How the DOJ is using civil rights law to attack school desegregation

In February, the Department of Justice joined a lawsuit against Los Angeles Unified School District brought by conservative activists, seeking to use the 14th Amendment to repeal a desegregation policy previously ruled unconstitutional.

The 1776 Project Foundation took issue with the school district’s “predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian or other non-Anglo” (PHBAO) designation for schools, which is used by the district to demark schools with a resident population that is more than 70% non-white.

The designation was rolled out as part of a 1976 desegregation program, which aimed at improving educational opportunities across the city’s schools. These majority non-white schools are subject to two programs that non-PHBAO schools are not: specifically, smaller class sizes and increased parent-teacher conference requirements. The difference in class size maximums varies by grade level, per school district data, and PHBAO schools are mandated to have two parent-teacher conferences per year.

Attendance at a PHBAO school is also used in admissions for Los Angeles magnet schools, which were initially established in 1977 as part of a court-ordered desegregation plan and have become a popular option for families. PHBAO designation is considered alongside factors like attendance at an overcrowded school and whether a sibling is attending the same school. By far the biggest factor in admission, however, is whether an applicant has matriculated from another magnet school and how long an applicant has been on the waiting list for a magnet school.

While a student’s race or ethnicity is not considered for admission to a magnet school and white students do often attend PHBAO schools, 90% of Los Angeles schools are designated as PHBAO, the lawsuit claims that the program is illegal for having any racially conscious policy.

“The LAUSD race-based policies violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause because they distribute benefits and burdens on the basis of race without substantive justification,” the lawsuit reads.

Aiden Buzzetti, the president of the group that brought the suit, told Salon in an interview that regardless of whether a policy is implemented as an attempt to address racial segregation, he believes that it is unconstitutional for the government to make a policy that considers race as a factor.

“You just cannot use race as a factor in your decision-making, full stop. We certainly believe it is unconstitutional,” Buzzetti said.

When asked what the 1776 Project Foundation would recommend as an alternative desegregation policy, Buzzetti said that there were already existing federal programs that allow schools to allocate more funds to low-income areas and that the government could use other proxies, like asthma or crime rates, but that it was not their responsibility to propose a new program.

“What we’re trying to do is just take this specific program and get rid of it. It’s not like there aren’t other options for the school district to allocate funding to students and schools and neighborhoods who might need it the most,” Buzzetti said. “We’re just arguing that any programs that allocate funding by race are illegal, so they already have alternatives. So I wouldn’t propose any new program, because they already have those tools.”

Robert Kim, the director of the Education Law Center, told Salon that this interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which would mandate race blind policies from the government, represents a turnaround from traditional interpretations of the Constitution.

“From a broad perspective, this is 180 degrees from the original understanding of the 14th Amendment and the direction and policies that many states and districts were pursuing in the years after the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954,” Kim said. “[There was an] understanding that in order for students to be treated equally in this country, we needed to ensure equal educational opportunity for those students, to end discrimination and to provide the resources and the support that students need to be successful.”

The problem is that, as it stands, Los Angeles schools are still falling short of the initial 1976 court order, which mandated the district take steps to alleviate the harms of segregation in schools. According to test scores, there are still wide gaps between racial groups in Los Angeles schools and, by most metrics, the school district is still extremely segregated.

A 2025 report from The Civil Rights Project found that Black, Latino and American Indian students were concentrated in schools with high rates of poverty and that school segregation in the district has been driven in part by the growth of charter schools. For reference, the report found that 59% of charter schools were segregated in 2019, compared to just 36% of magnet schools.

Tyrone Howard, a professor in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Salon that, while there is potentially a larger discussion to be had on how effective the current program has been in terms of desegregating schools, the current suit is part of “a racist distraction.”

“It’s all part of the anti-DEI movement. Anything that can be used as fodder for reverse racism is getting a lot of attention these days,” Howard said.

Howard also addressed the notion of using different proxies, like family income, to allocate funding instead of race, saying that, in the Los Angeles school district, there simply aren’t large groups of impoverished white families with children attending under-resourced public schools. This is why he suspects that the suit does not identify any of the non-PHBAO schools that the 1776 Project Foundation alleges are missing out on the standards required for PHBAO schools.

“I’m not a legal expert but the reality is this: If you were really concerned about educational equity, you would bring a suit that said kids living in these poor neighborhoods are not getting something that kids in these richer neighborhoods are getting,” Howard said.

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

He also situated the current suit within the context of the larger conservative movement, which has taken a special interest in claims of anti-white racism over the years. He referenced a recent suit against the Los Angeles district’s Black Student Achievement Plan.

The suit, brought by Parents Defending Education, a northern Virginia-based conservative group, alleged that the program was aimed at addressing historical inequities.

“What the program has never said is that it is for Black students only. Any student, regardless of their racial or ethnic background, may participate in these programs,” Howard said.

The fight over schools in Los Angeles is happening against a backdrop of the conservative legal movement’s push to redefine the 14th Amendment, according to Myron Orfield, a professor of civil rights and civil liberties law at the University of Minnesota. Orfield said that the end goal of the current conservative legal push is to leave states without any tools to directly address racial inequality and to direct resources reserved for addressing racial inequality towards addressing allegations of anti-white discrimination.

“It’s a big new step, but it’s part of a long-term process of destroying any kind of programs to deal with racial discrimination,” Orfield said.

Orfield noted that programs like the one in Los Angeles, though they are the product of legal orders mandating desegregation, are also indicative of a system in which efforts to integrate schools have failed and, in an attempt to remedy the situation, there were resources allocated to majority minority schools.

“It’s a remedy when you’ve given up hope for integration,” Orfield said.

Orfield said that the administration’s current fixation on allegations of anti-white discrimination is the product of wealthy donors and foundations that are obsessed with the idea that white people are disadvantaged in society.

“They’re feeling like the whole world favors minority people, but it’s not based on any facts, and it’s not true. But at this level, these think tanks that have jillions of dollars from really racist foundations and causes, they’re obsessed,” Orfield said. “They’re a bunch of wealthy foundations that are obsessed with discrimination against white people.”

The post How the DOJ is using civil rights law to attack school desegregation appeared first on Salon.com.