Is Trump ending federal enforcement of school desegregation?
President Trump has gone out of his way to endorse racism and other forms of bigotry with high profile immigration raids and detentions as well as his efforts to destroy diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher and public education and the corporate world.
Now, it looks like an end to desegregation enforcement in public education could be next.
The Guardian news site recently reported that the Trump Justice Department was ending a consent decree in a Plaquemines Parish, La., school district that has been under a desegregation order since the Johnson administration in the 1960s.
According to The Guardian, the Justice Department still has about 135 desegregation cases on its docket, most of which are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Many of these cases date back to the1960s’ civil rights era when President Johnson and the federal courts were clamping down on school districts trying to find ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation order.
Now, the Trump administration is suggesting those old cases are obsolete, and court-approved enforcement orders are no longer necessary. The Louisiana school district did not have to prove it was still complying with the old consent decree. Instead, the Justice Department simply worked with the Louisiana state attorney general’s office to agree on the dismissal.
Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, said the decision “signals utter contempt for communities of color by the administration and a lack of awareness of the history of segregation that has plagued our nation’s schools.”
“Even though we are 71 years after the Brown vs. Board (of Education) decision, schools of this country remain more segregated today than they were back in 1954,” Smith added. “The fact that the administration is kind of wholeheartedly ending these types of consent decrees is troubling, particularly when they’re not doing the research and investigation to determine whether or not these decrees really should be ended at this point.”
The years following the Supreme Court’s desegregation order also marked the introduction of private school vouchers, which were used by segregationists to pay the way for white students to attend so-called segregation academies, which eventually were outlawed by federal courts.
Interestingly, vouchers are surging now. Yielding to the demands of Gov. Greg Abbott, the Legislature enacted Texas’ first voucher bill this year, and at the urging of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the first federal voucher program was included in Trump’s budget bill recently enacted by Congress.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s civil rights division said the dismissal of the consent decree in the Louisiana case was part of “getting America refocused on our bright future.”
It sounds more like another significant step toward returning our country to its dark, racist past.
Consent decrees force schools to desegregate. The Trump administration is striking them down.
