The Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) surrounding its Predominately Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Other (PHBAO) Program. According to the filing, the program discriminates against students on the basis of their race and the race of their neighbors in order to weigh school funding.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, explains that the program separates everyone in the district into an “Anglo” group and another group for non-white students. Neighborhoods with less than a 30% white population are “treated as disadvantaged with ‘Predominantly’ non-White racial groups,” the DOJ explained.
In the initial filing, plaintiffs argued that schools obtaining PHBAO status receive benefits such as “greater school funding to hire additional teachers such that the PHBAO schools have a student-teacher ratio that is roughly 5.5 fewer students per teacher than in comparable non-PHBAO schools” and “the right to have two parent-teacher conferences per year to ‘allow parents to monitor the academic and social development of students and to involve parents in the educational processes.'” Schools with the PHBAO program also boost magnet admissions.
“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,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “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.”
