Trump Administration Gives Ohio Education Institutions Two Weeks To Cut DEI or Risk Losing Funding
STATEWIDE - In a “Dear Colleague” letter submitted last Friday, the executive branch is given Ohio public schools and universities until the end of the month to remove DEI initiatives for items such as school admission or risk losing federal funding.
In the letter, Craig Trainor, Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights United States Department of Education, writes on how the public institutions have used racial information to make decisions in items such as admissions for many years, acknowledging the longstanding practice of policies such as affirmative action and DEI.
“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,” the letter said. “These institutions’ embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia. For example, colleges, universities, and K-12 schools have routinely used race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming”
Traitor additionally outlines the current administration’s opinion of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which it was revealed Harvard has been discriminating against students in admissions on the basis of race.
“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions,” The letter read. “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent…All educational institutions are advised to: (1) ensure that their policies and actions comply with existing civil rights law; (2) cease all efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race by relying on proxies or other indirect means to accomplish such ends; and (3) cease all reliance on third-party contractors, clearinghouses, or aggregators that are being used by institutions in an effort to circumvent prohibited uses of race. Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law may, consistent with applicable law, face potential loss of federal funding.”
The move comes after the U.S. Department of Education canceled $600 million in grants for educator training programs that promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Some of these initiatives guided teachers to ‘interrupt racial marginalization and oppression of students.’ Other programs under the grant funded initiative promoted an “abolitionist pedagogy” a term coined by Bettina L. Love. The goal is to apply a “critical race lens” to classrooms and encourage teachers to organize marches and boycotts against their colleagues perceived as “racist, homophobic, or Islamophobic.”
According to a study published by Parents Defending Education, the U.S. Department of Education has spent around $1 billion on various DEI-related initiatives. This includes approximately $490 million on DEI hiring efforts, $343 million on DEI programming, and $170 million on DEI-related mental health programs.
