Exclusive: DOJ Stops Race-Based Funding for Federal Student Aid

The Department of Justice issued a legal opinion Thursday officially stating that federal education aid cannot be tied to race-based initiatives, such as increasing racial diversity or artificially altering racial balance.

The slip opinion, obtained by The Federalist, addresses specifically the Department of Education’s Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP), which the Department of Justice says “facially classifies by race and is motivated by the racially discriminatory purpose of changing the racial composition of K–12 schools.”

The MSAP was created by Congress to support magnet schools, allowing the secretary of education to give local agencies funding for the schools. The program has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars toward this end, and the Department of Justice recognizes that magnet schools “provide meaningful opportunities for school choice, and foster academic excellence and innovation within the public school system.”

{snip}

The parameters for program eligibility are also explicitly racial, and require that participating organizations are “part of an approved desegregation plan” that is “designed to bring students from different social, economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds together.” Right now, there are 60 active MSAP grants across school districts in 18 states, 52 of which are implementing voluntary plans, and eight of which are implementing court-ordered plans.

However, as the opinion noted, the U.S. Supreme Court has made recent rulings on the unconstitutionality of such explicit racial plans in both Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Louisiana v. Callais. “The Supreme Court explained that ‘[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,’” the opinion states, quoting Callais, which itself quoted SFFA.

The opinion pointed to a 2017 $10,121,928 grant to Napa Valley Unified School District (NVUSD), which set a goal of “reducing supposed Hispanic/Latino isolation by ‘at least 2 percentage points per year.’” In 2023 the Department of Education issued a $14,981,002 grant to Ypsilanti Community Schools (YCS) for transitioning four schools to magnet schools. YCS proposed a marketing strategy for recruitment to achieve its “racial balances” and eliminate “Black student isolation.”

{snip}