On February 27, the Trump administration released a new Department of Education website that allows people to report their school districts for participating in training or content related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This action followed a previous Executive Order and a “Dear Colleague” letter that also targeted DEI efforts in public schools, colleges and universities.
These online reporting portals, whether about equity in education or access to gender-affirming health care or other issues, are often spammed with joke and parody submissions, and that seems to be happening with the Department of Education website already. Most Americans are unsupportive of programs that encourage neighbors, colleagues and family members to report on each other to the government, finding them far too reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.
Even so, this tactic has been a mainstay of right-wing politicians in recent years, as it achieves several of their goals: legitimizing the biased accusations of racist and anti-LGBTQ+ organizations against public schools; providing additional fuel for disinformation campaigns; and identifying schools and universities as potential targets for high-profile legal and political attacks.
Their overarching goal is to create a climate of fear and intimidation, as several national educators and civil rights attorneys noted in a recent Brookings Institute webinar. The Trump administration is deeply over-extended in legal battles already, and the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, which has been understaffed for decades, has now lost or fired so much of its staff that it is barely functioning. The Trump administration has little capacity to enforce these guidelines broadly across the country, leading us to believe that they are likely to target a few universities and school districts in highly publicized cases. In this climate of fear and repression, many schools are already curtailing their efforts to be inclusive and welcoming for diverse populations, because they don’t want to be the school that gets targeted.
In my work with school districts across the South and across the country, the overwhelming majority of students, educators, and parents all agree that their districts have not done nearly enough to promote equity and inclusion. Members of conservative groups are already being mobilized to report school districts for whatever DEI efforts may be in place, inadequate as they may be.
Ironically, the best way to protect your school district from being targeted by the Trump administration is to use the Department of Education website to report the inadequacy of your district’s equity and inclusion efforts.
Before the Department of Education can investigate a school district, they must review all of the reports about that school district. If half the reports about your district say it’s doing too much DEI work, and the other half say that it’s not doing enough, then your district does not make an appealing target for an investigation. If your district is investigated, then the conflicting reports will become part of the investigation, and can even give your district grounds for a counter-lawsuit against bias in the Department of Education.
At a broader level, submissions to the anti-DEI reporting site are public records (with identifying information removed). Watchdog organizations will be tracking the responses, and if a sizable number of complaints are demanding more DEI efforts from schools, in opposition to the explicit purpose of why the reporting form was created, then that will make the news and be another setback for the Trump administration.
If you believe that your local school district could be doing more to make schools and the school curriculum more inclusive, safe, and welcoming for all students, then we encourage you to complete the Department of Education reporting form by clicking here. The form is very short, but you can file as many reports as you like.
Examples of points you might make:
- Lack of representation of LGBTQ+ identities, people of color, people with disabilities, and non-Christian faiths in literature, history, social studies, and other parts of the curriculum
- Failure to effectively address longstanding racial disparities in educational outcomes, discipline, and graduation rates
- Failure to adequately invest time and funding for educator training, so that staff and faculty can be prepared to work with culturally diverse student populations
- Failure to enforce anti-bullying protections for LGBTQ+ students, students of color, students with disabilities, immigrant students, and non-Christian students
We also encourage you to share this feedback with your school district directly. Ask them to strengthen rather than abandon their equity and inclusion efforts, and organize with others in your community who have the same goals.
The struggle to create public schools that serve and support all students has gone on for generations, and racist, anti-LGBTQ+ politicians are again blocking the schoolhouse door. We hope that you’ll join us in advocating for the inclusive and equitable schools that all our students deserve.
[ssba-buttons]