New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin is already anticipating litigation against the Trump administration over its campaign to end diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. He’s just imploring parents and educators to head off the legal clash before it affects millions of families in his state.
“I don’t want to get to the point where schools are actually getting the letter saying losing funding, and we have to litigate it, because this is not something we should have to debate in this country,” Platkin told NOTUS days before a March 1 deadline imposed by the federal Department of Education for schools to end programs that run afoul of the administration’s ban on DEI. “You have the Department of Defense canceling Black History Month but the White House celebrating it. So was the White House violating the policy? … To me the answer is yes.”
The Trump administration has ordered schools that receive federal funds to end programs aimed at providing assistance to students based on race — or risk losing grants — pivoting off the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that ended most affirmative action in college admissions.
But education lawyers and school administrators have said the wording of the order isn’t clearly defined and does not detail the exact kinds of initiatives that would put federal funds at risk. A Feb. 14 letter from Craig Trainor, the Department of Education’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, specifically said schools that “eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity” would be in violation, for example, but also broadly warned against “less direct, but equally insidious” programs. No one exactly knows what those are, and some have wondered if long-standing programs like Black History Month or racial or ethnic affinity-group celebrations might run afoul of the White House.
The stakes couldn’t be higher for some of the most vulnerable students in the education system, Platkin said. New Jersey public schools receive around $1 billion from the federal government annually, around $460 million of which is so-called Title 1 funding authorized by Congress to improve educational opportunities for low-income students. Another $430 million or so is known as IDEA funds, which Congress authorizes to help provide an equal education for students with disabilities. If those funds were disrupted during a protracted legal battle with the federal government over what exactly qualifies as DEI, Platkin said, services would be disrupted right along with them.
“This is not normal. We’ve never had an administration threaten every single family with special needs that they’re going to lose their services based on vague statements [the Trump administration] cannot even define,” Platkin said.
Platkin led a suit joined by fellow Democratic attorneys general filed in the opening hours of the Trump administration aimed at taking on the White House plan to end birthright citizenship. It was one of several similar suits that led to judges across the country ordering the administration policy shift to stop. But the effects of that legal fight were felt in immigrant communities across the country, with confusion over legal status and access to services disrupting lives and showing the limitations of legal action as a backstop to Trump — lawyers cannot act before something has happened, and even when they do, administration disruption can continue during legal proceedings once it has begun.
Platkin is hoping to avoid that reality for families relying on special-needs-education programs funded by the federal government as the clock ticks down on the anti-DEI letter sent to educators across the country.
The New Jersey Democrat says parents and educators should express their concerns to lawmakers, in the hopes of heading off a clash between school leaders and the Trump administration that could leave hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for special education in limbo as the White House roots out “racial indoctrination” at public schools.
The pathways to litigation are obvious, Platkin said, but parents need to pay attention now before it gets to that state. “We’ve got to make sure people understand the harms that could come,” he said.
New Jersey’s Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
The uncertainty has already led to a roiling debate among lawyers in the education space over how to respond. One firm publicly posted a memo last week warning education decision-makers to “avoid over- or under-reacting” to the letter, basically suggesting they wait and see what happens. Another large firm posted guidance to higher education leaders under the heading “this is not a drill.”
Trump’s Department of Education said the letter is crystal clear.
“While additional guidance is forthcoming, this isn’t complicated,” Trainor told NOTUS in a statement. “When in doubt, every school should consult the [Students for Fair Admissions] legal test contained in the [Dear Colleague letter]: ‘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.’”
Platkin says wording like that, coupled with President Trump’s Jan. 29 executive order aimed at “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” should be taken at face value by school leaders, suggesting laws like New Jersey’s ordering “instruction on diversity and inclusion in an appropriate place in the curriculum” for the state’s public school students will lead to a protracted legal fight over funding that could leave those most reliant on programs funded with federal dollars in the lurch.
As with other lawsuits that have been successful, Platkin said he expected legal action from his office to ask a judge to stop the White House from unilaterally ending funding for education programs already authorized by Congress.
New Jersey is prepared to go to court, he said. But he hopes the funding threat gains political traction before that happens. He acknowledged that an esoteric school-policy letter not even in effect yet may have trouble breaking through in the deluge of adminstration actions.
“This whole idea of flooding the zone, it drives me nuts,” Platkin said. “All it really means is that they’re going to do a whole bunch of illegal things at once and hope to sneak a couple past the goalie. Well, that’s not going to happen.”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro is a reporter at NOTUS.