The Trump administration joined a high-profile racial discrimination lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District, alleging nation’s second largest school district gave white students “inferior treatment and calculated disadvantages.”
The lawsuit, originally filed by the 1776 Project Foundation, argues that the district’s decades-old desegregation mandates amount to discriminatory practices that harm non-minority students by giving preferential treatment to others.
“Treating Americans equally is not a suggestion — it is a core constitutional guarantee that educational institutions must follow,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “This Department of Justice will never stop fighting to make that guarantee a reality, including for public-school students in Los Angeles.”
The DOJ’s civil rights chief, Harmeet Dhillon, added that LAUSD is “providing benefits that treat students — based on their race — as though they have learning disabilities.”
“Racial discrimination is unlawful and un-American, and this Civil Rights Division will fight to ensure that every LAUSD student is treated equally under the law,” Dillon added.
The school district’s “Predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian, or Other Non-Anglo” (PHBAO) program separates students by race to determine which schools with high PHBAO populations receive certain benefits. The Justice Department says the policy “separates everyone in the LAUSD area by race into either the ‘Anglo,’ meaning White group, and everyone else.”
The 1776 Project Foundation’s founder, Ryan James Girdusky, said the LAUSD is unique among school districts nationwide.
“This is the most blatant example of racial discrimination by a major school district in this country,” Girdusky told the Los Angeles Times.
Critics of the lawsuit say it lacks merit and is politically motivated.
“It’s symbolic, it’s troubling, it’s disturbing. It is part of a larger right-wing agenda to shift the focus from centuries of discrimination, exclusion, and denied opportunity to certain groups and to say, ‘look, white students are being treated badly,’” Tyrone Howard, the faculty director of UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools, told EdSource.