School Segregation Is On The Rise — And Trump Is Likely To Make It Worse

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When the Trump administration announced in April that it was dismissing the Department of Justice's decades-long effort to desegregate the Plaquemines Parish School District in Louisiana, the state's Republicans rejoiced.
'For years, federal judges have imposed unnecessary requirements that have cost our schools and our children tens of millions of dollars,' Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in a press release. 'Educational decisions should be made at the most local level and not by unelected, activist federal judges.'
In 1966, the DOJ sued Plaquemines in order to force the school district to racially integrate its schools. The court order required the district to bus Black children to all-white schools and banned it from discriminating against students or teachers on the basis of race. It was just one of many court orders that came in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that found that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional.
Though nationwide desegregation efforts proved to be a boon for Black student success and didn't harm white students, Republicans said the Louisiana order amounted to an imposition on local lawmakers and educators. The federal government now seemingly agrees, framing the 60-year-old mandate as a 'historical wrong.'
'Louisiana got its act together decades ago, and it is past time to acknowledge how far we have come,' Leo Terrell, senior counsel at the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. 'America is back, and this Department of Justice is making sure the Civil Rights Division is correcting wrongs from the past and working for all Americans.'
More than 100 U.S. schools are still under similar court orders to desegregate, and the Trump administration is reportedly considering dismissing more orders. The Justice Department did not respond to HuffPost's request for comment on ending desegregation orders.
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President Donald Trump's second term has been predicated on punishing his enemies and reshaping the country to reward the biggest promoters of white grievances. For conservatives, it's the perfect time to relitigate the idea that schools should be equal and accessible to kids of all identities.
Ending these court orders is just one tactic experts say the administration is likely to use to further that goal.
By threatening public schools with diversity initiatives, promoting 'school choice,' attacking efforts to make school discipline less racist and doing whatever he can to dismantle the Department of Education, Trump is on a path to make our modern school segregation problem worse.
'Certainly, the Trump administration is likely going to accelerate a process that's been going on for a while,' Sean Reardon, an education researcher and sociology professor at Stanford University, told HuffPost.
American schools are already more segregated today than they were at the end of the last century.
Throughout the 1960s, the Department of Justice adopted a strategy of suing school boards to force them to comply with Brown v. Board. These orders required schools to stop discriminating based on race and to allow Black students to enroll in previously all-white schools. Once schools could prove that they were no longer discriminating against Black students, the DOJ would dismiss their cases.
Scholars agree that the orders helped with racial integration, even though federal courts never explicitly defined what, exactly, would determine if a school had satisfied an order.
Graduation rates among Black students increased after schools were ordered to desegregate, as did their test scores, Rucker Johnson, a University of California, Berkeley economics professor, wrote in his 2019 book 'Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works.' Research from the National Coalition on School Diversity also shows that students of all races who attend racially diverse schools perform better academically and have better health and earnings outcomes in adulthood.
But between 1991 and 2009, the DOJ dropped 200 court orders — and in every instance, segregation began to slowly increase. Part of the issue is that school districts are based on neighborhoods, and many residential areas remain segregated thanks to federal policies from the 1950s and 1960s that precluded people of color from buying homes in certain communities.
School desegregation peaked in the U.S. by the 1980s, Reardon said, and then started to reverse.
'The country wasn't so focused on racial inequality and segregation,' Reardon said. 'I think there was some fatigue with the efforts.'
In the 1990s, the Supreme Court issued several rulings that made it easier for schools to be released from their required desegregation plans. This was followed by George W. Bush's DOJ encouraging schools to seek the dismissal of these orders. The number of dismissals dramatically increased between 2000 and 2007, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Only a handful of researchers have looked at the complete data on school segregation and what happened after the Department of Justice began ordering districts to integrate. But Reardon and other Stanford researchers found that once schools were released from their court orders, they became more segregated over the next decade.
Between 2012 and 2022, the percentage of white students attending public schools dropped from 51% to 44%. And in the fall of 2022, 42% of white children attended schools where at least three-quarters of students were white, according to Department of Education data. By contrast, only 30% of Hispanic students and 21% of Black students attended schools where their racial or ethnic group made up three-quarters or more of the student population.
The decades when the DOJ was actively ensuring school districts were desegregated made it clear that intervention from the federal government was crucial to ensure equal and racially diverse public schools. But this administration has instead supported policies that will exacerbate segregation.
Trump's dizzying array of education policies is unprecedented. While other Republican administrations have criticized the federal government's role in public schools and championed right-wing school policies like taxpayer-funded vouchers, no modern president before him has explicitly called for the end of diversity initiatives and targeted schools that have programs designed to ensure equal access for all students.
'There are just so many ways in which the actions the administration is taking are already exacerbating segregation and are going to make it worse,' Katrina Feldkamp, a senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, told HuffPost.
Schools have become a focal point for right-wing activists and Republican politicians looking to implement a conservative agenda nationwide. Their movement has manifested itself as a fight against the promise of a multiracial democracy that includes racially integrated and equitably funded schools. Conservatives have also attacked LGBTQ+ groups, especially trans children, and immigrant kids.
The Trump administration has meanwhile been promoting so-called school choice, the idea that parents should be able to send their kids to charter schools and private institutions at taxpayer expense.
'In celebrating the pivotal role that charter schools play to deliver high-quality options for students and families, I'm excited to share that the Trump Administration is making historic investments in the Charter Schools Program,' Secretary of Education Linda McMahonsaid last month in a press release. 'Not only are we proposing a future $60 million increase in the program budget, but we are also dedicating an additional $60 million in this year's funding.'
Deemphasizing public schools could have significant repercussions for some students.
'The administration's focus on school choice and vouchers poses a real threat here,' Feldkamp said.
School choice, she said, 'was originally implemented as a way to help white families who are opposed to desegregation flee public schools and create their own segregation academies.'
'We are sort of now seeing that play out here as there is a rush to give students 'school choice,'' Feldkamp added.
After the Brown v. Board decision, conservative government officials in the South provided school vouchers to white parents to send their children to private schools so they could avoid going to school with Black children. The meaning of school choice has evolved over time — the first charter school didn't begin operating until 1991 — but the result is often the same.
Research shows that charter schools make segregation worse.
'We've seen that in districts where the number of charter schools have grown, so has segregation,' Reardon said. 'That's partly because charter schools operate outside of any school district efforts to create integrated schools.'
Charter school enrollment jumped from 1.8 million to 3.7 million between 2010 and 2021, according to the Education Department. And a 2024 study by the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 59% of charter schools were 'intensely segregated,' meaning that at least 90% of the student body was from a minority racial background.
'The HuffPost is an irrelevant leftist publication that hires activist reporters solely to push hateful and divisive content,' Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said in an emailed statement in response to a question about whether the administration's priorities would exacerbate segregation. 'The President's push to expand school choice enhances educational freedom and opportunity for all families and gives parents, not the government, the keys to their child's success. Only the left would view that as racist.'
While it props up charter schools, the administration is also making good on its promise to dismantle the agency that oversees the nation's public schools.
One of Trump's biggest promises on the campaign trail was shutting down the Department of Education and 'returning education to the states.'
Conservatives have been fantasizing about dismantling the agency since it began operating in 1980. And now that conservatives are in the throes of a culture war centered on public schools, the GOP has never been closer to abolishing the agency.
Trump fired nearly half the staff of the Department of Education and then signed an executive order to begin the process of closing the agency in March. (Actually shutting down the department would require an act of Congress.)
No office was spared from the mass layoffs, including the Office for Civil Rights — the main avenue for students and their families to lodge complaints about civil rights violations, including race-based ones.
Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the administration must reinstate the laid-off Education Department employees. The government is challenging the ruling while staffers remain in limbo.
The Education Department did not respond to HuffPost's request for comment.
Though completely closing down the agency still seems unlikely, the Trump administration has been chipping away at the department.
First, there were the cuts to any contracts the administration could claim were connected to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or DEI. This led to the revocation of funds for researchers who study federal education data, which experts use to inform the public about how schools are doing — including information about race that could help shed light on segregation.
'Everything that we are able to know about how our education system is functioning or is not functioning is going to go dark in a lot of ways,' Feldkamp said. 'The literal statistics that the [Legal Defense Fund] uses to continue to hold school districts accountable in our school desegregation cases aren't going to be available.'
The LDF has filed a preliminary injunction in federal court to get the Department of Education to restore research grants.
The Trump administration has also gone after equity assistance grants, which fund programs that help school districts reduce discrimination in public schools.
The LDF, on behalf of the NAACP and other education groups, has filed a suit against the Department of Education for terminating the grants.
According to the lawsuit, one of the plaintiffs, the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, was able to assist more than 100 education agencies, including 17 school districts in New York that needed help reducing racially discriminatory discipline practices. Without this funding, they won't be able to continue.
'Ultimately,' Feldkamp said, 'their goal is to go back to a place where Black students don't have equal access to schools.'
Trump signed an executive order titled 'Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies' in April. The order claims that Obama-era guidance, which said that schools that suspended students of certain racial groups at disproportionate rates could be violating civil rights law, had left teachers afraid of disciplining students for fear of being labeled racist. It alleges that educators ignored and covered up discipline problems, which hurt all students.
'As a result, students who should have been suspended or expelled for dangerous behavior remained in the classroom, making all students less safe,' the order says.
On its face, the language appears to be race-neutral. But there's a mountain of evidence to show that Black students are disproportionately punished at school.
In 2018, the federal government found that Black students were being disproportionately disciplined. (Boys were also more commonly disciplined than girls, and students with disabilities were more often disciplined than those without.) Using the latest data available, the Government Accountability Office found that despite making up 15% of the public school population, Black students made up 39% of students who were suspended or expelled. In 2024, a GAO report focused on Black girls and had similar findings. Despite comprising just 15% of all girls attending public school, nearly 50% of the girls suspended were Black.
The underlying message of the Trump administration waving away racial disparities in school discipline rates hints at a more sinister message: Black students don't belong.
The school discipline order was similar to an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office that sought to end DEI across the federal government.
As part of that effort, the Department of Education issued guidelines to public education institutions in February, telling them they must 'cease using race preferences and stereotypes as a factor in their admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, sanctions, discipline, and beyond.'
The letter was vague on details but made very clear threats, including that schools' federal funding could be revoked.
The letter said that schools had just two weeks to end their 'illegal' DEI programming, prompting them to cancel programs they believed might run afoul of the new guidance. (In April, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from cutting the funds of schools that don't comply with anti-DEI policies.)
'By going after DEI, the administration is directly fighting and attacking programs that encourage desegregation,' Feldkamp said.
In Iowa, one school district withdrew from the University of Northern Iowa's African American read-in event, a celebration of Black authors that typically draws hundreds of students from across the state, and asked teachers to return the hundreds of books they had intended to distribute to students.
Officials in the Waterloo school district, which is majority nonwhite, feared they could lose federal funding if they allowed students to participate.
The Trump administration claims that anti-white racism is on the rise and is being ignored by public schools across the country — all while co-opting progressive language about civil rights.
'In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families,' Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, wrote in the February letter. 'These institutions' embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia.'
The LDF sued the Trump administration over its anti-DEI guidelines. The suit says the letter did not make it clear which programs the Trump administration considered 'DEI' and argues that it could force schools to end 'programs and policies that afford [Black students] equal educational opportunity.'
Disguising its agenda with the false premise that white students are being discriminated against on a systemic level shrouds what the administration's real end goal is.
'They can sort of erase the fact that these programs are really long-standing ones to fight this country's original sin of slavery and segregation,' Feldkamp said.
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