Today, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division sought intervention in a lawsuit against the administrators of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) over the Predominately Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Other (PHBAO) Program. This program categorizes students by race and by the race of their neighbors in order to determine school funding and magnet school admissions. The lawsuit was brought by the 1776 Project Foundation, a nonprofit focused on public education.
“Treating Americans equally is not a suggestion — it is a core constitutional guarantee that educational institutions must follow,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “This Department of Justice will never stop fighting to make that guarantee a reality, including for public-school students in Los Angeles.”
“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,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “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.”
“Now in its sixth decade, LAUSD’s desegregation program has outlived its usefulness to the point of being unconstitutional,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California. “School districts must treat their students equally and no longer discriminate on the basis of race.”
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, notes that the PHBAO Program first separates everyone in the LAUSD area by race into either the “Anglo,” meaning White group, and everyone else. School neighborhoods with less than 30% Whites are treated as disadvantaged with “Predominately” non-White racial groups. Most schools are PHBAO in the majority Hispanic area served by LAUSD.
The United States’ complaint notes that LAUSD provides extra funding to the PHBAO schools to lower the student/teacher ratio by 5.5 students, and increase parent-teacher conferences. It also gives students wishing to transfer to a magnet program an admissions preference equal to that for an overcrowded school. LAUSD treats attending school with non-Whites as a disadvantage equal to attending an overcrowded school.
This case is brought by the Educational Opportunities Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
You can view the motion to intervene here and the proposed complaint here.
