DEI Isn’t Dead

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) isn’t dead. States and schools are still holding tight to DEI, despite Trump administration directives.

At the top of the order, New York is defiantly standing against the Trump administration’s promise to pull federal funding from public schools over their DEI programs. One day after the Education Department (ED) sent the memo to education officials around the nation to confirm the elimination of DEI programs, Daniel Morton-Bentley, the deputy commissioner for legal affairs at the state education agency in New York, penned a stern response stating “we understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems ‘diversity, equity & inclusion.’” He continued, “But there are no federal or state laws prohibiting the principles of D.E.I.” Morton-Bentley also added that the federal government has “not defined what practices it believes violate civil rights protections.”

While many colleges and universities quietly scrub websites to hide their DEI practices and events—as well as eliminating former DEI departments and shuffling administrators and programs into other areas at their institutions under a new name—K-12 public schools are seemingly more threatened by the potential loss of federal funding. They are making their displeasure loudly known.

New York is not alone in its defiant response. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson stated that the city would take the Trump administration to court if their funding is pulled. Maine is currently suing the Trump administration for freezing federal funding after a weeks-long dispute over the state’s refusal to comply with current Title IX regulations.

This is all to say, we must be aware that states, schools, and professors are not currently, and will not, give up DEI practices in education easily.

The ED memo sent on April 3 asks K-12 schools to certify compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act along with responsibilities outlined in the Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA). For background, the 2023 SFFA decision was over a decade-long fight by the group Students for Fair Admissions—with support from the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and other like organizations—that sought to eliminate race-based discrimination in admissions. Harvard used a holistic admissions process to create a de facto quota of Asian students to achieve racial balancing. The evidence of discrimination was overwhelming and the Supreme Court eventually decided that the use of racial preferences in college admissions was unconstitutional.

Though the ED memo to K-12 school administrators references SFFA as part of its anti-discrimination certification, New York education officials have pushed back. SFFA makes race-based affirmative action admissions programs unlawful at colleges and universities, but does not address issues involving K-12 schools, says a New York Times article. “The state’s letter argued that the case did ‘not have the totemic significance that you have assigned it’ — and that federal officials were free to make policy pronouncements, but ‘cannot conflate policy with law.’”

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