By Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier, Word In Black
If the Department of Education gets its way, your kid’s school will soon be stripped of federal funding used to hire instructional aides, run after-school tutoring programs, and train teachers to reach struggling students — unless districts agree to stop diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
If the NAACP gets its way, that will never happen.
The civil rights group and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, accusing it of twisting civil rights laws to target DEI initiatives in public schools.
The suit marks the latest battle line in President Donald Trump’s war on “woke” education, which, over the past few years, has included everything from banning books about Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock Nine to axing AP African American Studies.
So What’s Happening?
Back in February, the DOE sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to schools, warning that any programs touching on race, whether in hiring, admissions, financial aid, or even cultural events, might violate federal law and jeopardize funding. Then, in April, it demanded that schools certify compliance and end all DEI programs, or risk losing federal funding.
That’s a blatant misreading of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, according to the NAACP lawsuit. Those laws, it contends, are meant to prevent discrimination — not ban efforts to fix it.
Rather than protecting students’ civil rights, the DOE “has instead claimed systemic racism doesn’t exist,” Derrick Johnson, the NAACP’s president, said in a statement. The reality, he said, is that Black students and other children of color still experience racial harms and are more likely to “attend segregated, chronically underfunded schools where they receive less educational opportunities and more discipline.”
It’s About Fear, Not Fairness
The lawsuit comes as real-world consequences of the Trump administration’s policies play out nationwide. The NAACP pointed out in March that the Waterloo, Iowa, school district withdrew its students from a long-running, annual African American Read-In event at the University of Northern Iowa. Instead of participating in a culture of fairness, the NAACP argues, Waterloo feared retaliation from Washington.
Ultimately, journalist and Howard University professor Nikole Hannah Jones, a Waterloo native, stepped up to host a replacement read-in for the kids.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is systematically dismantling the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights through sweeping layoffs. OCR is now all but disbanded; parents whose children are victims of bias or discrimination have nowhere to turn for help. As NPR reported this week, OCR investigated instances of racial discrimination in schools, but the vast majority of cases involved parents seeking resources for their children with disabilities.
Other programs — like affinity groups for students of color or anti-bias teacher training — are now on the chopping block. That’s bad news for the 7.4 million Black students in K-12 public schools, already being taught by a workforce overwhelmingly white and female.
The Education Department hasn’t commented on the lawsuit yet. But if the NAACP and LDF are successful, the case could safeguard funding for schools that serve marginalized students — and set a major precedent for how civil rights laws are upheld going forward. For now, though, educators and families are left in limbo.
“Denying these truths doesn’t make them disappear,” Johnson said. “It deepens the harm.”