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For decades, a key principle underpinned civil rights enforcement in American schools: Not all discrimination was intentional.
Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that received federal funding had an obligation to address it.
Under President Donald Trump’s administration, that’s no longer the case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools can use to address systemic racial injustice.
This summer, the Education Department rescinded a regulation that allowed schools to gauge potential discrimination by comparing outcomes across races, such as the racial breakdown of students in advanced classes. Then, it issued a letter to American schools, emphasizing it’s illegal to consider race when crafting discipline policies — even if one particular racial group ends up suspended or expelled more often.
At the same time, Trump’s Justice Department has stepped away from many school desegregation cases. In a news release Thursday, the department boasted of successfully working through the courts to close more than 50 desegregation cases since Trump took office, with motions to dismiss in the works in many other cases. Previous administrations had used these federal court cases to hold schools accountable when students of color had worse outcomes than white students — high rates of discipline, worse school facilities or reduced access to extracurriculars and advanced coursework.
While Trump’s first administration deprioritized enforcing racial justice, his current administration has gone further — threatening to punish schools for any consideration of race in their policies and practices.
To the administration, the practice of examining different outcomes for particular groups of students, sometimes known as “disparate impact,” was itself a form of racial discrimination.
“The Obama and Biden Administrations weaponized disparate impact by effectively coercing schools to discipline students differently based on race in order to engineer equitable disciplinary outcomes across racial groups,” Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney said. “These practices unfortunately led to unsafe classrooms and undermined student learning.”
