equity officer.' [But] the proof will be in the pudding because what we notice often is that you'll see a switch, like suddenly we hear the word belonging a lot more now. And so the question becomes, 'Are you getting rid of it? Or are you just rebranding it and shifting it somewhere else and taking it off your website?'"
"What many people don't understand is that the founders of these consultant companies and the people who run them and the practitioners are activists. They are ideologues," she went on. "They have every right to believe that what they're transmitting is the right thing, but in a public-school setting that is required to maintain viewpoint diversity, these really have no place, not only because of the cost, not only cause it's public money, not only because they're not very transparent about what they're doing, but also because they are really trying to push an ideological agenda on other people's children."
The Culturally Responsive School Leadership Institute did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.