The Trump administration threatened on Thursday to withhold federal funding from public schools unless state education officials verified the elimination of all programs that it said unfairly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion.
In a memo sent to top public education officials across the country, the Education Department said that funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students, known as Title I funding, was at risk pending compliance with the administration’s directive.
The memo included a certification letter that state and local school officials must sign and return to the department within 10 days, even as the administration has struggled to define which programs would violate its interpretation of civil rights laws. The move is the latest in a series of Education Department directives aimed at carrying out President Trump’s political agenda in the nation’s schools.
At her confirmation hearing in February, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools should be allowed to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But she was more circumspect when asked whether classes that focused on Black history ran afoul of Mr. Trump’s agenda and should be banned.
“I’m not quite certain,” Ms. McMahon said, “and I’d like to look into it further.”
More recently, the Education Department said that an “assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”
Programs aimed at recognizing historical events and contributions and promoting awareness would not violate the law “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination,” the department wrote.
“However, schools must consider whether any school programming discourages members of all races from attending, either by excluding or discouraging students of a particular race or races, or by creating hostile environments based on race for students who do participate,” the Education Department said.
It also noted that the Justice Department could sue for breach of contract if it found that federal funds were spent while violating civil rights laws.
The administration’s view of those laws, including anti-discrimination requirements, was first raised as a potential condition for public school funding in a letter from the department on Feb. 14, two weeks before Ms. McMahon was confirmed.
The letter indicated that the administration plans to enforce a Supreme Court decision in 2023 that declared race-based affirmative action programs were unlawful. That ruling did not address related issues in K-12 schools, but the department made clear in the letter that the administration was interpreting the Supreme Court’s decision “more broadly.”
“At its core, the test is simple,” wrote Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department. “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.”
His letter drew on a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers, the American Sociological Association and Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group, that has asked a federal judge to pre-emptively block the administration from withholding funding from schools. The plaintiffs argued that the threats in the letter would violate the academic freedom protected by the First Amendment and was so vague that it would breach the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process.
“No one’s life is being made better by these unlawful and unprecedented threats against America’s public education system, its educators and students,” said Skye Perryman, president and chief executive officer of Democracy Forward, said on Thursday of the lawsuit. “Threatening teachers and sowing chaos in schools throughout America is part of Trump’s war on education.”
Government-downsizing efforts led by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a top adviser to Mr. Trump, has said that it canceled 70 grants in the Education Department for D.E.I. training programs worth $373 million.
In its first 11 weeks, the Trump administration has begun civil rights investigations into Denver Public Schools over an all-gender restroom in one high school, and into the state public education systems in California and Maine over policies aimed at prioritizing the safety of transgender students over requirements from unwanted disclosures to their parents.
Simultaneously, Mr. Trump has insisted that the decisions about educating the nation’s schoolchildren are best left to the states. Mr. Trump has signed an executive order to begin dismantling the Education Department, which has drawn multiple lawsuits citing federal law that only Congress can shutter the agency.
The federal government accounts for about 8 percent of local school funding, but the amounts vary widely. In Mississippi, for example, about 23 percent of school funding comes from federal sources, while just 7 percent of school funding in New York comes from Washington, according to the Pew Research Center.
Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government, called for transferring Title I programs to the Department of Health and Human Services and phasing out the federal funding stream over a 10-year period.
“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Mr. Trainor, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.”
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