The Guardian - For decades, the Los Angeles Unified School District has classified its schools based on the proportion of enrolled students who aren’t white.
In a city where more than two-thirds of residents identify as Hispanic, Black or Asian, that meant a vast majority were found to have extraordinarily diverse student bodies. And in an effort to combat segregation, the school district has afforded those diverse schools with smaller class sizes and other benefits.
But last month, a conservative group sued the school district, saying the decades-old program has become a mechanism of “overt discrimination against a new minority: white students”.
That group, called the 1776 Project Foundation, hopes to end the program and “vindicate the American ideal of racial equality”.
“These policies are not just unfair – they’re unconstitutional,” Aiden Buzzetti, the president of the 1776 Project Foundation, said in a statement in January. “What began as a temporary measure to address segregation has become a rigid system of racial favoritism that excludes thousands of students from equal opportunity.”
And on Wednesday, the case was bolstered by the Trump administration. The Department of Justice, under attorney general Pam Bondi, said this week it agreed. The agency’s civil rights division filed to intervene in the case, saying students in LA “should never be classified or treated differently because of their race”.
No comments:
Post a Comment