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”.
“Treating Americans equally is not a suggestion – it is a core constitutional guarantee that educational institutions must follow,” Bondi said in a statement. “This Department of Justice will never stop fighting to make that guarantee a reality, including for public-school students in Los Angeles.”
The LAUSD educates nearly 377,000 students. Nearly 73% of those identify as Latino, 7% Black, 3.5% Asian and 10% white. If a school has a student body population that is more than 70% non-white, it is given a designation known as PHBAO, or predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian or other non-white.
The lawsuit says more than 600 schools in the LAUSD are classified as PHBAO schools, while 100 are not.
Schools with a PHBAO designation are eligible for programs to provide additional support to minority students, including smaller class sizes and at least two parent-teacher conferences per year. The difference in class sizes, according to the lawsuit, is a maximum of 25 students per teacher in a PHBAO school compared to an average of 34.5 at a school without the designation.
“In PHBAO schools, parents have a greater opportunity for involvement in their child’s education,” the lawsuit reads. “The LAUSD channels opportunities, preferences, funding, and outreach primarily to specific racial groups, while systematically excluding or failing to allow other students who similarly could benefit from the same favorable academic support.”
The district said it could not comment on the current case as it remains before the courts. But a spokesperson maintained it continued to focus on equal access education for all students.
“Because this matter involves pending litigation, we are unable to comment on the specifics,” the spokesperson told the Guardian. “However, Los Angeles Unified remains firmly committed to ensuring all students have meaningful access to services and enriching educational opportunities.”
Dr Tyrone Howard, a professor of education at UCLA, said the latest complaint echoed others targeting schools in the city by activists emboldened by an amenable Trump administration.
“Los Angeles is a majority minority district, so much of the conservative argument has been that this has been reverse discrimination or reverse racism towards white students,” Howard said. “In Los Angeles of all places, to me, that is really mind-boggling, because there aren’t really pockets of schools that are predominately made up of white students that are underserved.”
“I think LA is just the wrong tree to bark up.”
The LAUSD began working on efforts to address segregation in 1976 after a series of court battles, with the state supreme court ultimately ordering the district to take steps to alleviate the harms of segregated schools. Recent data shows the school district is falling short of academic goals, but test results indicate students of color also have wide gaps in results when compared to white students.
Howard compared the latest legal challenge by conservative groups to another in 2023 after a conservative group in Virginia filed a federal civil rights complaint targeting a program meant to help Black students, known as the Black Student Achievement plan. At the time, the group – called Parents Defending Education – claimed the LAUSD had offered race-based programming for some students that wasn’t “open to all”.
The school district overhauled the program in 2024, saying it would open the $120m program to other students regardless of race.
Howard said the achievement program was meant to create opportunities to support Black students and other students throughout the district, but quickly drew the ire of conservative groups who said it amounted to reverse racism. The program, he noted, had already been linked to positive trends for Black kids, including increased attendance, more students in AP and honors classes and better engagement with Black parents.
“There were some positive trends that were affecting Black students, but that didn’t seem to matter to these groups,” he told the Guardian. “It’s racist because you’re fine when Black students are suffering and underperforming, you’re okay then. But when there are programs that support Black students and have positive outcomes, wait a minute, that’s unfair, that’s unjust.”
“We’re OK with Black students failing, but if there’s anything to help Black students, that’s different.”
Activist groups have filed similar suits in recent years, particularly after the US supreme court, under a conservative supermajority, ended race-conscious admissions in higher education across the country in 2023. The ruling ended decades of precedent, concluding longstanding admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the constitution’s equal protection clause.
A similar case against race-conscious education is under way in Hawaii, after a group called Students for Fair Admissions filed a challenge saying a private school system meant to educate Native Hawaiians unfairly preferences those without Hawaiian ancestry.
Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind that effort in Hawaii, said in an email he was confident the Los Angeles case will be decided in favor of the plaintiffs, adding he believes “racial preferences like these are unfair and illegal”.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s civil rights division, defended the agency’s intervention in the LAUSD case, saying the district was wrong in its treatment of diverse students.
“Los Angeles county students should never be classified or treated differently because of their race. Yet this school district is doing exactly that by providing benefits that treat students – based on their race – as though they have learning disabilities,” Dhillon said in a statement on Wednesday. “Racial discrimination is unlawful and un-American, and this civil rights division will fight to ensure that every LAUSD student is treated equally under the law.”
But members of the LAUSD school board disagree.
“Treating students the same in the face of unequal conditions does not create the equality the justice department claims to seek; it perpetuates inequity, injustice, and delusion. Investing in students who have been denied opportunity is not discrimination,” Tanya Ortiz Franklin, a school board member who represents LAUSD district 7, said. “It is how we fulfill the promise of public education.”
Howard said he ultimately believes the lawsuit will not help diverse students.
“It doesn’t help, in fact it hurts,” he said. “It will hurt students of color, the very groups of students who are supposed to be protected by these policies.”
“They essentially want to eliminate any type of program to help historically underserved groups.”
