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Dive Brief:
The U.S. Department of Justice released guidance Wednesday that threatens to strip grant funding from colleges and other federally funded institutionsover what the agency deems unlawful diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
The agency’s memo targets a sweeping set of practices, including offering race-based scholarship programs, allowing transgender women to access bathrooms that correspond with their gender identityand having identity-based lounges or study spaces on campus — even if they are open to all.
But the nine-page memo goes a step further, saying even neutral criteria — such as recruitment strategies targeting certain regions — could be deemed unlawful if the Justice Department determines they are chosen because of their demographic composition.
Dive Insight:
The Justice Department’s memo comes after a federal judge temporarily blocked similar guidance from the U.S. Department of Education that broadly targeted diversity, equity and inclusion programs at federally funded colleges and K-12 schools.The order came in response to a lawsuit that alleged the guidance “radically upends” federal antidiscrimination laws.
The guidance from the Justice Department illustrates the major shift in how the agency under President Donald Trump approaches enforcement of civil rights laws, with officials now targeting programs that were often actually launched to fight systemic discrimination.
Earlier this month, the National Urban League declared a “state of emergency” for antidiscrimination policies, calling the Trump administration’s overhaul of the Justice Department’s enforcement priorities “an existential threat” to civil rights laws, according to The Associated Press.
Like the Education Department’s blocked guidance, the Justice Department’s new memo warns that government officials could pull federal funding from institutions that don’t comply. That threat comes at the same time the agency has ramped up investigations into colleges over their diversity initiatives and their responses to antisemitism on campus.
The DOJ memo contains examples of practices it lists as “unlawful” and says could lead to federal funding being revoked, as well as a list of recommendations, which it says are not mandatory, to avoid “legal pitfalls.”
“This Department of Justice will not stand by while recipients of federal funds engage in illegal discrimination,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a Wednesday statement. “This guidance will ensure we are serving the American people and not ideological agendas.”
As examples of unlawful practices, the agency highlighted race-based scholarships or programs, including mentorship programs or leadership initiatives reserved for members of certain racial groups.
The memo could upend admissions. It recommends colleges end programs “designed to achieve discriminatory outcomes” even if they have “facially neutral” criteria, such as targeting scholarships to certain regions to increase enrollment or participation among certain racial groups.
“Instead, use universally applicable criteria, such as academic merit or financial hardship, applied without regard to protected characteristics or demographic goals,” the memo said.
The memo also takes aim at what it describes as “unlawful proxies” for race and sex. As an example, the memo calls out universities that ask job applicants “to demonstrate ‘cultural competence,’ ‘lived experience,’ or ‘cross-cultural skills’ in ways that effectively evaluate candidates’ racial or ethnic backgrounds rather than objective qualifications.”
The Justice Department also flagged diversity statements — which typically ask job or graduate student candidates to explain their experience and commitment to diversity and inclusion initiatives — as potentially unlawful if they advantage “those who discuss experiences intrinsically tied to protected characteristics.” The memo said the same of asking for statements from applicants about “obstacles they have overcome,” a common essay prompt for college applications.
State lawmakers have likewise targeted diversity statements, with many outlawing public colleges from requiring them in job or admission applications.
The memo also said failing to “maintain sex-separated athletic competitions and intimate spaces” could violate federal law. The Justice Department’s examples of those violations include allowing transgender women to use bathrooms, showers, locker rooms and dormitories designated for women, as well as allowing them to compete in women’s athletic events.
And it mentions college lounges or other spaces designated for specific groups, such as a “BIPOC-only study lounge.”
“Even if access is technically open to all, the identity-based focus creates a perception of segregation and may foster a hostile environment,” the memo stated. “This extends to any resource allocation — such as study spaces, computer labs, or event venues — that segregates access based on protected characteristics, even if intended to create ‘safe spaces.’”
It also takes aim at diversity training, giving the example of requiring teachers at K-12 schools to complete a DEI training that includes statements such as “all white people are inherently privileged” or touching on “toxic masculinity.”
The memo says such trainings could violate civil rights laws “if they create a hostile environment or impose penalties for dissent in ways that result in discriminatory treatment.”
Attorney General Pamela Bondi authored the memo declaring all race-conscious practices unlawful.
Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images
More than three months after a federal court struck down an Education Department directive that barred any practices that consider race at colleges across the country, the Department of Justice declared Wednesday that diversity, equity and inclusion practices are unlawful and “discriminatory.”
But the agency’s memo goes even further than ED’s guidance, suggesting that programs that rely on what they describe as stand-ins for race, like recruitment efforts that focus on majority-minority geographic areas, could violate federal civil rights laws. The directive applies to any organization that receives federal funds, and DOJ officials warned that engaging in potentially unlawful practices could lead to a loss in grant funding.
Other examples of “potentially unlawful proxies” include requirements that job applicants “demonstrate ‘cultural competence,’ ‘lived experience,’ or ‘cross-cultural skills’” or narratives about how the applicant has overcome obstacles, Attorney General Pamela Bondi wrote.
This interpretation of federal law could present new challenges for colleges that have relied on tactics like place-based recruitment to create diverse student bodies since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023. For instance, some colleges have guaranteed admission to students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high schools.
“This highlights that every practice of colleges is under scrutiny, even ones that have been viewed as politically safe for years (such as top ten percent plans or even TRIO programs). The only truly safe ways to admit students right now are to admit everyone or only use standardized test scores,” Robert Kelchen, a professor in the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Being an enrollment management leader has always been tough, but now it’s even more challenging to meet revenue targets and satisfy stakeholders who have politically incompatible goals.”
The document offers clearer guidance about what the Justice Department considers off-limits as it investigates DEI at colleges and universities. The DOJ is playing a greater role in investigating colleges as it enforces its position that DEI programs as well as efforts to boost diversity among faculty and staff violate federal antidiscrimination laws.
Since President Trump took office in January, he’s targeted DEI programs, practices and personnel via executive orders and other efforts. However, higher ed experts haverepeatedly said that the orders don’t change the underlying laws, so colleges that complied with the law before Jan. 20 remain in compliance. In response to the federal edicts, colleges have rolled back a number of their programs and closed centers that catered to specific student groups.
Many of the practices declared unlawful in the nine-page memo echo those referenced in the Education Department’s February Dear Colleague letter, such as race-based scholarships. But it also explicitly states that “BIPOC-only study lounges” and similar facilities are unlawful. The Education Department’s guidance mentioned race-based facilities generally but not specifically study lounges.
DEI advocates have long argued that these centers or lounges are open to all students. Some have persisted even after state DEI bans, but multiple colleges have in recent months closed centers that catered to specific student groups. Bondi argued that such spaces violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination based on race and national origin.
“Even if access is technically open to all, the identity-based focus creates a perception of segregation and may foster a hostile environment. This extends to any resource allocation—such as study spaces, computer labs, or event venues—that segregates access based on protected characteristics, even if intended to create ‘safe spaces,’” the order reads.
Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said that the memo is “another example of governmental overreach into academic freedom, institutional autonomy and shared governance that conditions federal funding on ideological alignment with the administration’s viewpoints.”
She added that the guidelines in the document violate existing constitutional protections and erode federal civil rights law.
“What is missing from the DOJ narrative on DEI is that treating people differently is not always unjust, especially when doing so corrects a broader pattern of systemic injustice. Considering race and gender in the context of historic unjust discrimination to inform policies and practices at colleges and universities doesn’t in and of itself constitute illegal discrimination, though the letter suggests otherwise.”
Beyond race-based practices, the letter also addresses transgender student athletes, building on the Trump administration’s previous actions that advocates say deny the existence of trans individuals and roll back their rights. The memo states that it would “typically be unlawful” for someone assigned male at birth to compete on women’s sports teams or for an institution to “compel” individuals to share an intimate space, like a locker room, with someone of another sex.
Pasquerella noted that the letter offers guidance, not legal mandates.
“Nevertheless,” she said, “what are described as ‘best practices and nonbinding suggestions’ will likely cause another wave of anticipatory compliance and overcorrection given the climate of fear and intimidation created by the weaponization of research funds.”
Japan needs to admit that long-running efforts to address gender inequality in higher education aren’t working, experts say, with antidiversity sentiment spreading from the U.S. and threatening to gain traction.
Despite government policies spanning nearly two decades, women remain severely underrepresented across Japanese universities, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.
As of 2022, women made up just 26.7 percent of faculty nationwide and fewer than half of all students, with even starker disparities in senior academic roles and male-dominated disciplines.
Sayaka Oki, a professor at the University of Tokyo, described the situation as “terrible.”
“Gender equality doesn’t really exist here,” she added.
As of 2022, only 11 percent of professors at Oki’s university were female, with particularly low representation in engineering. In undergraduate programs in physics and engineering, women typically make up only about 15 percent of the student population.
“The gender imbalance starts at the student level and gets worse in higher positions,” she said. The university has launched repeated initiatives that have attempted to address the problem and has reported that it has “steadily increased the number of women in faculty positions.”
Since 2006, Japan’s government has implemented a “goal and timetable” policy aimed at increasing women researchers in natural sciences, setting numerical hiring targets every five years.
However, these targets have remained largely unchanged because the proportion of women earning doctoral degrees—the main feeder for research roles—has not significantly increased.
Ginko Kawano, professor of gender equality at Kyushu University, said that, “after nearly two decades, the policy has not produced significant results, and it appears we are now at a turning point in terms of policy design.”
Yet “while this sends a positive message that women are welcome in these disciplines, it is unlikely to serve as a fundamental solution to the underlying issues,” she said.
She also acknowledged strong opposition from students and faculty: “Institutions that choose to introduce this system should clearly explain the reasoning behind it.
“At the same time, it is crucial for university faculty to have access to the information and knowledge necessary to evaluate the merits and drawbacks of such quotas.
“For example, they should be aware of the historical exclusion of women from science, and recognize the persistent bias that suggest[s] women are not suited for STEM fields—biases that continue to shape the choices women feel able to make,” Kawano said.
Adding to the complexity is a political environment increasingly wary of diversity initiatives.
Kawano warned that antidiversity sentiment similar to that in the U.S. could gain traction in Japan, although opposition to gender equality policies has existed independently for years.
Akiyoshi Yonezawa, professor of higher education in the Global Strategy Office at Tohoku University, highlighted demographic pressures pushing universities toward diversity.
“Since around 1990, the number of 18-year-olds has continuously declined and is expected to continue until at least 2040,” he said.
In response, women and international students have been framed as essential for sustaining Japan’s knowledge economy.
Yonezawa criticized how diversity initiatives in Japan are often framed: “DEI initiatives in Japanese universities and society tend to be promoted as a ‘catch-up’ Western mindset rather than intrinsic value formation through daily experience. This makes DEI activities in Japan’s higher education fragile in the long term when faced with controversy.”
Institutional barriers also persist. Oki described how her university’s collegial governance system complicates efforts to implement top-down diversity policies and secure funding, which often comes with centralized control conditions.
“To access the fund, we’re required to adopt a more top-down management style,” she said. “That’s difficult because our university traditionally follows a collegial governance model.”
Oki agreed that there was a risk that international developments had made the situation potentially more difficult—particularly in the U.S., where things like the ban on affirmative action had made colleagues “more cautious about what might happen here.”
The University of North Carolina System’s Board of Governors issued a memorandum requiring each of the system’s 17 campuses to develop a subcommittee to evaluate the campus’s compliance with the system’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion policy, The Assembly reported.
They have until Sept. 1 to show how they have complied with the policy, which cancelled previous DEI guidance and mandated neutrality from administrators on political and social issues. As a result of that policy, UNC campuses reported that they laid off dozens of staffers, moved 131 people to new positions, and redirected $16 million in DEI spending to student success and wellbeing programs.
According to the memo, the reviews should include briefings with chancellors about employees whose jobs were changed as a result of the DEI ban.
“These confidential reviews should compare an individual’s prior position to his or her new responsibilities, including how the employee’s performance in that role has changed, and what safeguards exist to ensure an employee’s previous responsibilities do not continue in the present role,” the memo states. “Confidential briefings from the chancellor on any disciplinary action taken against personnel should occur at this time as well.”
The memo comes after four UNC employees were secretly filmed by a conservative nonprofit discussing circumventing DEI restrictions; three of those employees are no longer employed by their universities.
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Dive Brief:
A federal judge on Sunday temporarily blocked enforcement of major parts of a new Mississippi law that bars diversity, equity and inclusion in the state’s public colleges and K-12 schools.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi and other organizations filed a lawsuit in June on behalf of students and educators, arguing the new law imposes the state government’s views on race, gender and sexuality on public colleges and schools and censors opposing views.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate pointed to accounts of educators having their programs shut down or censoring their own speech to ensure they don’t run afoul of the law. The accounts signal “possible widespread suppression of speech, programming, and institutional function,” Wingate wrote.
Dive Insight:
Educator and student groups sued over the law just two months after it took effect in April, arguing the legislation violates their First Amendment right to free speech and is unconstitutionally vague.
“It is difficult for administrators, teachers, and students to distinguish prohibited actions from permissible ones, making the law particularly susceptible to arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement,” the lawsuit said.
One contested aspect of the law is a provision that bans public colleges and K-12 schools from either engaging in or requiring diversity training, which it defines as any formal or informal education meant to increase “awareness or understanding of issues related to race, sex, color, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or national origin.”
This edict applies to both elective or required courses, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs warn of dire consequences from the legislation, arguing its provisions would prohibit constitutional law professors from discussing discrimination and history teachers from teaching about the Civil War and slavery.
Under the bill, colleges and K-12 schools also can’t “engage in” eight “divisive concepts” — a provision the lawsuit calls “extremely broad.” One divisive concept, for instance, is that an individual “by virtue of his or her race, sex, color, national origin, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
The lawsuit argues that could block discussions of implicit bias in sociology, psychology and other classes.
Public colleges and K-12 schools that don’t follow the law face a steep penalty if they rack up two violations — the potential loss of state funding. Colleges and schools must “cure” their violations to avoid this punishment, though the legislation doesn’t explain how that can be accomplished, sparking concerns that educators will be fired and students will be expelled, according to the lawsuit.
The legislation also carves out exceptions for “scholarly research or creative work” by students and employees. But the lawsuit argues those carve-outs are unclear and raise questions about whether students could discuss work on one of the banned concepts during class.
“Like other provisions of the act, this exception is vague and further confuses what is and what is not prohibited by the law,” the plaintiffs argued.
The defendants include Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, as well as the chairs of the state community college system’s coordinating board and education board, among others. They filed a motion to dismiss earlier this month, arguing that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue and that the attorney general was shielded by sovereign immunity.
However, Wingate wrote that U.S. Supreme Court precedent allows plaintiffs to seek injunctive relief against state officials to prevent constitutional violations.
The temporary restraining order is in effect until further court order. Wingate is holding a hearing Wednesday over whether to grant a preliminary injunction, which would last until he issues a final ruling on the case.
In his ruling, the judge pointed to accounts from educators and students. One plaintiff, a librarian at Hinds Community College, expressed uncertainty about whether she can recommend books on race, gender or identity or curate material for events like Black History Month.
And the director of student development at Tougaloo College said she has suspended programs meant to support LGBTQ+ students out of concern that discussion of gender identity could risk her institution’s funding.
Since the law took effect in April, institutions have been attempting to follow the legislation, often “erring on the side of caution” by canceling programming that could now be prohibited, Wingate noted.
“This Court finds that each day the statute remains unclarified, undefined, and under a threat of open interpretation, exacerbates the suppression of protected speech,” Wingate wrote.
America First Legal has called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for alleged racial discrimination, according to The Baltimore Banner.
In a 133-page complaint filed Thursday, the conservative legal group, run by President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, urged the DOJ to investigate Johns Hopkins “for its systemic, intentional, and ongoing discrimination within its School of Medicine on the basis of race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, and other impermissible, immutable characteristics under the pretext of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’) in open defiance” of civil rights laws, Supreme Court precedent and presidential executive orders.
“Johns Hopkins has not merely preserved its discriminatory DEI framework—it has entrenched, expanded, and openly celebrated it as a cornerstone of its institutional identity,” the complaint reads, adding that identity-based preferences are “embedded” in the medical school’s curriculum, admissions processes, clinical practices and administrative operations.
The America First Legal complaint singles out certain medical school divisions and programs for seeking to recruit a “diverse applicant pool,” including residency programs in gynecology and obstetrics, emergency medicine, dermatology, anesthesiology and critical care.
But the complaint leaves room for attacks beyond the medical school, noting that DEI practices “are part of a comprehensive, university-wide regime of racial engineering.”
Johns Hopkins has not responded to America First Legal’s complaint.
But the university has lately taken pains to address what critics have called a lack of viewpoint diversity on campus, engaging in civic education initiatives and partnering with the conservative American Enterprise Institute to “convey the importance of rooting teaching and research with implications for the nation’s common life in a broad range of points of view,” according to the university.
When a white teacher at Decatur High School used the n-word in class in 2022, students walked out and marched in protest. But Reyes Le wanted to do more.
Until he graduated from the Atlanta-area school this year, he co-led its equity team. He organized walking tours devoted to Decatur’s history as a thriving community of freed slaves after the Civil War. Stops included a statue of civil rights leader John Lewis, which replaced a Confederate monument, and a historical marker recognizing the site where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed for driving with an out-of-state license.
Reyes Le, a Decatur High graduate, sits at the base of Celebration, a sculpture in the town’s central square that honors the city’s first Black commissioner and mayor. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)
But Le feared his efforts would collapse in the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion. An existing state law against “divisive concepts” meant students already had to get parent permission to go on the tour. Then the district threw out two non-discrimination policies April 15.
“I felt that the work we were doing wouldn’t be approved going into the future,” Le said.
Decatur got snared by the U.S. Department of Education’s threat to pull millions of dollars in federal funding from states and districts that employed DEI policies. In response, several organizations sued the department, calling its guidance vague and in violation of constitutional provisions that favor local control. Within weeks, three federal judges, including one Trump appointee, blocked Education Secretary Linda McMahon from enforcing the directives, and Decatur promptly reinstated its policies.
The reversal offers a glimpse into the courts’ role in thwarting — or at least slowing down — the Trump education juggernaut. States, districts, unions, civil rights groups and parents sued McMahon, and multiple courts agreed the department skirted the law in slashing funding and staff. But some observers say the administration is playing a long game and may view such losses as temporary setbacks.
“The administration’s plan is to push on multiple fronts to test the boundaries of what they can get away with,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “Cut personnel, but if needed, add them back later. What’s gained? Possible intimidation of ‘deep state’ employees and a chance to hire people that will be ‘a better fit.’ ”
A recent example of boundary testing: The administration withheld nearly $7 billion for education the president already approved in March.
But the move is practically lifted from the pages of Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. In that document, Russ Vought, now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, argues that presidents must “handcuff the bureaucracy” and that the Constitution never intended for the White House to spend everything Congress appropriated.
The administration blames Democrats for playing the courts. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller accused “radical rogue judges” of getting in the president’s way.
The end result is often administrative chaos, leaving many districts unable to make routine purchases and displaced staff unsure whether to move on with their lives.
While the outcome in the lower courts has been mixed, the Supreme Court — which has looked favorably on much of Trump’s agenda — is expected any day to weigh in on the president’s biggest prize: whether McMahon can permanently cut half the department’s staff.
In that case, 21 Democratic attorneys general and a Massachusetts school district sued to prevent the administration from taking a giant step toward eliminating the department.
“Everything about defunding and dismantling by the administration is in judicial limbo,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. As a supporter of eliminating the department, he lamented the slow pace of change. “If the Supreme Court allows mass layoffs, though, I would expect more energy to return to shrinking the department.”
The odds of that increased last week when the court ruled that mass firings at other agencies could remain in effect as the parties argue the case in the lower courts.
While the lawsuits over the Education Department are separate, Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law, said the ruling is “clearly not a good sign.” His case, filed in May, focuses on cuts specifically to the department’s Office for Civil Rights, but the argument is essentially the same: The administration overstepped its authority when it gutted the department without congressional approval.
Solicitor General John Sauer, in his brief to the Supreme Court, said the states had no grounds to sue and called any fears the department couldn’t make do with a smaller staff merely “speculative.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended her cuts to programs and staff before a House education committee June 4. (Sha Hanting/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
Even if the Supreme Court rules in McMahon’s favor, its opinion won’t affect previous rulings and other lawsuits in progress against the department.
Here’s where some of those key legal battles stand:
COVID relief funds
McMahon stunned states in late March when she said they would no longer receive more than $2 billion in reimbursements for COVID-related expenses. States would have to make a fresh case for how their costs related to the pandemic, even though the department had already approved extensions for construction projects, summer learning and tutoring.
On June 3, a federal judge in Maryland blocked McMahon from pulling the funds.
Despite the judicial order, not all states have been paid.
The Maryland Department of Education still had more than $400 million to spend. Cherie Duvall-Jones, a spokeswoman, said the agency hasn’t received any reimbursements even though it provided the “necessary documentation and information” federal officials requested.
The cancellation forced Baltimore City schools to dip into a reserve account to avoid disrupting tutoring and summer school programs.
Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, declined to comment on why it had yet to pay Maryland or how much the department has distributed to other states since June.
Mass firings
In the administration’s push to wind down the department, McMahon admits she still needs staff to complete what she calls her “final mission.” On May 21, she told a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. Biedermann wouldn’t say whether that figure has grown, and referred a reporter to the hearing video.
“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.”
The next day, a federal district court ordered her to also reinstate the more than 1,300 employees she fired in March, about half of the department’s workforce. Updating the court on progress, Chief of Staff Rachel Oglesby said in a July 8 filing that she’s still reviewing survey responses from laid off staffers and figuring out where they would work if they return.
Student protestors participate in the “Hands Off Our Schools” rally in front of the U.S. Department of Education on April 4 in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)
But some call the department’s efforts to bring back employees lackluster, perhaps because it’s pinning its hopes on a victory before the Supreme Court.
“This is a court that’s been fairly aggressive in overturning lower court decisions,” said Smith, with the National Center for Youth Law.
His group’s lawsuit is one of two challenging cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which lost nearly 250 staffers and seven regional offices. They argue the cuts have left the department unable to thoroughly investigate complaints. Of the 5,164 civil rights complaints since March, OCR has dismissed 3,625, Oglesby reported.
In a case brought by the Victim Rights Law Center, a Massachusetts-based advocacy organization, a federal district court judge ordered McMahon to reinstate OCR employees.
Even if the case is not reversed on appeal, there’s another potential problem: Not all former staffers are eager to return.
“I have applied for other jobs, but I’d prefer to have certainty about my employment with OCR before making a transition,” said Andy Artz, who was a supervising attorney in OCR’s New York City office until the layoffs. “I feel committed to the mission of the agency and I’d like to be part of maintaining it if reinstated.”
DEI
An aspect of that mission, nurtured under the Biden administration, was to discourage discipline policies that result in higher suspension and expulsion rates for minority students. A 2023 memo warned that discrimination in discipline could have “devastating long-term consequences on students and their future opportunities.”
But according to the department’s Feb. 14 guidance, efforts to reduce those gaps or raise achievement among Black and Hispanic students could fall under its definition of “impermissible” DEI practices. Officials demanded that states sign a form certifying compliance with their interpretation of the law. On April 24, three federal courts ruled that for now, the department can’t pull funding from states that didn’t sign. The department also had to temporarily shut down a website designed to gather public complaints about DEI practices.
The cases, which McMahon has asked the courts to dismiss, will continue through the summer. In court records, the administration’s lawyers say the groups’ arguments are weak and that districts like Decatur simply overreacted. In an example cited in a complaint brought by the NAACP, the Waterloo Community School District in Iowa responded to the federal guidance by pulling out of a statewide “read-In” for Black History Month. About 3,500 first graders were expected to participate in the virtual event featuring Black authors and illustrators.
The department said the move reflected a misunderstanding of the guidance. “Withdrawing all its students from the read-In event appears to have been a drastic overreaction by the school district and disconnected from a plain reading of the … documents,” the department said.
Desegregation
The administration’s DEI crackdown has left many schools confused about how to teach seminal issues of American history such as the Civil Rights era.
It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that established “desegregation centers” across the country to help districts implement court-ordered integration.
In 2022, the Biden administration awarded $33 million in grants to what are now called equity assistance centers. But Trump’s department views such work as inseparable from DEI. When it cancelled funding to the centers, it described them as “woke” and “divisive.”
Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Clinton appointee, disagreed. He blocked McMahon from pulling roughly $4 million from the Southern Education Foundation, which houses Equity Assistance Center-South and helped finance Brown v. Board of Education over 70 years ago. His order referenced President Dwight Eisenhower and southern judges who took the ruling seriously.
“They could hardly have imagined that some future presidential administration would hinder efforts by organizations like SEF — based on some misguided understanding of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ — to fulfill Brown’s constitutional promise to students across the country to eradicate the practice of racial segregation.”
He said the center is likely to win its argument that canceling the grant was “arbitrary and capricious.”
Raymond Pierce, Southern Education Foundation president and CEO, said when he applied for the grant to run one of the centers, he emphasized its historical significance.
“My family is from Mississippi, so I remember seeing a ‘colored’ entrance sign on the back of the building as we pulled into my mother’s hometown for the holidays,” Pierce said.
Trump’s Justice Department aims to dismiss many of the remaining 130 desegregation orders across the South. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said the orders force districts to spend money on monitoring and data collection and that it’s time to “let people off the hook” for past discrimination.
But Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South, said the centers are vital because their services are free to districts.
“Some of these cases haven’t had any movement,” she said. “Districts are like ‘Well, we can’t afford to do this work.’ That’s why the equity assistance center is so key.”
Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South and a member of the Atlanta City Council, read to students during a visit to a local school. (Courtesy of Eshé Collins)
Her center, for example, works with the Fayette County schools in Tennessee to recruit more Black teachers and ensure minority students get an equal chance to enroll in advanced classes. The system is still under a desegregation order from 1965, but is on track to meet the terms set by the court next year, Collins said. A week after Friedman issued the injunction in the foundation’s case, Ruth Ryder, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs, told Collins she could once again access funds and her work resumed.
Research
As they entered the Department of Education in early February, one of the first moves made by staffers of the Department of Government Efficiency was to terminate nearly $900 million in research contracts awarded through the Institute for Education Sciences. Three lawsuits say the cuts seriously hinder efforts to conduct high-quality research on schools and students.
Kevin Gee from the University of California, Davis, was among those hit. He was in the middle of producing a practice guide for the nation on chronic absenteeism, which continues to exceed pre-pandemic levels in all states. In a recent report, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus said the pandemic “took this crisis to unprecedented levels” that “warrant urgent and sustained attention.” Last year’s rate stood at nearly 24% nationally — still well above the 15% before the pandemic.
Gee was eager to fully grasp the impact of the pandemic on K-3 students. Even though young children didn’t experience school closures, many missed out on preschool and have shown delays in social and academic skills.
Westat, the contractor for the project, employed 350 staffers to collect data from more than 860 schools and conduct interviews with children about their experiences. But DOGE halted the data collection midstream — after the department had already invested about $44 million of a $100 million contract.
Kevin Gee, an education researcher at the University of California, Davis, had to stop his research work when the Trump administration cancelled grants. (Courtesy of Kevin Gee)
“The data would’ve helped us understand, for the first time, the educational well-being of our nation’s earliest learners on a nationwide scale in the aftermath of the pandemic,” he said.
The department has no plans to resurrect the project, according to a June court filing. But there are other signs it is walking back some of DOGE’s original cuts. For example, it intends to reissue contracts for regional education labs, which work with districts and states on school improvement.
“It feels like the legal pressure has succeeded, in the sense that the Department of Education is starting up some of this stuff again,” said Cara Jackson, a past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, which filed one of the lawsuits. “I think … there’s somebody at the department who is going through the legislation and saying, ‘Oh, we actually do need to do this.’ ”
Mental health grants
Amid the legal machinations, even some Republicans are losing patience with McMahon’s moves to freeze spending Congress already appropriated.
In April, she terminated $1 billion in mental health grants approved as part of a 2022 law that followed the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The department told grantees, without elaboration, that the funding no longer aligns with the administration’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness and excellence in education” and undermines “the students these programs are intended to help.”
The secretary told Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in June that she would “rebid” the grants, but some schools don’t want to wait. Silver Consolidated Schools in New Mexico, which lost $6 million when the grant was discontinued, sued her on June 20th. Sixteen Democrat-led states filed a second suit later that month.
The funds, according to Silver Consolidated’s complaint, allowed it to hire seven mental health professionals and contract with two outside counseling organizations. With the extra resources, the district saw bullying reports decline by 30% and suspensions drop by a third, according to the district’s complaint. Almost 500 students used a mental health app funded by the grant.
A judge has yet to rule in either case, but Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and other members of a bipartisan task force are holding McMahon to her word that she’ll open a new competition for the funds.
“These funds were never intended to be a theoretical exercise — they were designed to confront an urgent crisis affecting millions of children,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “With youth mental health challenges at an all-time high, any disruption or diversion of resources threatens to reverse hard-won progress and leave communities without critical supports.”
Scores of speech therapists across the country erupted last month when their leading professional association said it was considering dropping language calling for diversity, equity and inclusion and “cultural competence” in their certification standards. Those values could be replaced in some standards with a much more amorphous emphasis on “person-centered care.”
“The decision to propose these modifications was not made lightly,” wrote officials of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in a June letter to members. They noted that due to recent executive orders related to DEI, even terminology that “is lawfully applied and considered essential for clinical practice … could put ASHA’s certification programs at risk.”
Yet in the eyes of experts and some speech pathologists, the change would further imperil getting quality help to a group that’s long been grossly underserved: young children with speech delays who live in households where English is not the primary language spoken.
“This is going to have long-term impacts on communities who already struggle to get services for their needs,” said Joshuaa Allison-Burbank, a speech language pathologist and Navajo member who works on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico where the tribal language is dominant in many homes.
In a written statement after this story published, a spokesperson for the association stressed that the proposed changes have not been finalized, and said that member feedback is currently under review.
“ASHA remains steadfast in our belief that all health care services should be non-discriminatory and address the needs of every individual,” the spokesperson added. She characterized the proposed changes as “an evolution, not a retreat,” and noted that person-centered care aims to ensure “clinicians are equipped to deliver services tailored to each person’s context, including their lived experience, language background, cultural identity, and home environment.”
A shift away from DEI and cultural competence — which involves understanding and trying to respond to differences in children’s language, culture and home environment — could have a devastating effect at a time when more of both are needed to reach and help multilingual learners, several experts and speech pathologists said.
They told me about a few promising strategies for strengthening speech services for multilingual infants, toddlers and preschool-age children with speech delays — each of which involves a heavy reliance on DEI and cultural competence.
Embrace creative staffing. The Navajo Nation faces severe shortages of trained personnel to evaluate and work with young children with developmental delays, including speech. So in 2022, Allison-Burbank and his research team began providing training in speech evaluation and therapy to Native family coaches who are already working with families through a tribal home visiting program. The family coaches provide speech support until a more permanent solution can be found, said Allison-Burbank.
Home visiting programs are “an untapped resource for people like me who are trying to have a wider reach to identify these kids and get interim services going,” he said. (The existence of both the home visiting program and speech therapy are under serious threat because of federal cuts, including to Medicaid.)
Use language tests that have been designed for multilingual populations. Decades ago, few if any of the exams used to diagnose speech delays had been “normed” — or pretested to establish expectations and benchmarks — on non-English-speaking populations.
For example, early childhood intervention programs in Texas were required several years ago to use a single tool that relied on English norms to diagnose Spanish-speaking children, said Ellen Kester, the founder and president of Bilinguistics Speech and Language Services in Austin, which provides both direct services to families and training to school districts. “We saw a rise in diagnosis of very young (Spanish-speaking) kids,” she said. That isn’t because all of the kids had speech delays, but due to fundamental differences between the two languages that were not reflected in the test’s design and scoring. (In Spanish, for instance, the ‘z’ sound is pronounced like an English ‘s.’)
There are now more options than ever before of screeners and tools normed on multilingual, diverse populations; states, agencies and school districts should be selective, and informed, in seeking them out, and pushing for continued refinement.
Expand training — formal and self-initiated — for speech therapists in the best ways to work with diverse populations. In the long-term, the best way to help more bilingual children is to hire more bilingual speech therapists through robust DEI efforts. But in the short term, speech therapists can’t rely solely on interpreters — if one is even available — to connect with multilingual children.
That means using resources that break down the major differences in structure, pronunciation and usage between English and the language spoken by the family, said Kester. “As therapists, we need to know the patterns of the languages and what’s to be expected and what’s not to be expected,” Kester said.
It’s also crucial that therapists understand how cultural norms may vary, especially as they coach parents and caregivers in how best to support their kids, said Katharine Zuckerman, professor and associate division head of general pediatrics at Oregon Health & Science University.
“This idea that parents sit on the floor and play with the kid and teach them how to talk is a very American cultural idea,” she said. “In many communities, it doesn’t work quite that way.”
In other words, to help the child, therapists have to embrace an idea that’s suddenly under siege: cultural competence,
Quick take: Relevant research
In recent years, several studies have homed in on how state early intervention systems, which serve children with developmental delays ages birth through 3, shortchange multilingual children with speech challenges. One study based out of Oregon, and co-authored by Zuckerman, found that speech diagnoses for Spanish-speaking children were often less specific than for English speakers. Instead of pinpointing a particular challenge, the Spanish speakers tended to get the general “language delay” designation. That made it harder to connect families to the most tailored and beneficial therapies.
A second study found that speech pathologists routinely miss critical steps when evaluating multilingual children for early intervention. That can lead to overdiagnosis, underdiagnosis and inappropriate help. “These findings point to the critical need for increased preparation at preprofessional levels and strong advocacy … to ensure evidence-based EI assessments and family-centered, culturally responsive intervention for children from all backgrounds,” the authors concluded.
Carr is a fellow at New America, focused on reporting on early childhood issues.
Contact the editor of this story, Christina Samuels, at 212-678-3635, via Signal at cas.37 or [email protected].
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North Carolina’s Democratic governor has vetoed two bills the Republican-led General Assembly passed targeting what lawmakers dubbed “diversity, equity and inclusion”; “discriminatory practices”; and “divisive concepts” in public higher education.
Senate Bill 558 would have banned institutions from having offices “promoting discriminatory practices or divisive concepts” or focused on DEI. The bill defined “discriminatory practices” as “treating an individual differently [based on their protected federal law classification] solely to advantage or disadvantage that individual as compared to other individuals or groups.”
SB 558’s list of restricted divisive concepts mirrored the lists that Republicans have inserted into laws in other states, including the idea that “a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist” or that “the rule of law does not exist.” The legislation would have prohibited colleges and universities from endorsing these concepts.
The bill would have also banned institutions from establishing processes “for reporting or investigating offensive or unwanted speech that is protected by the First Amendment, including satire or speech labeled as microaggression.”
In his veto message Thursday, Gov. Josh Stein wrote, “Diversity is our strength. We should not whitewash history, police dorm room conversations, or ban books. Rather than fearing differing viewpoints and cracking down on free speech, we should ensure our students learn from diverse perspectives and form their own opinions.”
Stein also vetoed House Bill 171, which would have broadly banned DEI from state government. It defined DEI in multiple ways, including the promotion of “differential treatment of or providing special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, nationality, country of origin, or sexual orientation.”
“House Bill 171 is riddled with vague definitions yet imposes extreme penalties for unknowable violations,” Stein wrote in his HB 171 veto message. NC Newsline reported that lawmakers might still override the vetoes.
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With diversity, equity and inclusion efforts facing scrutiny under the Trump administration, school districts and states looking to diversify their teacher workforces are in a precarious situation.
Nearly a month into President Donald Trump’s second term, for instance, the U.S. Department of Education slashed $600 million in “divisive” teacher training grants — specifically through the Teacher Quality Partnership Program and the Supporting Effective Educator Development Grant Program. The department said in February that those cuts were made to grants that “included teacher and staff recruiting strategies implicitly and explicitly based on race.” Advocates for the federal grants said the decision particularly impacted funding for programs aiming to improve teacher diversity in classrooms.
For years, there’s been a push for more policies to support the recruitment and retention of teachers of color as the nation’s K-12 public school student population grows more racially diverse and as teacher shortages persist. Advocates often point to research that shows when schools hire teachers who look like their students — particularly students of color — student achievement improves and disciplinary rates go down.
While research from the National Council on Teacher Quality found that teacher diversity slowly grew between 2014 and 2022, those findings also suggested that teachers of color are opting out of careers in education as teacher diversity lags behind the rate of the broader workforce.
But with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that repealed race-conscious admissions in higher education and the Trump administration’s ongoing push against DEI, some experts advise districts and states to be cautious when approaching teacher diversity efforts moving forward. On the flip side, advocates say the need for these initiatives remain.
A ‘scary’ time for teacher diversity initiatives
Before Modesto City Schools began its teacher workforce diversity partnership with California State University, Stanislaus, there was a “mismatch” in representation between students of color and teachers of color in its elementary schools, said Shannon Panfilio-Padden, an associate professor at the university’s college of education.
During the 2021-22 school year, elementary enrollment for students of color in Modesto City Schools could range from 60% in some buildings to as much as 98% in others. That’s compared to the range of 13% to 66% among elementary teachers of color in the district, said Panfilio-Padden, who helped oversee the partnership between the district and university. “What Modesto had been working on for years was diversifying their teacher workforce, but no matter what they tried, it wasn’t working.”
By improving collaboration and identifying workforce barriers with Modesto City Schools, CalState Stanislaus — which has a majority Hispanic student population — was able to double the number of candidates who are teachers of color, from 6 to 16, who entered the district’s classrooms between the 2021-22 and 2023-24 school years, said Panfilio-Padden.
At a time when such initiatives are being targeted at the federal level, Panfilio-Padden said “it can be scary.” But, she said, she’s dedicated to supporting her students, who are aspiring teachers from diverse backgrounds.
“We need teachers so desperately in California, and we need highly qualified teachers,” she said. Panfilio-Padden said the university can’t predict the amount of federal aid or state grant money that will be available to aspiring teachers, but “at the same time, when they continue to come to us with an enthusiasm to teach elementary kids, it just puts everything into perspective.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Massachusetts enacted the Educator Diversity Act in November 2024 as part of the state’s economic development package. The legislation looks to address barriers to recruiting and retaining educators of color by allowing multiple pathways for teacher certification, creating a statewide dashboard for tracking educator workforce diversity at the district level, and increasing uniformity in hiring practices to support candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.
Students of color make up more than 45% of public school enrollment in Massachusetts, while only 10% of teachers in the state are people of color, according to Latinos for Education, a nonprofit advocacy group that supported the Educator Diversity Act.
The Educator Diversity Act is “going to help all communities” and not just aspiring educators of color, because the legislation creates more equitable opportunities to enter the teaching profession — and that ultimately benefits everyone, said Jorge Fanjul, executive director for the Massachusetts chapter of Latinos for Education. If the law included a quota based on race, that would be discriminatory, he said, but that’s not the case here.
While Fanjul said he’s hopeful about the efforts to improve teacher diversity in Massachusetts, parts of the broader movement in the U.S. “may be wounded” because of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI policies.
Elsewhere, a 33-year-old Illinois state law aiming to boost teacher diversity, known as the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship Program, is being challenged in court by public interest law firm Pacific Legal Foundation, which claims the program discriminates against nonminorities. A motion to dismiss the case is still pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois.
Since the program’s beginnings in 1992, 13,000 scholarships have been awarded to aspiring teachers through the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship Program, said Bravetta Hassell, director of communications for Advance Illinois, an organization that supports the state’s scholarship program.
Applicants must be a minority student to receive the scholarships, which are “intended to help diversify the teaching pool and provide a supply of well-qualified and diverse teachers for hard-to-staff schools,” according to the program’s website.
Over the last decade, teaching candidates of color have jumped from 20% to 36% in Illinois, Hassell said. That’s not enough, considering over half of all K-12 public school students in the state are students of color compared to just 18% of the state’s teachers being educators of color, she added.
‘Tread carefully’
The lawsuit challenging MTI alleges that not allowing nonminority students to receive a scholarship on the basis of race is a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. For Erin Wilcox, senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, MTI is a pretty clear example of a government program that gives out a benefit based on race.
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based admissions practices in 2023, Wilcox said, courts are starting to implement a stricter standard for when the government can discriminate on the basis of race for many different programs.
The latest challenge against the MTI program “is one more example of how states have really got to take a hard look at their laws and start cleaning up their act” as they approach similar programs that promote teacher diversity, Wilcox said.
“The race-based programs, ones that specifically admit or exclude applicants based on their race, I think those are on a collision course with the U.S. Constitution. I think it’s unavoidable,” Wilcox said.
While schools “desperately” need teachers nationwide, Wilcox said, districts and states need to continue encouraging people to become teachers — but “you can’t do it based on the race of the person who’s applying for your program.”
Though there’s promising research on the importance of having a diverse teaching staff, districts should “tread carefully,” on teacher diversity initiatives, which are now increasingly at risk of potential legal scrutiny, said Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education policy think tank.
Districts have to make sure their policies and practices don’t discriminate against Black or Hispanic teachers, Petrilli said. While they seek to expand their pipeline to include those candidates, districts must also avoid discriminating against White or Asian teachers. Rather, he said, the district workforce strategy should be “opening the door to everybody.”
The point, Petrilli said, should be, “How can we get as close to a non-discriminatory approach and a non-biased approach as possible, and can that help us improve our diversity?”
