“We don’t think the court order is relevant anymore to the present day, and it is currently inflicting present day harms,” said Aiden Buzzetti, the president of the 1776 Project Foundation.
A conservative group has filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles, claiming that a decades-old policy designed to end segregation is itself discriminatory.
According to The New York Times, the policy dates to the 1970s. At the time, Los Angeles’s public school district was the second-largest in the country—and under an active court order to desegregate and improve learning conditions for non-white students.
The city’s policy offers benefits and concessions, including smaller classroom sizes, at schools where enrollment is predominately Hispanic, African-American, or Asian. Most schools in the district meet the criteria to receive benefits. In court documents, attorneys for the 1776 Project Foundation said that the end-result of the policy is that white students in predominately white districts are provided “inferior treatment and calculated disadvantages.”
“This is the most blatant example of racial discrimination by a major school district in this country,” 1776 Project Foundation founder Ryan James Girdusky told The New York Times.
The Times notes that a 1963 lawsuit led to Los Angeles’s current desegregation policy.
The city, for instance, agreed to implement a new busing program; it also promised to redirect more resources to “racially isolated schools” that could not be desegregated. These schools were eventually termed “predominately Hispanic, Black, Asian, or other non-Anglo” schools.
Today, more than 600 schools in the district qualify for benefits, while fewer than 100 do not.
Predominately Hispanic, Black, Asia, or other non-Anglo schools receive other tangible benefits. For example, qualifying schools have “student-to-teacher rations of no more than 25 to 1, compared with nonqualifying schools, where the ratio may be as high as 34 to 1. Students at qualifying schools also receive extra points when applying to the district’s selective magnet schools.”
“We don’t think the court order is relevant anymore to the present day, and it is currently inflicting present day harms,” said Aiden Buzzetti, the president of the 1776 Project Foundation.
The lawsuit argues that, as a direct result of the desegregation policy’s continuing enforcement, the city’s school district “channels opportunities, preferences, funding, and outreach primarily to specific racial groups, while systematically excluding or failing to allow other students who similarly could benefit from the same favorable academic support.”
“The District’s purpose is to create a racially-dictated environment in these programs and to give preferential treatment to certain students because of their race,” it says.
District officials have since declined media requests for comment.
“Because this matter involves pending litigation, we are unable to comment on the specifics,” a district spokesperson told USA Today. “However, Los Angeles Unified remains firmly committed to ensuring all students have meaningful access to services and enriching educational opportunities.”
Sources
Los Angeles school policy discriminates against White students, lawsuit says
White Students Hurt by L.A. Desegregation Policy, Lawsuit Says
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