Nation’s Second Largest School District Revises Race-Based Grant Program

In August, the nation’s second-largest school district announced a major policy shift that caused the soon-to-be-unemployed minds at the Los Angeles Times editorial board to collectively explode last month. Why?

Because in the wake of a federal civil rights complaint filed by Parents Defending Education in 2023, the U.S. Department of Education forced the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to open up its $120 million Black Student Achievement Plan tutoring program to all students with academic need – no longer conditioning participation on skin color alone.

Read that again: a public school system – underwritten by public tax dollars – is no longer allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. In 2024.

The horror!

Just what was this program, though? Depending on a learner’s skin color, totally different courses were offered; for example, during the 2020-2021 school year, students of color were given exclusive resources including a “Black Cultural Arts Passport,” “STEM Makerspace Labs,” and “Parent Workshops and Community Fairs.” Students of other racial backgrounds, however, were left out of these learning opportunities altogether. Change black to white and this system is something the KKK would applaud.

How, exactly, was such an obviously illegal program able to take root?

Look no further than AFT/NEA affiliate the United Teachers Los Angeles, which bragged that “as part of our last contract fight, we successfully pushed the district to codify BSAP into our 2022-25 contract, winning agreements for more resources, staffing, and professional development for BSAP schools.”

To be clear, the program hasn’t been shuttered; as Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told the Times, “Our solution is one that preserves the funding, the concentration of attention and resources on the same students and same schools … We were able to reformat the program without sacrificing impact.”

Yet far too many see the end of the race-based program – which should be considered a civil rights victory –as a defeat, exposing their own support for racial discrimination in K-12 schools. Students protested at an October school board meeting, while an online campaign demanded not only the expansion of the program but also a formal apology.

Sure, excluding students from educational programming based on race is – and has been! – illegal since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and immoral since… forever. Yes, proficiency scores for all children of all races in LAUSD are below the national average. And yes, the Supreme Court ruled in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Man, that pesky Constitution and its insistence on “equality before the law!”

LAUSD’s revision of the race-based grant program frees up the $120 million in funding for use among needy students or those suffering from genuine socioeconomic disadvantages – of whom there are many. In 2023, more than half of California students were unable to meet grade-level reading standards, setting them up for a lifetime of failure. It would be far more beneficial to students if LAUSD’s grant was directed towards actually improving subject matter proficiency for all students – and now, it can be. This is a momentous achievement coming from LAUSD, which has an otherwise shameful track record of centering racial differences in nearly every student interaction.

Much to the chagrin of DEI activists, the program was revised in a way that brings it into compliance with federal antidiscrimination law – and not simply given a cosmetic lift, as so many similar programs receive when they are challenged outside of court.

As the saying goes, “the price of eternal liberty is vigilance” – and in Los Angeles and other cities, ensuring that the program doesn’t backslide will be an ongoing effort. In an interview with The 74, University of Southern California education professor Julie Slayton noted that “They’ll take away the language of ‘Black,’ … But it doesn’t have to change, profoundly, the way that they’re thinking about the distribution of these resources and the schools that will receive them.” Meanwhile, the much-aggrieved LA Times editorial board asserted, “There are grounds to defend the program, even in California, which bans affirmative action in the public sector. … government agencies are constitutionally allowed to use ‘race-conscious remedies’ to make up for past race-based discrimination. District leaders certainly should be able to do this.”

But remember: this complaint was resolved by a Biden Administration Office for Civil Rights – which has loudly and clearly telegraphed its support for identity politics over the past four years but still found LAUSD’s program to be a bridge too far. An incoming Trump Administration is likely to have far less tolerance for taxpayer-funded discrimination in America’s public schools. Let the administrators beware.

This article was originally published by RealClearEducation and made available via RealClearWire.