The Los Angeles Unified School District is putting an end to a $120-million academic program designed to help Black students. Race will no longer be a factor in determining which students receive support.
The decision comes after a Virginia-based conservative group Parents Defending Education filed a complaint with the federal Office for Civil Rights against the Black Student Achievement Plan in July 2023. The group argued that the program was unconstitutional and violated 1964’s Civil Rights Act by providing education to students based on race. One of the group’s trustees, Edward Blum, also founded Students for Fair Admissions, a group that helped strike down affirmative action, according to The Los Angeles Times.
“The Los Angeles Unified School District is offering race-based programming for some students that is not open to all,” Parents Defending Education wrote in a post.
Defenders of the program praised it for yielding positive results. In 2021, the Board of Education founded the L.A. Unified Program intending to add counselors to help Black students and fund selected schools to enhance their curriculum and employee training.
“There’s a lot of historical and systemic inequities that, if we’re not going to address them, Black children are going to continue to fail,” Ebony Batiste, who teaches restorative justice at 74th Street Elementary School in South L.A. told the news outlet. “Sometimes I feel like every time we try, our hands are tied behind our back, and we’re not being allowed to help the children that need help.”
Others are critical of the complaint because it comes without concerns about specific issues tied to the Black community.
“The conservative groups would sit by idly when there are a disproportionate number of Black people in jails and prisons,” UCLA education professor Tyrone Howard said. “They’ll sit by idly when there’s large numbers of Black students who are misplaced in special education classrooms. They’ll sit by silently when there are large numbers of Black students who are not graduating from high school. But yet, when there’s a remedy, an attempt to somehow respond, to combat that, then all of a sudden, there’s this anger, and there’s lawsuits. That’s the part that disappoints. I just wish that we lived in a different political climate.”
The program is set to be restructured before being presented to the Office for Civil Rights. L.A. schools superintendent Alberto Carvalho says it will continue helping Black students and others with similar academic needs.
“Our solution is one that preserves the funding, the concentration of attention and resources on the same students and same schools,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “We were able to reformat the program without sacrificing impact.”
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