Trump administration moves to limit fixes for systemic racism in schools
[September 25, 2026]
By ANNIE MA
WASHINGTON (AP) — For decades, a key principle underpinned civil rights
enforcement in American schools: Not all discrimination was intentional.
Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might
unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding
went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and
Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that
received federal funding had an obligation to address it.
Under President Donald Trump's administration, that's no longer the
case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools
can use to address systemic racial injustice.
This summer, the Education Department rescinded a regulation that
allowed schools to gauge potential discrimination by comparing outcomes
across races, such as the racial breakdown of students in advanced
classes. Then, it issued a letter to American schools, emphasizing it's
illegal to consider race when crafting discipline policies — even if one
particular racial group ends up suspended or expelled more often.
At the same time, Trump's Justice Department has stepped away from many
school desegregation cases. In a news release Thursday, the department
boasted of successfully working through the courts to close more than 50
desegregation cases since Trump took office, with motions to dismiss in
the works in many other cases. Previous administrations had used these
federal court cases to hold schools accountable when students of color
had worse outcomes than white students — high rates of discipline, worse
school facilities or reduced access to extracurriculars and advanced
coursework.
While Trump's first administration deprioritized enforcing racial
justice, his current administration has gone further — threatening to
punish schools for any consideration of race in their policies and
practices.
To the administration, the practice of examining different outcomes for
particular groups of students, sometimes known as “disparate impact,”
was itself a form of racial discrimination.
“The Obama and Biden Administrations weaponized disparate impact by
effectively coercing schools to discipline students differently based on
race in order to engineer equitable disciplinary outcomes across racial
groups,” Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney said. "These
practices unfortunately led to unsafe classrooms and undermined student
learning."
Critics worry the administration's actions will make it easier to get
away with racial discrimination.
“When they talk about returning it to the states and making America
great again, they’re talking about returning to how it was before 1954,”
when school segregation was legal, said U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.
School discipline data had offered insights on discrimination
Since Trump's return to office, the administration has set its sights on
school discipline.
In May 2025, the president signed an executive order directing federal
agencies to stop looking for “ disparate impact," or policies that
appear neutral but result in outsized impact to one group over another.
Those policies had been examined for possible discrimination, regardless
of their intent.
In education, that analysis had most often been applied to school
discipline — especially to removing students from the classroom, such as
through suspensions, expulsions and referrals to law enforcement.
Federal and state data have long shown students of color, particularly
Black students, are more likely than their peers to be pulled from the
classroom for similar infractions. Research shows that students who are
suspended are more likely to become disengaged from school and to have
worse academic outcomes.
In 2021, the Education Department began investigating a complaint
alleging Black male students with disabilities in Denver Public Schools
were being disproportionately pushed out of the classroom. Progress on
the case halted after Trump took office in 2025.
Advocates had also filed the complaint with state authorities, who found
violations of civil rights laws and ordered the district to mandate new
training. Meanwhile, families have heard nothing from the federal
Education Department.
The silence gives school districts permission to continue with business
as usual, said Pam Bisceglia, executive director of Advocacy Denver,
which filed the complaints.
“I’d like to say that we have overcome and that marginalized communities
are enjoying equal protections. We see that, in fact, that isn’t true,”
she said.
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Jovonia Lewis poses for a portrait across from the Durham Board of
Education building on Monday, Sept. 21, 2026, in Durham, N.C. (AP
Photo/Matt Ramey)
Trump's administration has changed which cases are investigated
Under Trump's first administration, the Education Department
continued to investigate and resolve cases of racial discrimination
against minority students.
In 2018, the Education Department reached a settlement agreement
with Durham Public Schools in North Carolina, after examining
whether the district's discipline policies, or their effects, were
racially discriminatory. The investigation found Black students were
disproportionately given out-of-school suspension — especially in
instances involving subjective decisions on matters like
disobedience.
For a time, Jovonia Lewis, a parent and former Durham school board
member, constantly received calls about her son being kicked out of
the classroom. She was told he couldn’t sit still. But the federal
settlement agreement helped Black parents see their children's
experiences were not occurring in isolation, Lewis said.
“We knew our kids were being treated differently, but this data gave
us leverage,” she said.
The investigation had a significant impact in Durham, Lewis
recalled. The district adopted a new student code of conduct and
created an equity affairs office.
Under the Trump administration's new guidance, federal authorities
are unlikely to take up similar cases.
“The federal government has chosen to close its eyes to that way of
understanding discrimination,” said Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw
education civil rights under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden,
both Democrats.
The impact of the administration's changes will outlast Trump's
presidency, said Johnathan Smith, a former attorney in the civil
rights division at the Justice Department and a managing director at
the National Center for Youth Law. Once the administration changes
rules and regulations, future efforts to investigate civil rights
could be held up in court.
“They're building an infrastructure that says, ‘Not only are we
taking down these structures, but we are building in roadblocks to
make it very difficult for any future administration to change
course,’” Smith said.
Decades-old school desegregation cases are being closed
Across the South, the Justice Department has taken an interest in
closing cases of court-mandated school desegregation, arguing the
decades-old orders are outdated. But civil rights attorneys say the
impact of segregation continues to be felt today.
Courts have long maintained the passage of time is not enough to
rule that discrimination has passed, said Kelly Gardner, deputy
director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. To be
released from a desegregation order, schools have had to show that
they have removed the lingering effects of segregation to the extent
possible. That can involve assessing extracurricular offerings,
funding levels and the state of school facilities.
Now, the Justice Department is intervening to close cases, often
without taking account of those considerations, Gardner said.
In January, a federal court granted a request from the Justice
Department and the DeSoto Parish School Board in Louisiana to
release the small district from its desegregation order. In the
order, the district had allowed students to transfer out of racially
isolated schools, with transportation provided. As recently as 2024,
the order was used to ensure those students had equal access to
extracurriculars in their new schools.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, praised the
court decision for freeing the district from federal oversight.
“After 60 years of litigation and federal control, the elected
members of the DeSoto Parish School Board now have the full powers
of their office, as our Constitution has always intended,” Murrill
wrote in a social media post at the time.
A few months after the order was lifted, the school district amended
its policies. The district would no longer accept new applications
for transfers, and students in the transfer program would have to
return to their zoned schools once they finished the highest grade
at their current school.
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