The left-wing American education establishment is clutching its pearls at the thought of dropping its push for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology after the Department of Education threatened its federal funding, but the Trump administration is calling its bluff.
“The Department of Education will no longer allow education entities to discriminate on the basis of race,” Department of Education Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor told The Federalist. “This isn’t complicated. When in doubt, every school should consult the SFFA [Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard] legal test contained in the [“Dear Colleague” letter]: if an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates law.”
The Trump administration distributed a “Dear Colleague” letter last Friday telling schools to shut down their DEI programs for training, teaching, and hiring or face the loss of their federal funding. The memo uses the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action from SFFA to set up guidance for schools to shut down their racially discriminatory DEI programs that have “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.”
The Department of Education said that additional guidance on implementation is forthcoming.
However, as The Federalist reported, The School Superintendents Association (AASA), which represents the leaders of school districts across the country, sent a memo to its members to ignore the guidance.
Now, the entire state of Michigan appears poised to ignore the order, as state Superintendent Michael Rice said he has no plans to get rid of the state’s divisive DEI programming.
“MDE continues to support diversity in literature, comprehensive history instruction, and broad recruitment to Grow Your Own programs for students and support staff to become teachers,” Rice, who said the letter is under review, told Newsweek. “MDE disagrees that pre-K-12 programs that promote diversity representing all children, regardless of race, and inclusion of all children, regardless of race, inherently harm particular groups of children and are de facto violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Not everyone in Democrat-run Michigan agrees with Rice, as Nikki Snyder, a Republican who serves on the Michigan Board of Education, said she is excited to see tax dollars taken from the get-rich-quick-scheming DEI consultants and return them to educating children.
“I am looking forward to public education and our higher education systems being sent a very clear message: You are no longer allowed to teach our students that superiority and oppression is a racial quality rather than a human quality any person is capable of. It divides us and encourages discrimination,” she said.
But resistance to the Trump administration’s drive to end the DEI ideological capture of America’s education institutions is broader than just the AASA and Michigan — and it is sure to grow, as the entrenched education industrial complex attempts to regroup after the Trump administration has pressured it to reform and focus on students.
Other leeches in the American education establishment are also hyperventilating about the memo, as the Daily Caller reported. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Council on Education (ACE), and EdTrust are all in lock-step to resist.
EdTrust, an education DEI consulting firm, brought back the tired and failed messaging of the left during the first Trump administration, calling the moves to end discrimination “essentially Jim Crow 2.0.”
Likely fearing the spigot of consulting checks might dry up, EdTrust added that “this administration is instead leaning into the most primal and prejudice-based fears of a racist faction of Americans and enacting the same policies that were developed to subjugate black Americans.”
AAUP said, “We must vigorously oppose the assault on our education, research, healthcare, and jobs,” and it invited members to join it and the Higher Education Labor United union “throughout the winter and spring for mass actions to fight for an education system that serves all of us and a robust, inclusive democracy.”
“Trump and his cronies, through threats and intimidation, are dead set on returning to a world where they enjoyed unfettered preferential treatment,” AAUP wrote, apparently unaware of the irony, as the entire DEI regime is based on preferential treatment for certain races. “In the face of these assaults on education and civil rights, students and faculty nationwide are organizing in their communities. Join us. The way to confront those intent on dismantling our democracy is to join together in mass action.”
The AASA memo challenged the Trump administration’s willingness to enforce its guidance, saying that it does not amount to law, and ACE president Ted Mitchell has made the same argument, telling an audience of “5,000 stakeholders” that “overcompliance, anticipatory compliance, pre-emptive compliance, is not a strategy. The strategy needs to be much more considered, much more nuanced.”
The Department of Education Office for Civil Rights will need to open investigations into school districts and find their policies violative of civil rights law in order to revoke federal funding. The Trump administration has already launched some investigations based on its refocus on civil rights after the Biden administration’s destructive policies.
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.
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