Just for kicks, I wandered around the Department of Education’s (ED) Institute of Education Sciences (IES) website today. Surely, a sciences institute must be spending your money and mine in essential ways—ways that are critical to the survival of the republic, ways that help you and me better than we could ever help ourselves. Here’s what I found.
A whopping $1,000,000 went to the Los Angeles-based leftist company Alterea Inc. for a two-year project still in progress to produce a second version of their web-based game “Agents of Influence” for middle and high school students, intended to promote “resilience to misinformation.” And we all know what “misinformation” means in the mealy mouths of leftists.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Hunter’s Biden’s laptop was “misinformation.” The claim that the Wuhan Virology Institute-cooked virus was cooked up in the Wuhan Virology Institute was “misinformation.” The claim that befuddled Joe Biden was befuddled was misinformation. And the true claim that the Trump-Russia collusion story was misinformation was deemed itself misinformation in the Upside Down where leftists live and move and have their being.
In 2021 on the blog of University of Southern California professor Henry Jenkins, who had been advising the “Agents of Influence” creators, they admitted that they “designed our game around many educational standards, including Common Core, CASEL [social and emotional learning standards]” and the “Learning for Justice Digital Literacy Framework.” These standards and frameworks are all creations of leftists, with the last one perhaps the most troubling.
Learning for Justice Digital Literacy Framework is a project of the notorious Southern Poverty Law Center, (SPLC) which has its filthy fingers in myriad government agencies and schools, influencing policy, legislation, and the malleable minds of children.
The SPLC produces articles, magazines, posters, webinars, reports, guides, curricula, and educational “standards.” In addition to the ED, the SPLC has worked with the FBI, the Dept. of Justice, the Treasury Dept., the Commerce Dept., and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.
Let’s for a moment imagine a perfect world in which leftists experienced a crisis of conscience and decided to create an objective game intended to help minors better discern information from misinformation. Should we even then be using money forcibly extracted from hardworking taxpayers to fund its creation? Is that what the Founding Fathers envisioned for the federal government?
The first version of “Agents of Influence” was funded via a Kickstarter campaign in 2021. Why not let the free market determine if this project has value? Why should the government subsidize it?
American taxpayers have also unknowingly subsidized rapStudy Inc. to the tune of $250,000 for eight-months to fund the creation of a an A. I. song generator that will replace the lyrics of popular rap songs with “academic content in English language arts” classes. How was this quarter million dollar expenditure rationalized?
The rapStudy team explains that “Many students struggled with academic learning and engagement after the global pandemic ended, with figures demonstrating that approximately half of students described themselves as not engaged or actively disengaged.” The rapStudy team’s solution to student disengagement is having Americans fund their for-profit company to generate A.I. songs.
Another $1,000,000 went to dfusion Inc. for a two-year still-in-progress project to “develop a supplemental interactive game for middle school students to practice and reinforce math skills in a collaborative and competitive learning environment through purposeful and structured play.”
Note the word “supplemental.” Americans have already paid this for-profit company $250,000 in 2023 to develop a “prototype of a web-based game for middle schools students to learn math by making and managing a fantasy sports football team.”
This company also sells a mobile app “designed with and for trans women to support their connections to each other and their relationship goals and dreams” and “affirm their gender identity.” Money is fungible, so whatever the federal government takes from taxpayers and gives to dfusion Inc. frees up other of its revenue streams to fund its pro-“trans” products.
Games, it seems, are all the rage among ED bureaucrats. Another $250,000 went to Makefully LLC for its eight-month project in 2024 to “develop a novel prototype of a multi-player roleplaying game to teach students about key historical events in American history.”
Costing Americans another $250K was an eight-month project of Sown to Grow LLC to “develop a prototype with logic-based algorithms to identify and categorize students based on the structured data from their reflections, emoji inputs, [and] social-emotion learning survey responses,” followed by testing to see if their algorithms accurately identify students who need interventions.
The busy bees at Sown to Grow know where the big bucks are. Since 2021, they have received three grants, totaling $1,450,000 of public money.
Since May 1, 2024, these five companies have cost Americans $2,750,000 through the Small Business Innovation Research program.
According to the government website,
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program was established under the Small Business Innovation Development Act of 1982 (P.L. 97-219).
Federal agencies with extramural research and development budgets over $100 million are required to administer SBIR programs using an annual set-aside of 2.5% for small companies to conduct innovative R&D that has potential for commercialization and public benefit. At present, 11 federal agencies provide more than $2 billion annually to for-profit small business firms and their partners. [emphasis added]
Who knew? While the United States remains deeply in debt, we the people are forced to subsidize the silly projects of for-profit companies.
The act states that its goal was “to strengthen the role of the small, innovative firms in federally funded research and development, and to utilize Federal research and development as a base for technological innovation to meet agency needs and to contribute to the growth and strength of the Nation’s economy.”
Do the grants described in this article contribute to “agency needs”?
Does examining student emojis advance the ED’s mission?
Is it the responsibility of the federal government to donate taxpayer money to small companies to subsidize the development of non-essential products that may or may not have commercial viability?
Haven’t we learned the hard way that when the government—as opposed to the marketplace—tries to pick winners in the ongoing competition to “strengthen the nation’s economy,” the losers are taxpayers?
What leftists don’t understand is that not everything that may prove beneficial to society in some small way is the responsibility of taxpayers to fund. The Small Business Innovation Development Act should be amended, and the Department of Education needs to go—yesterday. Boy does America need DOGE.