My daughter is both a public school and a Catholic school music teacher, grades K-12, in VA. I know that she is heavily pressured to include “diversity” in the songs she teachers. I’ll ask her about this and where these directives come from. I know that they have all kinds of associations and workshops. Somebody said on this forum that the author of that children’s book on Obama (who went to Harvard with him) also wrote one of the songs on the original tapes that surfaced.
I can tell you this: most music teachers do not have the time to compose stuff like this. These songs are being distributed through some network, and the teachers grab them as something “different”.
I’ll just add that I remember singing songs for a cause in school — in those days it was “War Bonds for our Soldiers”. Since I was only in 1st grade it came home like “Werbens for our soldiers” and my mother had to contact the teacher to find out what I was singing.
We learned enough songs for a whole program that we presented to the school and the parents after V-J Day. In fact, I thought that the War was finally over because our class was about to move to a new teacher and, it was our last chance to sing our songs because the new teacher wouldn’t know them!
However, with all that patriotic fever going on, we did not learn one song praising FDR or Harry Truman!