The lawsuit said the Department of Education’s guidance violates free speech protections.
The American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association sued the U.S. Department of Education on Feb. 25 over a letter warning that schools could lose federal funding if they did not cease their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs within 14 days.
In the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland, the plaintiffs said the Education Department’s Feb. 14 letter violates the First and Fifth Amendments. They asked the judge to declare the policy unconstitutional and bar federal officials from enforcing the directive.
In the letter, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights within the department, condemned what he described as “overt and covert racial discrimination” in K–12 schools and universities, adding that proponents of such “discriminatory practices” have attempted to further justify them under the banner of DEI over the past four years.
In doing so, they have smuggled “racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline,” Trainor wrote. He warned that schools had two weeks to stop any practice that treats people differently because of their race while vowing that the department would “vigorously enforce the law” and take “appropriate measures” to assess compliance.
The letter was sent to the departments of education in all 50 states, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The American Federation of Teachers is one of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions while the sociological association is a group of about 9,000 college students, scholars, and teachers.
They said the letter violates free speech protections provided under the First Amendment by forcing schools to teach only the views supported by the federal government. The letter also violates the Fifth Amendment because the directive is so vague that schools won’t know what practices cross the line, the lawsuit stated.
“The overbreadth and vagueness of the law, and the content-based restrictions it places on speech and expression, will force plaintiffs’ members to choose between chilling their constitutionally protected speech and association or risk losing federal funds and being subject to prosecution,” the complaint read.
The letter “radically upends and re-writes otherwise well-established jurisprudence,” the plaintiffs stated, pointing to Trainor’s justification for the new nondiscrimination obligations: a Supreme Court decision banning the use of race in college admissions (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard).
Department ‘Attempting to Establish New Legal Regime’
In his letter to schools, Trainor said the ruling from the nation’s highest court applies more broadly to all federally funded education. “At its core, the test is simple: If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law,” he wrote in the letter.
