California and other states Friday sued the Trump administration over its directive forbidding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in K-12 public schools — or risk immediate loss of federal education funds.
The lawsuit from California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 18 other state attorneys general was filed a day after a Trump administration deadline for state officials to collect certifications from every school district in the nation confirming that all DEI efforts had been eliminated.
In its interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Trump administration believes that DEI initiatives amount to illegal discrimination.
California, like many other states, refused to certify its compliance with the requirements, arguing that there is no lawful or practical way to do so given the U.S. Department of Education’s “vague, contradictory and unsupported” interpretation of Title VI, Bonta said.
In the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, Bonta and the coalition seek to bar the department from withholding any funding based on what the plaintiffs consider unlawful conditions.
A representative from the Los Angeles Unified School District did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bonta said in a statement that the department is “unapologetically abandoning its mission to ensure equal access to education with its latest threat to wholesale terminate congressionally mandated federal education funding.”
“Let me be clear: The federal Department of Education is not trying to `combat’ discrimination with this latest order,” the AG said. “Instead, it is using our nation’s foundational civil rights law as a pretext to coerce states into abandoning efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion through lawful programs and policies. Once again, the president has exceeded his authority under the Constitution and violated the law.”
The department provides California with $7.9 billion in congressionally mandated financial support each year for a wide variety of needs and services related to children and education, Bonta said.
The funding includes financial support to ensure that students from low-income families have the same access to high-quality education as their peers, provide special education services, recruit and train highly skilled and dedicated teachers, fund programming for non-native speakers to learn English, and provide support to vulnerable children in foster care and without housing, according to the AG.
As a condition of receiving these funds, state and local education agencies provide written assurances they will comply with Title VI, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin. California has consistently and regularly certified its compliance with Title VI and its implementing regulations, Bonta said.
Bonta is leading a multi-state coalition in filing the lawsuit along with the attorneys general of New York, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts and Minnesota, among other states.