States and school districts resisting a U.S. Department of Education ultimatum regarding diversity, equity and inclusion got a temporary reprieve Thursday. Two federal judges — one in New Hampshire and another in the District of Columbia — blocked the department’s ability to withhold federal funding from those that didn’t sign on to its interpretation of non-discrimination laws or agree to end what officials called “impermissible” DEI programs.
A third judge in Maryland suspended for now a Feb. 14 “dear colleague” letter warning districts against racial diversity efforts. The deadline to sign a form certifying compliance was Thursday.
States and districts are “no longer under the immediate threat” of losing funds if they “continue to offer long-standing lawful programs or don’t sign” the form, said Katrina Feldkamp, assistant counsel at the Legal Defense Fund. Representing the NAACP, the law firm is among several groups, including unions, school districts and advocacy groups, involved in three separate lawsuits over the department’s anti-DEI guidance.
In a statement, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers — part of the Maryland case — called the court’s ruling “a huge win for students, families and educators.”
The department’s follow-up Q&A document on Feb. 28 appeared to soften officials’ stance on practices it considers illegal, saying cultural and historical observances were acceptable as long as all students were welcome to participate. But the certification requirement took a firm tone, cautioning states that they could face substantial financial penalties if they sign it and are then found to be in violation.
“The court finds that threatening penalties under those legal provisions without sufficiently defining the conduct that might trigger liability violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on vagueness,” Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in her oral ruling granting a preliminary injunction. The department’s documents, she said, “placed a particular emphasis on certain DEI practices without providing an actual definition of what constitutes DEI or DEI practice.”
At the time of publication 12 states, including Arizona, Arkansas and Montana, and the District of Columbia, had signed the certification. Twenty-two, including California, Michigan and New Mexico, declined to sign, and 17 either hadn’t announced their decision or did not respond to calls or emails from The 74. Madi Biedermann, spokeswoman for the Education Department, said she didn’t know if officials would share the full count of states complying. She didn’t respond to a request for comment on the court rulings.
Signing the form indicates compliance with Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin, as well as the department’s view of a 2023 Supreme Court ruling against racial preferences in higher education admissions.
State chiefs who didn’t sign argued that the Education Department didn’t clearly define DEI and ignored proper procedures for collecting such information. Overall, the documents have left leaders bewildered over whether they stand to lose millions in federal funds. In Denver Public Schools, for example, roughly $36 million in Title I funds for high-poverty schools and another $20 million for special education services are at stake. Like state chiefs in several other blue states, Colorado’s Susana Córdova declined to sign the document.
“I think all districts across the country are forced to grapple with this question of ‘What would you do without it?’ ” said Chuck Carpenter, chief financial officer.
Title I funds in his district, Colorado’s largest, cover salaries for school social workers, help to reduce class sizes and support interventions for students who are behind academically.
“These are very much on-the-ground expenses,” he said. “This doesn’t get caught up in the bureaucracy. This is for real kids and real people.”
Several GOP state chiefs welcomed the department’s message. Arizona state Superintendent Tom Horne jotted down, “Thank you for fighting for our Constitution and laws!” along with his signature. Oklahoma chief Ryan Walters posted a video of himself at his desk signing the form.
“No DEI in Oklahoma schools,” he said. “We will talk about merit and American exceptionalism, and we’ll have the best school system possible, thanks to President Trump.”
While some state and district leaders likely viewed the form as a “box to check,” others may see it as “provocation,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations.
“The department’s shifting guidance in recent months has created a lot of confusion in the field,” she said. “It’s not always clear whether this is a legal compliance issue or a political messaging moment.”
Even some critics of DEI agree. Steven Wilson, a senior fellow at the free market-oriented Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research in Boston, argues that many schools, including high-performing charter networks, went astray by embracing anti-racist teaching approaches.
He pointed, for example, to author Tema Okun’s argument that “worship of the written word” is evidence of white supremacy and framing math word problems around social justice issues.
“These teachings are enormously destructive,” said Wilson, who founded the Ascend charter school network in Brooklyn, New York. “I would be hard pressed to think of a more damaging message to impart to teachers of Black and brown children than that the worship of the written word is whiteness.”
But Wilson views the department’s threat to federal funding as equally harmful. “The audacity” of tying the compliance form to funding for programs that serve students in poverty and those with disabilities, he said “has to be vigorously contested.”
‘Historically underserved’
Title I, the biggest federal education program, totals over $18 billion. Part of the 1960s War on Poverty, it has “really been a cornerstone of federal funding in K-12 for the better part of a century,” said Jess Gartner, founder of Allovue, a school finance technology company that’s now part of PowerSchool. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, currently funded at $15 billion, came a decade later in 1975.
Officials can’t withhold those funds with “a wave of the hand and a strike of the pen” or because “someone won’t sign a form,” Gartner said. “There is a process for reporting, investigating and determining that discrimination has actually occurred.”
In 2023, under former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the department withheld federal funds from Maine for not meeting state testing requirements. But that was after two years of being out of compliance, and officials pulled a quarter of the Title I funds the state could reserve for administrative costs — not the money that goes to schools.
The Trump administration has demonstrated that it will abruptly cancel funding that has already been approved by Congress. That’s why finance officers like Carpenter in Denver are on edge about how the department will respond to states that didn’t sign the form.
Title I funding supports about half of the Denver district’s 207 schools, where immigrant and non-English-speaking parents especially rely on liaisons like Boni Sanchez Florez. He helps them access after-school classes, mental health services and low-cost internet. But Florez also encourages them to take leadership roles and speak up about issues that affect their children, like school closures.
“It’s hard enough for them to walk in a building with a staff that is predominantly 80% white. How do you build that trust in a community that doesn’t trust the system?” asked Florez, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a child. “If I’m in my dad’s shoes 30 years ago, I would want people to reach out to me.”
Nearby in Jeffco Public Schools, Colorado’s second largest district, roughly 100 staff members are directly paid with Title I funds, said Tara Peña, chief of family partnerships and community engagement. They include three “family ambassadors” who work out of a mobile welcome center — a customized bus that hosts enrollment fairs, book giveaways and what Peña called “goodwill events.”
The welcome center staff signs families up for Medicaid or free lunch programs and teams up with other community groups to distribute school and hygiene supplies.
“A loss in federal funding would be very destructive and be very impactful to the supports and the services that we provide to our most vulnerable students,” Peña said. “The students who’ve been historically underserved would continue to be the ones that would be harmed.”
‘Four years?’
The potential cuts to funding also come as districts across the country are finalizing their budgets for the upcoming school year, with federal funds in mind. Before McMahon announced the certification requirement on April 3, most had already issued contracts for staff for this fall.
In California, which receives over $2 billion in Title I funds and almost $1.6 billion from IDEA, the deadline to issue any layoff notices was March 15.
That means districts would still be obligated to pay employees whose salaries come from those sources “whether they get funding or don’t,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state agency responsible for financial oversight of districts. “Districts did not contemplate such a loss before the March 15 layoff window.”
Districts in Michigan, another state that declined to sign the form, are in the same predicament. For now, the Detroit Public Schools Community District — where roughly 25% of the budget comes from federal sources — has committed to not letting any employees go. But Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer, said that could just be a temporary solution if the department fully cuts Title I.
“Maybe we can bridge two years with our fund balance. But four years? There’s no way,” he said. “It will mean school closures. It will mean reduced services for our kids and walking back the intervention programs.”
With a student poverty rate of more than 80%, the nearly $125 million Detroit receives in Title I funding pays for counselors, social workers, and art and music teachers, as well as high school administrators who are focused on keeping ninth graders on track for graduation.
For LaQuitta Brown’s son Kermari, a 7 year old with autism, art has been especially important. He struggled to speak until last year, but he could communicate with his mother by drawing pictures, Brown said. Through special education, he receives speech and occupational therapy. His mother also depends on a mobile vision screening program for his checkups.
“He wouldn’t be where he would be without those services,” she said. “It takes a village, especially when you have a child needing special attention.”
Title I also supports high-dosage tutoring in Detroit, one of the reasons, Vidito said, why the district outperformed most other large, urban systems in a national study from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Last school year, the district also saw greater gains in reading than the state as a whole.
“We are seeing results,” he said. “We have committed to educating all kids, but if we start to defund education, then we’re stepping back from that commitment.”
Most right-leaning think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, welcome the department’s certification requirement and its interpretation of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision.
That opinion didn’t mention K-12 schools, but it has “broad implications for the use of racial preferences in public education services at the K-12 and postsecondary levels,” said Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “The majority opinion and supporting opinions deal with rooting out racism writ large from education.”
But Wilson at the Pioneer Institute said the AFT lawsuit is “one of those relatively rare moments” of agreement he has with AFT President Randi Weingarten. She said the anti-DEI directives would hamper schools’ efforts to teach accurate history, including the harms of slavery and persecution of minority groups.
“If that is what [the department] has in mind as a federal prohibition, that would be devastating.” he said. Trump, is “claiming, rather flamboyantly, to devolve education back to the states while announcing this unprecedented intrusion into what schools and districts may teach.”