The Wisconsin Departments of Public Education and Children and Families are still promoting materials from the Southern Poverty Law Center even after the SPLC was indicted for massive fraud.
Two Wisconsin state agencies charged with guiding the state’s children are featuring classroom and early-childhood materials from the Southern Poverty Law Center, just days after the SPLC was hit with a federal indictment accusing it of secretly funneling more than $3 million in donated funds to leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and other violent extremist groups.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the Department of Children and Families two major state Agencies that host or recommend resources from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its Learning for Justice program, according to a review of official websites.
DPI’s WISELearn Resources portal lists multiple SPLC-produced items for K-12 teachers, including “Learning for Justice: Let’s Talk! Facilitating Critical Conversations with Students,” which covers white privilege, police violence and mass incarceration; “Teaching Hard History: Grades 6-12”; and lessons on the 1963 Birmingham campaign, the 1965 Selma march and “Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System.” The materials are offered as free tools for ethnic studies, social studies, and equity education.
DCF’s Child Care Resources page explicitly recommends Learning for Justice for providers, describing it as offering “classroom resources that respect and appreciate diversity” from pre-K through 12th grade. The agency also included SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance publications in the official Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, which are used statewide.
On April 21, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the SPLC on 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege the group created fictitious organizations and sham bank accounts to hide payments totaling more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to individuals tied to extremist groups, including one leader involved in planning the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., who allegedly received roughly $270,000. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the scheme amounted to “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.”
Critics have long accused the SPLC of using its “hate group” listings and educational materials to advance a partisan progressive agenda while amassing nearly $787 million in net assets. The new indictment intensifies those concerns, with analysts questioning whether donors, including small-dollar contributors repeatedly solicited online, knew their money was allegedly being used to prop up the very organizations the SPLC claims to fight.
Conservative education watchdogs say the episode underscores a deeper problem: taxpayer-supported agencies funneling impressionable students and young children toward materials from a group now facing serious federal fraud allegations.“
Parents expect schools and child care programs to teach facts, not ideology from an outfit accused of manufacturing the hate it raises money to combat. The SPLC materials remain publicly available on state sites at no additional direct cost to taxpayers, but critics argue that even free promotion lends the government credibility to a deeply controversial organization.
