Since the 1950s, educational equity has been a positive goal our society has worked to embed in our institutions and expand across the states. President Trump’s Department of Education has, however, made “equity” a tainted word.  School districts can lose federal funding if their programs are designed to serve vulnerable groups of students or if their teachers fail to comply with vaguely defined laws that prohibit topics touching on equity.  “Equity” has now been buried the in the middle of the catch phrase “DEI,” where most of us have stopped thinking about its meaning much at all—except as part of that thing public schools now have to avoid or lose federal funding.

A lot of us have spent the past year trying to figure out precisely how to define “equity” as it is used in the Trump dialect of American English. I think the Brookings-Brown Center on Education Policy’s Rachel Perera does the best job of defining what the Trump administration means when it uses the term “equity”:  “In just one year, the Trump administration has orchestrated a radical overhaul of education civil rights enforcement—unmaking decades of civil rights progress in the process… The current administration has refocused the agency’s limited resources almost exclusively on three issues: sex-based discrimination rooted in the provision of protection of transgender students’ rights; reverse racial (or ethnic) discrimination, where any efforts to promote DEI are recast as discrimination against white (and/or Asian) students; (and) discrimination against Jewish students, where allegations of antisemitism—some more legitimate than others—are used to initiate sweeping investigations to address longstanding conservative complaints about higher education.”

In her definition, Perera might also have included a reversion to “states’ rights”—what the U.S. Department of Education continually defines as its goal: “returning education to the states where it belongs.”  While the Civil Rights Movement and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty sought to offer an equal chance to students whose states had, for generations, permitted segregation and unequal access to education, the Trump Department of Education seeks to end the federal oversight and compensatory funding designed to overcome generations of historical inequity under “states’ rights.”

Our society has not yet ever achieved educational equity.  Only a few states have truly equitable school funding formulas. And because there is always a required local school finance contribution that each school district must produce and our metropolitan areas remain highly segregated by economics, rich suburbs can always impose higher local taxes than poor cities and rural areas.

In their recent update of public school finance across the states, the Albert Shanker Institute’s  Bruce Baker, Matthew DiCarlo, and Mark Weber describe what remains widespread public school inequity: (U)nequal opportunity is universal, with higher-poverty districts funded less adequately than lower-poverty districts… (S)tates can and should ‘raise the floor’ for higher-poverty districts and narrow these gaps with targeted state aid… We find that 37 percent of white students attend districts with negative adequacy gaps, compared with 75 percent of African American students and 62 percent of Hispanic students. In other words, African American students are about twice as likely as their white peers to attend school in a district with below-adequate funding, while Hispanic students are almost 70 percent more likely to do so, and Native American… students are 50 percent more likely. Similarly, African American students are over 3 times more likely than white students to attend chronically underfunded districts….”

Although we have certainly never achieved universally equal educational opportunity despite the federal government’s provision of funding for Title I and other programs, equal opportunity was always something to which we aspired until the Trump era.  Our society has continued to make progress toward equitable schooling. But it seems that in the Trump era, when the “equity” has been turned into a pejorative, federal rhetoric and new regulations tell us we are not even supposed to try anymore.

Last week, Chalkbeat‘s Matt Barnum and Lila Altavena reported on one example of how our new Trump era works: “At least three states have taken steps to restrict undocumented high school students’ access to dual enrollment and career-technical education programs… These moves come as efforts to limit educational funding for undocumented immigrants ramp up nationwide. They build on controversial guidance from the Trump administration that restricted federally funded preschool and adult education programs to citizens and legal residents. But these state actions are particularly striking because they chip away at protections based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe decision, which requires public schools to serve all students, including those who lack legal permission to be in the country.”

Chalkbeat’s reporters explain one new development last summer: “In July of last year, the Trump administration issued new interpretations of a 1996 federal law that restricted certain immigrants’ access to welfare programs.  Trump’s changes sought to go further, by blocking undocumented immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, adult education, and postsecondary education programs. In its legal notice, the administration… said it believes Plyler does not protect programming that goes ‘beyond providing a basic public education,’ suggesting that undocumented students might not have access to the full slate of services offered in many public schools. The change targeted career-technical education programs that often involve partnerships between school districts and community colleges.”

Barum and Altavena mention programs in Iowa and Georgia that deprive undocumented students’ access to specific programs, but the focus of their investigation is on Virginia, where the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction sent an e-mail warning labeled “URGENT” to school superintendents across the state: “To continue to receive federal career-and-technical education funding, known as Perkins, school districts would have to promptly sign an ‘attestation’ that ‘non-qualified aliens’ are ‘not provided or receiving services funded by the program.’ ”  Virgina’s state school superintendent was trying to protect a $32.5 million Perkins grant for the current school year.

In a webinar, the Virginia school superintendents’ association provided legal guidance: “Scott Braband, the group’s executive director, said during the meeting that there was some legal argument against signing but recommended that districts do so…. He emphasized that funding that was at stake.”  The majority of school districts, 120 in total, signed; seven abstained. After officials in Loudoun County Schools refused to sign the “attestation,” the district lost $150,000 in federal Perkins funding.

Chalkbeat reports that Governor Glenn Youngkin’s state school superintendent, Emily Anne Gullickson explained: “Schools should only spend taxpayer money on students as intended… Virginia was unwilling to put federal funds at risk.” After Abigail Spanberger replaced Youngkin as Virginia governor and after Chalkbeat investigated the situation, Barum and Altavena report: “This week, Holly Coy, chief of staff at the Virginia Department of Education, said the agency ‘has determined that submitting the attestation is no longer a necessary requirement.’ She said the state was still determining the logistics for releasing money to districts that had not signed.”

The Chalkbeat reporters conclude: “The chain of events in Virginia shows the compromises school districts were willing to make to keep federal money flowing, as well as the ways in which student rights are dependent on states’ partisan make-up.”

The compromises involved in this particular situation involved collecting immigration status data from families which is not permitted under Plyler v. Doe and a related court decision.  And, of course, Virginia denied equitable access for immigrant students to a federally funded program in which all the other students were able to participate.

The denial in Virginia of access to federally funded career-tech programs undermined equity as we all defined it before the Trump administration began developing exclusionary federal rules and using federal funding to bribe state officials and school administrators to forget the original purpose of those programs.