Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Justice expanded its footprint in K-12 Wednesday, joining a race discrimination lawsuit against Los Angeles Unified School District and launching investigations into three Michigan school districts over sexual orientation and gender ideology.
- In its intervention in the LAUSD lawsuit, which challenges a district integration plan, the Justice Department said the school system is "operating a system of racial spoils" and that its desegregation program has "outlived its usefulness to the point of being unconstitutional."
- Additionally, the agency launched Title IX investigations into three Michigan school districts, including Detroit Public Schools Community District, to determine whether the districts taught content in any pre-K-12 class related to "sexual orientation and gender ideology," whether they offered parental opt-outs, and whether they gave transgender students access to bathrooms and locker rooms aligning with their gender identities.
Dive Insight:
While the Justice Department has independent authority to investigate civil rights violations in education even without U.S. Department of Education referrals, its involvement in K-12 issues has expanded under the second Trump administration.
Under the Biden administration in 2023, for example, it entered into a resolution agreement with Case Western Reserve University after launching its own Title IX investigation.
"What may feel different now is the visibility or frequency, and perhaps the type of investigations, not the underlying legal authority," said Kayleigh Baker, senior consultant at TNG Consulting, in an email to K-12 Dive. TNG Consulting provides civil rights expertise to school districts.
Last year, the Education Department began routinely referring civil rights investigations to the Justice Department after giving districts and states shorter timeframes — sometimes 10 days — to sign onto proposed resolution agreements.
In April, the two agencies also announced a joint Title IX Special Investigations Team, shifting some civil rights investigations and enforcement from the Education Department to the Justice Department. That team was specifically created to enforce the separation of transgender students from girls’ and women’s athletics teams and spaces in schools and colleges.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said following that announcement that "there’s a new sheriff in town."
The Justice Department's string of Wednesday announcements invoked civil rights laws and protections for White and cisgender students.
The LAUSD lawsuit joined by the Justice Department on Wednesday was originally filed last month by the 1776 Project Foundation, a conservative nonprofit focused on public education. It challenges an integration program focused on schools with resident populations that are 70% or more Hispanic, Black, Asian or other non-Anglo.
Those schools get funding to support class size reductions and are also required to hold two parent-teacher conferences during the school year, which plaintiffs said is discriminatory against White students.
"Sixty years have passed, and the majority racial group in LAUSD has been Hispanic for decades. Nevertheless, LAUSD's desegregation plan carries on with no end in sight," the Justice Department said in its complaint. "The era of race-based educational spoils systems has long since passed."
The day prior, the Justice Department also ended a 60-year-old desegregation court order for Tennessee’s Dyersburg City Schools. The agency said in a Tuesday press release that the district “no longer operates as a segregated system" and that “the federal government has no legitimate reason to continue monitoring" it.
