Education Association Tells Schools To Ignore Trump DEI Guidance

The School Superintendents Association (AASA), which represents the leaders of school districts across the country, told its members to ignore the Trump administration’s memorandum telling schools to end their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs or risk losing federal funding.

AASA told its members to ignore the guidance in a Monday blog post, relying on courts to stop the Trump administration’s reforms and a “long-drawn out process for rescinding funding for failure to comply with civil rights laws.”

“It seems unwise for the professional association for superintendents to advise its members to continue flouting longstanding federal law — perhaps many of them aren’t aware of what has happened on their watch, but countless superintendents are currently governing school districts whose policies and practices directly violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at Parents Defending Education, told The Federalist. “They are playing with fire with this terrible advice.” 

The guidance came in a “dear colleague” letter from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) last week, detailing how school districts could lose federal funding if investigations find them to be discriminating against students using the racialized system the left has been enforcing for years.

“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent,” the letter states. “Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race.”

Anticipating school districts attempting to hide their DEI policies behind other names or obscure them in other ways to bypass federal oversight, the letter warned districts that “relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information, violates the law.”

OCR said that programs that tell “students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not” would be violative of civil rights law because they “stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes” and “deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.”

In an attempt to fight the guidance, AASA even issued an underhanded challenge to the administration, questioning the “willingness of the Trump Administration to enforce it.” The organization said the letter from OCR is “not … very convincing” because OCR’s guidance does “not have the force and effect of law.” AASA then cited an OCR investigation freeze — though it failed to mention that the freeze was on investigations that were started under old race and gender theory standards from the Biden administration.

New investigations, based on new standards that are grounded in reality, have started under the Trump administration.

AASA education civil rights attorney Jackie Wernz noted that branding is key for school districts looking to avoid losing federal funding for keeping their race-based policies, writing that “there is much less support for arguments against race-neutral-yet-race-conscious policies like those used in cases in the 1st and 4th Circuit and there certainly is no legal merit for the idea that considering diversity goals or race at all is a problem.”

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., also egged AASA on, glomming on to a left-wing bait-and-switch tactic that attempts to make the argument that no one knows what conservatives mean by DEI. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tried to pull the same stunt during Education Secretary-designate Linda McMahon’s confirmation hearing.

“While it’s anyone’s guess what falls under the Trump administration’s definition of ‘DEI’, there is simply no authority or basis for Trump to impose such a mandate,” she said.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.