The Education Department slammed an Associated Press story that accused the Trump administration of dismissing minority students.
The article, titled “Trump’s Education Department is backing away from addressing civil rights for Black students,” argued that “efforts to address deep-rooted inequities for students of color are being cast as discriminatory against white students.”
Where previous Departments of Justice “pressed schools to desegregate” and the Department of Education “worked to promote equal opportunity and held schools accountable for racial bias,” the AP claimed that the Trump administration is reversing these efforts.
“Civil rights lawyers describe the Republican administration’s actions as a complete inversion of legal history,” the article claimed.
“It’s literally flipping the purpose of civil rights law on its head, not just harming Black students and students of color, but entire school communities,” Michael Pillera, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It’s unmoored from the actual history of our country and untethered to the reality of life in this country.”
The article went on to criticize the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“This headline is inaccurate and dangerous. It’s typical of @AP to cast ED’s important civil rights investigations as black vs. white issues when we see students of ALL races struggle academically,” the Education Department wrote on X. “To allocate resources disproportionately to students of one race at the expense of others is not only a violation of civil rights law, but an infringement upon the basic fairness to which all students are entitled.”
