Wisconsin Public Radio reported that State Superintendent Jill Underly has announced that the state will not comply with a letter from U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in which she directed states to agree with the Trump administration about stamping out diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trump wants to eliminate DEI, which would involve reversing compliance with existing civil rights law. In addition, although McMahon may not know it, she is violating federal law by attempting to influence curriculum and instruction in the schools.
Thank you, Superintendent Underly!
WPR reported:
Wisconsin school districts won’t comply with a directive from the Trump administration to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs until districts have more information.
On Wednesday, state Superintendent Jill Underly asked the U.S. Department of Education for clarification on both the intent and legality of an April 3 directive that schools sign a letter acknowledging they’re following the government’s interpretation of civil rights laws.
This school year, Wisconsin received about $216 million in Title I funds. About $82 million of that money went to Milwaukee Public Schools.
Underly said the request from the Department of Education potentially violates required procedural steps, is unnecessarily redundant and appears designed to intimidate school districts by threatening to withhold critical education funding.
“We cannot stand by while the current administration threatens our schools with unnecessary and potentially unlawful mandates based on political beliefs,” Underly said in a statement. “Our responsibility is to ensure Wisconsin students receive the best education possible, and that means allowing schools to make local decisions based on what is best for their kids and their communities.”
On Feb. 14, the U.S. Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter giving educational institutions 14 days to eliminate diversity initiatives or risk losing federal funding.
At that time, the state DPI issued guidance to school districts encouraging a “measured and thoughtful approach, rather than immediate or reactionary responses to the federal government’s concerns.”
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has not clearly defined what the administration considers a violation of civil rights law. The February letter said institutions must “cease using race preferences and stereotypes as a factor in their admissions, hiring, promotion, scholarship.”
In a related document addressing frequently asked questions about how the administration would interpret Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the agency said: “Many schools have advanced discriminatory policies and practices under the banner of ‘DEI’ initiatives.”
The document went on to say that schools could engage in historical observances like Black History Month, “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination.”
Dr. Azar Nafisi, author of the mega-bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, will speak at Wellesley College on April 15 at Wellesley College at 4 p.m. in the Jewett Arts Center. Admission is free.
Please mark the date on your calendar. She is speaking in a lecture series that I endowed several years ago. The lecture will be available eventually on the archive website of the College.
The book, which was a sensation upon its publication for its depiction of life under the mullahs, has recently been made into a film.
This review of the film was published by The Atlantic and written by Arash Azizi. At present, the film can be seen only at film festivals.
He wrote:
The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). And in 2024 came Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, who is Israeli, and adapted from a book by an Iranian author, with an almost entirely Iranian cast. The film premiered at the Rome Film Fest last year and is now starting to tour the United States.
Anyone old enough to remember cultural life at the beginning of this century will know the book. Azar Nafisi’s memoir came out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and quickly developed a cult following. A reviewer for The Nation confessed to missing a dental appointment, a business lunch, and a deadline just because she couldn’t put the book aside.
Literary scholars—Nafisi is an English professor—are not known for their page-turning thrillers. But Nafisi’s story and prose are captivating. She’d gone to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution in the hope of putting her American education to use by teaching English at a university. Instead, she was hounded out of the classroom by authorities hostile to Western literature. She wound up holding clandestine seminars for young women in her living room, delving into the masterpieces that the Islamic Republic forbade: the Vladimir Nabokov novel that gives the memoir its name, alongside the works of Henry James and Jane Austen, as well as one of Nafisi’s favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nafisi brings these classics into dialogue with the real-life stories of young Iranians in the heady decades following the 1979 revolution. Her book isn’t just about reading and teaching literature under a repressive regime, but about how literature in and of itself could serve as an antidote to all that the regime stood for.
Despite its global fame and translation into 32 languages, Reading Lolita in Tehran was never turned into a film before now, mostly because Nafisi didn’t like the proposals she’d received. Then, seven years ago, Riklis came around, as he recounted to a New York audience on January 13, after a special screening of the film. The Israeli director managed to convince Nafisi of his vision—and then to secure the funding, assemble a suitable Iranian cast, and settle on Rome as the shooting location, given that Tehran was not an option.
When the book was initially released in 2003, the American zeitgeist, shaped by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s global War on Terror, was rife with debates about the representations of Muslim women and life in the Middle East. Nafisi’s was one of several popular memoirs by Iranian women published during this period, including Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series (2000–03). And perhaps inevitably, given its success, Nafisi’s book became the subject of political scrutiny, much of it bearing little relation to the book’s content. Although Nafisi opposed the Iraq War, some critics lumped her in with neoconservatives because she portrayed the travails of Iranians under an anti-American regime. One scholar even proclaimed that he saw no difference between her and American soldiers convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq.
More than 20 years later, Riklis’s loyal adaptation has opponents just as the book did, and even more so because of the nationality of its director. In Tehran, the regime media have denounced the film as furnishing a “pretext for attacking Iran” and called its Iranian actors “traitors working with Zionists.” One outlet claimed that the film peddled a “violent, anti-culture, anti-art, and anti-human view of Iran and Iranians.”
The idea that Reading Lolita in Tehran is anti-Iranian because of its portrayal of the Islamic Republic, and of the life of women under its rule, was always patently ridiculous. The claim bears up particularly poorly in 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” What Nafisi does best, and the reason her work has endured, is precisely to refuse cartoonish portrayals and basic morality plays.
In Riklis, known for his empathetic depiction of Israelis and Palestinians in films such as Lemon Tree and Dancing Arabs, her book finds an able interpreter who has stayed true to its ethos. The film isn’t neutral. It vividly tells the story of how puritanical Islamist goons attacked universities in the early years after 1979, imposed mandatory veiling on women, and banned books they didn’t like. But neither is it a simple story of scary Islamists versus heroic women resisters.
The film captures the atmosphere of Iran in the 1980s and ’90s remarkably well for having been shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who has never set foot in the country. The dialogue is mostly in Persian, a language Riklis doesn’t speak; he was able to pull this off with the help of a carefully chosen cast of diasporic Iranians. Golshifteh Farahani, perhaps the best-known Iranian actor outside the country, is at her height as Nafisi, whom she plays as confident but humane, by turns brazen and vulnerable.
The young women of the clandestine class include Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture; Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in one of the film’s most delightful performances), who, unlike most of her classmates, wore the Islamic veil even before the revolution and defends an ideal of modesty as virtue; and Azin (Lara Wolf), whose multiple divorces make her an object of fascination to the less experienced students, but who turns out to be suffering from domestic abuse.
In Nafisi’s apartment, the students are far from the prying eyes of the regime and also of men (even the professor’s husband is barred from their meetings). They construct for themselves, in that all-female room, a little literary republic that survives the years of war and revolution. In one memorable scene, Nafisi has the students practice a Jane Austen–era dance as part of their study of Pride and Prejudice, drawing parallels between the stifling rules of courtship in Victorian England and those of some contemporary families in Iran.
The film also ventures beyond that cloistered space. Bahri (Reza Diako), a devout 1979 revolutionary, is nevertheless an avid student in Nafisi’s class at the university before it is shut down. Despite their diametrically opposed politics, Nafisi and Bahri form a bond. Early in the story, she tells him his essay on Huckleberry Finn is the best she’s ever received from a student, even in America. The two reconnect when Bahri returns from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, having lost an arm. He has used his family connections to the regime to obtain a surprise gift for his old professor: two tickets to The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky, showing at the Tehran film festival. The connection between Nafisi and Bahri is presented with complexity and without sentimentality, neither papering over political differences nor caricaturing Bahri as a generic revolutionary.
In this way, both film and book avoid didacticism. And in doing so, they demonstrate exactly the point Nafisi explores with her students, which is the power of literature to stir empathy across seemingly unbridgeable divides. When the group discusses The Great Gatsby, Nafisi insists on understanding the forbidden love that Daisy Buchanan, the married socialite, has for Jay Gatsby as a true human feeling, not a symbol of Western perfidy, as some of her more revolutionary students claim it to be. The latter advocate banning the book. Nafisi organizes a mock trial for the novel in her class, with students divided into teams for and against.
Nafisi calls on students on both sides of the political divide to treat each other with humanity. When she catches some in her class expressing glee at the wartime deaths of pro-regime peers, she enjoins them not to become like their oppressors. And she is no dogmatic opponent of Islam, only of religiously inspired repressive government: At one point Nafisi tells Bahri, “My grandmother was the most devout Muslim I knew. She never missed a prayer. But she wore her scarf because she was devout, not because she was a symbol.” (I am not the only critic with a Muslim background who found this line powerful.)
The point here isn’t just to repeat the liberal platitude that “the problem isn’t with Islam but with its repressive enforcement.” Rather, Nafisi is rejecting the revolutionaries’ tendency to treat all that surrounds them as a field of symbols. People are worth more than that, she tells them and us, as though echoing the Kantian dictum to treat one another “as an end, never merely as a means.”
This message about the humane power of literature makes Reading Lolita in Tehran a work of art rather than an exercise in sloganeering. And the fact that now, more than two decades after the book’s release, and at a time of regional tension, an Israeli filmmaker has worked with Iranians to adapt Nafisi’s book to the screen gives the film a special power.
The audience at the screening I attended, at a Jewish community center on the Upper West Side, included American Jews, Israelis, and Iranians. What we had in common was the experience of being gripped by a story about the capacity of literature to reveal us to one another as ends rather than as means. The setup might sound mawkish. But I recommend avoiding the temptation of cynicism and embracing the film as truly one for these times.
In his vendetta against law firms who represented his opponents, universities whose high standards offend him, and anyone who dared to stand up to his lies, Trump has selected two former government employees for retribution. These actions are typical of dictators. Trump is wannabe dictator. He certainly aspires to be a full-fledged fascist. He has a compliant Departnent of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi thinks she works for Trump, not the people of the United States.
President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive ordering the Justice Department to investigate two prominent former senior Homeland Security officials, saying they could be guilty of “treason” because of their criticism of him.
Trump also stripped Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs of their security clearances, although it was not clear if they maintained any. The order “also suspends any active security clearance held by individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania,” where Taylor is an adjunct professor, “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”
Likewise, the order also suspends security clearances held by associates of Krebs at SentinelOne, a California-based cyber security firm, where he is currently employed as the company’s chief intelligence and public policy officer.
Taylor, who served as the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, drew Trump’s wrath for writing a blistering, New York Times Op-ed, titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“, and later a book, A Warning, both under the pen name “Anonymous,” detailing his concerns about the president’s policies. The Op-ed unleashed a furious media campaign to identify him. After he surfaced in October 2020, he became a prominent TV critic of Trump
“You can’t have that happen,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, adding, “I think he’s guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we’ll find out.”
The executive order called Taylor “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.”
Taylor responded on X (formerly Twitter): “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”…
It’s almost funny to see Trump criticize anyone for failure to be faithful to their “constitutional oath,” since he has violated his own constitutional oath on a daily basis.
Vermont, a traditionally liberal state, has a moderate (non-MAGA) Republican governor, Phil Scott, and a Democratic-controlled legislature. Governor Scott appointed Zoie Saunders as Education Secretary. When the U.S. Department of Education recently directed every state to certify that it had banned DEI programs (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, Saunders asked the state’s districts to comply. Instead, she faced a widespread revolt by the state’s education organizations, and she issued a new directive, revoking her earlier request for compliance.
But just three days later, after initially defending and clarifying the decision in the face of public backlash, Education Secretary Zoie Saunders backtracked late Monday afternoon, informing superintendents the state would instead send a single statewide certification.
“To be clear, the Agency of Education and the Attorney General’s Office continue to support diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in our schools. Our communication on Friday was intended to make you aware of the directive from the U.S. Department of Education regarding Title VI,” Saunders wrote Monday afternoon, “and to reinforce that diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are lawful and supported in Vermont. In no way, did AOE direct schools to ban DEI.”
So why all the confusion?
On Friday, Saunders told school district leaders they had 10 days to submit their certification, but also said the agency believed certification required only that districts “reaffirm … compliance with existing law.”
That communication came in response to President Donald Trump and his administration, who have threatened to withhold funding to public schools that fail to comply with the expansive directive.
A letter dated April 3 from the U.S. Department of Education said noncompliance with the diversity programming ban could result in schools losing a crucial stream of money meant to support economically disadvantaged students, known as Title I, among other sources of federal dollars. The letter cited Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in schools based on “race, color or national origin,” and also cited a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court Case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that restricted affirmative action.
Saunders, in the letter to district leaders, wrote that the federal restriction includes “policies or programs under any name that treat students differently based on race, engage in racial stereotyping, or create hostile environments for students of particular races.”
Programs highlighting specific cultures or heritages “would not in and of themselves” violate federal regulations, the letter said. “We do not view this Certification to be announcing any new interpretation of Title VI,” Saunders wrote, adding that the agency’s “initial legal review” determined the federal letter only required the state to “reaffirm our compliance with existing law.”
But guidance from the federal education department cited by Saunders seems to restrict a variety of practices, arguing that school districts have “veil(ed) discriminatory policies” under initiatives like diversity programming, “social-emotional learning” and “culturally responsive” teaching.
Following news of the agency’s letter to districts, Saunders released an initial public statement around 3 p.m. on Monday saying the federal demands would not require Vermont’s schools to change practices. And in that communication, Vermont’s top education official gave no indication the agency would alter its request for districts to confirm their compliance with Trump’s directive.
“The political rhetoric around this federal directive is designed to create outrage in our communities, confusion in our schools, and self-censorship in our policy making. But we are not going to allow the chaos to control how we feel, or how we respond,” Saunders said in the statement. “Our priority is to protect Vermont’s values, preserve essential federal funding, and support schools in creating positive school environments free from the type of bullying and manipulation we see in our national politics today.”
In the same press release, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark said Vermont was in compliance with federal law.
“We will continue to protect Vermonters against any unlawful actions by the federal government,” Clark said.
One neighboring state, meanwhile, took a different tack. Soon after the Trump administration sent states last week’s letter, New York announced it would not comply.
Vermont and other states’ responses to the federal government are due April 14, and the state agency said last week that its response was supposed to include school districts’ “compliance issues” and “the Agency’s proposed enforcement plans” for those districts.
Before Saunders, in consultation with Clark, decided to rescind the state’s request for districts’ certifications, the Agency of Education’s actions drew criticism from the public education community.
Representatives from the Vermont School Boards Association, Vermont Principals’ Association, Vermont Superintendents Association and Vermont-NEA, the state teachers’ union, met with state leaders Monday. They later penned a letter to Saunders and Clark calling Vermont’s approach to the federal directive “not workable.”
“Expecting individual superintendents to certify compliance based on a cover letter (that they have not yet seen) that clarifies the legal boundaries of their certification will lead to a patchwork of responses that could put Vermont and local school districts at risk,” the organizations wrote.
The coalition urged Vermont to follow New York’s lead and reject the certification process. That strong approach, they wrote, “would also send a powerful message to students and families across the state.”
Hours later, the Agency of Education appeared to heed their advice. In her late afternoon message to superintendents, Saunders wrote that “AOE has received feedback throughout the day regarding the need for clarity on the intent of the certification and the state’s specific response.”
“We understand that many in the community are concerned because of the political rhetoric surrounding DEI,” she added.
News of Saunders’ initial Friday letter spread quickly on social media over the weekend. Already, plans for a Wednesday protest had circulated online.
At least one district, Winooski, said it wouldn’t comply with the certification.
“I notified the Secretary that I will not be signing anything,” Wilmer Chavarria, the district’s superintendent, wrote in an email to staff shared with VTDigger. “I also requested that the state grow some courage and stop complying so quickly and without hesitation to the politically-driven threats of the executive.”
Winooski’s school board will address the compliance certification at a regularly scheduled board meeting Wednesday, according to Chavarria’s message.
In Vermont, ethnic studies have been a larger part of the education landscape since the passage of Act 1 in 2019. The law, which the Legislature approved unanimously and Gov. Phil Scott signed, required public schools to incorporate ethnic studies into their curricula. The legislation charged a panel with making suggestions for better including the history and contributions of underrepresented groups in Vermont’s classrooms.
Correction: A previous version of this story attributed a quote directly to Charity Clark that was in fact a statement released by the Vermont Agency of Education and Vermont Attorney General’s Office.
Following a federal directive that schools ban “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion-related programs, the Vermont Agency of Education last Friday asked school districts to submit compliance certifications.
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Jennifer Berkshire has been writing insightfully about the rightwing attacks on public schools and on education for many years. She has written for national magazines and collaborated with education historian Jack Schneider to create a podcast “Have You Heard?”) and to write two excellent books: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars (which is also the title of her blog).
This post is the first of two that “connects the dots.” I am posting them together as they provide an excellent critique of the logic of today’s education policy changes. She explains the Republican animus towards public schools and education and their desire to eliminate the U.S. Departnent of Education.
She writes:
If you read the coverage regarding this week’s ‘bloodbath’ at the Deparment of Education, there is little sense to be made of the savage layoffs and shuttering of whole units. In reports like this one, this one, and this particularly half-baked take, the general tone is a sort of ‘how could this be happening?’ bafflement. But there is a brutal logic to rendering much of the Department inoperable. Since Trump’s first term, the intellectual architects of Trumpism have been laying the groundwork for what is essentially a roll-back of the modern civil rights era. In other words, we don’t have to speculate wildly about what these folks are up to because they’ve been telling us non-stop for the past six years. We need to pay attention.
They’re kneecapping the knowledge agencies
If it feels like DOGE is devoting a disproportionate amount of effort to dismantling agencies and departments that create, distribute, and legitimize knowledge, that’s because it’s true. A fascinating new analysis of DOGE layoffs finds that so-called knowledge agencies have borne the brunt of the chainsaw. This has nothing to do with ‘efficiency’ but instead reflects the belief of influential thinkers in the Trump-o-sphere that these are precisely the agencies and departments that have been captured by the woke mind virus and require elimination.
If you’ve managed to make it this far without encountering the ‘insights’ of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencious Moldbug, congratulations. But Yarvin’s argument that democracy is over, and that we’d be better served by a technocratic monarch, has found favor with the likes of JD Vance; its Yarvin’s case for demolishing ‘the cathedral,’ the knowledge institutions at the heart of modern life, that we’re living through right now.
The goal is to send fewer kids to college.
The AP posted a panicked story this week about the student loan website crashing in the wake of the ED layoffs. Make it too onerous for students to access information about paying for college, the story implied, and they just might give up and stay home. To which some high-profile Trump ‘intellectuals’ might respond: ‘good!’ In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, activist Christopher Rufo stated that his goal is reduce the number of students who attend college by half. Scott Yenor, an influential advisor to Ron DeSantis, wants to see the number reduced to less than 10 percent, and has argued repeatedly that too many women attend college. Various GOP proposals, meanwhile, could reduce the volume of student loans by one third. The idea that we’d make it harder and more expensive for kids to attend college after a few decades of ‘college for all’ thinking may be hard to wrap your head around. But the likes of Rufo and Yenor view this experiment as a collosal failure. In their view, college campuses are filled with students who don’t belong there, representing the sort of social engineering that they’re now determined to unwind. The anti-DEI purges currently remaking campuses reflect the general sentiment on the right these days that colleges, entirely captured by the ‘woke,’ are indoctrinating youngsters. But at the heart of these efforts is an even more retrograde cause: making college elite again.
They believe in natural hierarchies and race science.
The creepiest story I read this week had nothing to do with education but with the effort to rebuild the US semiconductor industry known as the CHIPS program. Employees in the CHIPS program office have been undergoing a now-familiar ritual: demonstrating their intellectual worth and abilities to Trump officials.
In late February, Michael Grimes, a senior official at the Department of Commerce and former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, conducted brief interviews with employees of the CHIPS Program Office, which oversees the grants.
In interactions some described as “demeaning,” Mr. Grimes asked employees to justify their intellect by providing test results from the SAT or an IQ test, said four people familiar with the evaluations. Some were asked to do math problems, like calculate the value of four to the fourth power or long division.
What does demanding IQ or SAT test results from engineers have to do with the dismantling of the Departmet of Education? Everything. If you start from the assumption that IQ is, not just fixed, but genetically determined, as many Trump intellectuals do, there is little case to be made for public schools that try to equalize outcomes—it can’t be done. Far better to shovel cash at the would-be ‘cognitive elite’ (an apt description of vouchers for the well-to-do, when you think about it) than to redistribute resources to the ‘lessers.’ It’s a bleak and brutal view of the world and one that holds increasing sway on the right.
They believe that race-based data powers the ‘civil rights regime’
In his fantastic new book, Dangerous Learning: the South’s Long War on Black Literacy, legal scholar Derek Black argues that a vision of racial equality is woven through education policy. Writes Black: “Education bureaucracy disaggregates every aspect of education by race–from basic attendance, test scores, and graduation rates to suspensions, expulsions, advanced placement opportunities, access to qualified teachers, and more.” But this is precisely why the data collectors have borne the brunt of the DOGE-ing of the Department of Education.
Read the likes of Richard Hanania, whose argument that ‘woke’ is essentially just civil rights law, inspired Trump’s early executive order rolling back affirmative action in federal hiring, and you get a much clearer picture of what’s happening right now. As Hanania argues, “[g]overnment should not be into the race, sex, and LGBT bean counting business.” His colleague, the afforementioned Scott Yenor, goes even farther. Yenor wants to see states criminalize the collection of data on the basis of race or sex as a challenge to what he describes as “the country’s corrupting ‘civil rights’ regime.”
So while federally-funded education research may have just been decimated, at least the researchers themselves aren’t being rounded up—yet.
They’re rolling back civil rights
At the heart of the Trumpist intellectual project is a relatively straight-forward argument. The civil rights revolution in this country went too far and it’s time to start rolling it back. As Jack Schneider and I argue in our recent book, The Education Wars, the role that public schools have historically played in advancing civil rights makes them particuarly vulnerable in this moment of intense backlash. It’s why the administration has moved with such ferocity against the most recent effort to extend civil rights through the schools—to transgender students. And it’s why the cuts to the Department of Education have fallen so heavily on its civil rights enforcement role. Of the agency’s civil rights offices across the country, only five are still open.
The OCR is one of the federal government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, investigating thousands of allegations of discrimination each year. That includes discrimination based on disability, race and gender.
Michael Elsen-Rooney of Chalkbeat reported that New York will not comply with Trump’s demand to ban Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The Trump Department of Education warned states that refusal to comply might lead to a suspension of federal funding.
The Department’s demand is illegal. Federal law explicitly forbids any interference by federal officials with the curriculum or program of any public school.
Elsen-Rooney wrote:
New York will not comply with an order from President Donald Trump’s administration to certify that school districts are eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, state Education Department officials said in a Friday letter obtained by Chalkbeat.
The letter represents some of the earliest and most forceful pushback to Thursday’s threat that gave state education agencies 10 days to guarantee that no public schools in their states have DEI programs the Trump administration deems illegal — or lose billions of dollars in federal education funding.
But New York officials countered that the state has already certified on multiple occasions that it follows federal anti-discrimination law, and that the U.S. Education Department has no legal right to threaten to withhold federal funding over its own interpretation of the law.
The state Education Department “is unaware of any authority that USDOE has to demand that a State Education Agency … agree to its interpretation of a judicial decision or change the terms and conditions of [New York State Education Department]’s award without formal administrative process,” wrote Counsel and Deputy Commissioner Daniel Morton-Bentley.
“We understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems ‘diversity, equity & inclusion. … But there are no federal or State laws prohibiting the principles of DEI,” Morton-Bentley continued. “And USDOE has yet to define what practices it believes violate Title VI.”
The state will not send any “further certification” of compliance with federal law, the letter concluded.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As you know, Trump took control of The Kennedy Center and named himself chairman of the board. He kicked all Democrats off the board and named Trumpers to replace them.
Some artists cancelled, some continued to perform. Trump’s new director, Richard Grennel, canceled the national tour of a children’s show called “Finn,” because it promoted love, kindness, and tolerance.
A band called Guster was performing at The Kennedy Center on March 29, and the band leader talked about the cancellation of “Finn.” Then he invited the cast of “Finn” to join him onstage and the audience went wild.
Michael C. Bender reports in The New York Times that the Trump administration is threatening to cancel funding from schools that refuse to eliminate programs or courses that teach DEI. The administration has turned civil rights enforcement upside down and inside out. For decades, civil rights law meant protection of racial minorities and women, who were often targets of discrimination, exclusion, or unfair treatment. This administration worries most about the rights of white students.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon clearly doesn’t know that federal law prohibits any federal official from interfering with or trying to influence curriculum.
“20 USC 1232a: Prohibition against Federal control of education. Text contains those laws in effect on April 2, 2025
§1232a. Prohibition against Federal control of education
No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance.
What Secretary McMahon proposes is illegal.
Bender writes:
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 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.
“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.”
When Trump took control of the Smithsonian Institution and its multiple museums yesterday, his executive order pledged to purge the museums of unpatriotic exhibits (WOKE ideology and DEI), the targets of Trump’s rage. Trump gave the job to Vance, who will presumably clean up the nation’s history and make it as inspiring (to white males) as it was before the 1960s.
Remember the halcyon days before the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and other “blemishes” on our national history? Trump does. That’s the story he wants in The Smithsonian: heroes, accomplishments, triumphs! When men were men, and everyone else was in the background.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order Thursday evening promising to eliminate “divisive narratives” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” that have been removed over the past five years.
The “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order directs Vice President JD Vance to eliminate what he finds “improper” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo. The White House fact sheet describing the order said it will focus on removing “anti-American ideology.”
The institution, the official keeper of the American story, has operated independently as a public-private partnership created by an act of Congress in 1846. The order is an unprecedented act to edit an institution that has been expanding over many decades to include a wider, richer and more diverse telling of the nation’s history.
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the executive order says. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
Trump’s order calls the museum’s evolving approach a reconstruction of history that is “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
Historians were immediately dismayed. “Attacking the idea that telling the whole story of the United States is an ideological plot to cast the United States in a negative light testifies to a stunningly brittle insecurity about our nation and its past,” said Chandra Manning, a professor of American history at Georgetown University.
“It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that,” Manning said.
Trump’s executive order demands an “ideological purity test” and “restores neither truth nor sanity,” said Adam Rothman, an American history professor at Georgetown University. “The president’s proclamation disrespects the thousands of sincere and dedicated researchers, curators, scientists, guides, interpreters, docents and countless other people who work hard every day to preserve and tell the nation’s story truthfully, and in ways that educate and inspire the American public.”
Three noted scholars of history, philosophy, and fascism at Yale University announced that they are moving to a university in Canada. One, Jason Stanley, made clear that he was leaving because of his fear that the U.S. was dangerously close to becoming fascist under Trump.
Three prominent critics of President Donald Trump are leaving Yale’s faculty — and the United States — amid attacks on higher education to take up positions at the University of Toronto in fall 2025.
Philosophy professor Jason Stanley announced this week that he will leave Yale, while history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, who are married, decided to leave around the November elections. The three professors will work at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
Stanley wrote to the Daily Nous that his decision to leave was “entirely because of the political climate in the United States.” On Wednesday, he told the Guardian that he chose to move after seeing how Columbia University handled political attacks from Trump.
After the Trump administration threatened to deport two student protesters at Columbia and revoked $400 million in research funding from the school, Columbia agreed on Friday to concede to a series of demands from the Trump administration that included overhauling its protest policies and imposing external oversight on the school’s Middle Eastern studies department.
“When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted — that whole way of thinking presupposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” Stanley told the Guardian…
Yale has not released a statement addressing the revocation of Columbia’s funding. Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis has told the News that he does not anticipate any changes in Yale’s free expression and protest policies. University President Maurie McInnis previously said that she is prioritizing lobbying for Yale’s interests in Washington over issuing public pronouncements.
Shore wrote that the Munk School had long attempted to recruit her and Snyder and that the couple had seriously considered the offers “for the past two years.” Shore wrote that the couple decided to take the positions after the November 2024 elections. However, a spokesperson for Snyder told Inside Higher Ed that Snyder’s decision was made before the elections, was largely personal and came amid “difficult family matters.” The spokesperson also said that he had “no desire” to leave the United States.
Shore wrote that her and Snyder’s children were factors in the couple’s decision.
Snyder and Shore both specialize in Eastern European history and each has drawn parallels between the fascist regimes they have studied and the current Trump administration. Stanley, a philosopher, has also published books on fascism and propaganda, including the popular book “How Fascism Works.”
In 2021, Stanley and Snyder co-taught a course at Yale titled “Mass Incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States.” Earlier this week, Stanley and Shore joined nearly 3,000 Jewish faculty across the U.S. to sign a letter denouncing the arrest of a Columbia student protester and urging their respective institutions to resist the Trump administration’s policies targeting colleges.
In an email, he writes that “the decision was entirely because of the political climate in the United States.” He had had an offer from Toronto, and decided to accept it last Friday night after Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands…
Stanley writes that he has been “very happy at Yale, with the department and the university,” but that he wants “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.”
A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship…”
He said in an interview that Columbia University’s recent actions moved him to accept the offer. Last Friday, Columbia gave in to the Trump administration by agreeing to a series of demands in order to restore $400m in federal funding. These changes include crackdowns on protests, increased security power and “internal reviews” of some academic programs, like the Middle Eastern studies department.
“When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted – that whole way of thinking pre-supposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” he said.
Stanley added: “You’ve got to just band together and say an attack on one university is an attack on all universities. And maybe you lose that fight, but you’re certainly going to lose this one if you give up before you fight.
“Columbia was just such a warning,” he said. “I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia. I see Yale trying not to be a target. And as I said, that’s a losing strategy.”
Stanley said he wasn’t concerned about his ability to continue his scholarship at Yale, but the broader climate against universities played a role. He praised other faculty at Yale for standing up against the attacks on their profession and said he wished he could stay and fight with them.
“But how could you speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen?” he questioned. “And if you can’t speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen, when will they come for the American citizens? It’s inevitable.”
Social media posts spread on Wednesday, noting the alarm sounded by a scholar of fascism leaving the country over its political climate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist and creator of the 1619 Project, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky: “When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave US universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry.”
In a statement, Yale said it remains a “home to world-class faculty members who are dedicated to excellence in scholarship and teaching”.
“Yale is proud of its global faculty community which includes faculty who may no longer work at the institution, or whose contributions to academia may continue at a different home institution,” the university said. “Faculty members make decisions about their careers for a variety of reasons and the university respects all such decisions.”skip past newsletter promotion
Stanley recently wrote for the Guardian about a new Department of Education directive that said teaching about systemic racism and other topics could be grounds for a civil rights violation, according to the Trump administration’s legal interpretations. Stanley said this order sets the country “on a path to educational authoritarianism”.
He said he considered leaving the US in 2017, but that the second Trump administration has “definitely” proved worse than the first. Stanley’s profile has also risen since then after the publication of several books on propaganda and fascism. The Munk school is building a program with the view that there’s an “international struggle against democracy” and provides a “very exciting intellectual opportunity”, he said.
“I don’t see it as fleeing at all,” he said. “I see it as joining Canada, which is a target of Trump, just like Yale is a target of Trump.”
What does it say that a scholar of fascism is leaving the US right now? Said Stanley: “Part of it is you’re leaving because ultimately, it is like leaving Germany in 1932, 33, 34. There’s resonance: my grandmother left Berlin with my father in 1939. So it’s a family tradition.”
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