CHICAGO (LifeSiteNews) — As Chicago Public Schools (CPS) continue to fail basic educational metrics such as reading ability, math proficiency, and attendance, the federal government continues to award them hundreds of thousands of dollars not to fix their core deficiencies but to shore up its promotion of left-wing ideology in the classroom.

The Daily Caller reports that CPS received in August $400,000 from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for “LGBTQ+” student “health” funding and over $497,000 for a “mental health equity” program focused on “recognizing, preventing, responding to and transforming incidents of bias and discrimination.” It also received $75,000 from the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) for training students to find “scientific solutions which build resilience to extreme weather and climate change.”

All this comes despite the facts that 82 percent of CPS students are not proficient in math, 74 percent are not proficient in reading, and approximately 40 percent are chronically absent, in a district with a budget deficit of half a billion dollars. Yet its graduation rate remains 83 percent, prompting the conservative Illinois Policy Institute to allege that the district is “promoting students who haven’t mastered critical skills” rather than dealing with its problems and focusing its requests for financial assistance on the basics.

“This is what it looks like when you burn a district down,” said Marguerite Roza, professor of education at Georgetown University. “It is a level of dysfunction that feels beyond destabilizing, enough to make people lose confidence in the system.”

The indoctrination of children with radical sexual ideologies and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental knowledge or consent. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas. 

In recent years, such trends have provoked a backlash with the election of Republicans such as Glenn Youngkin in Virginia and Ron DeSantis in Florida. More than 30 states have introduced legislation eliminating diversity programs from education as part of a broader push against so-called “woke ideology.”