How will K-12 schools prepare Black students for careers and higher education in a landscape in which equity-focused programs are under attack? Experts explain and share how reporters should cover this story.
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In 2021, the Los Angeles Unified School District approved a new program to tackle decades of underperformance by Black students—from chronic absenteeism to lagging test scores in math and reading. Black youth were overrepresented in school suspensions and persistently underrepresented in Advanced Placement and honors classes. Despite various interventions, there was no real change.
Then, following the George Floyd uprisings, Black student activists lobbied the nation’s second-largest school district to spend less on school policing in majority-Black schools and redirect that funding into targeted support for Black students. Thus, the Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) was born.
Journalists can learn a lot about equity in education—and the broader movement to dismantle equity policies—by studying this program, which a conservative group targeted after it improved student outcomes. This is part of a wider trend, with increasing threats to diversity, equity and inclusion in education.
In Los Angeles, opponents sought to eliminate a program with promising results for Black students, said University of California-Los Angeles education professor Tyrone Howard.
Attendance is up; suspensions are down, and enrollment in AP and honors classes has increased. Black students in LA Unified also showed gains in math and English in spring 2024 testing—even outperforming their Black peers statewide, the Los Angeles Times reported.
What’s notable, Howard said, is why these academic measures improved: “Chronic absenteeism decreased because they put more social workers in schools where Black students are concentrated. We now have BSAP coordinators who play a pivotal role in building relationships with students and their parents, advocating to ensure they’re placed in AP and honors classes, which are pathways to college. We also have some data that shows that Black students feel more connected to certain school staff associated with BSAP, and suspensions of Black students have gone down since BSAP was put in place.”
Typically, successful outcomes increase an intervention program’s chances of continuing. But in 2023, BSAP–lauded for boosting Black student achievement–was challenged by a conservative Virginia group for violating federal civil rights law. The group claimed that BSAP offered “race-based programming for some students that is not open to all.”
Howard, who serves as a consultant for the program, refuted this charge, explaining that while BSAP prioritized Black students, non-Black students were not excluded. “The BSAP program organized field trips to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and never was there any effort by a school that I’m familiar with to ban white students or Latinx students,” he said.
Still, LA Unified – to the dismay of Black youth and their supporters – agreed to remove race as a criteria for targeting resources.
The legal complaint in Los Angeles is part of an orchestrated political effort to weaponize civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination, as well as restrict K-12 instruction to reflect right-leaning conservative ideology.
To date, 18 states have passed laws or taken state-level action to limit what schools can teach with regard to race—banning Black authors from school bookshelves and blocking the teaching of African American studies. In January, a sweeping White House order was signed to eliminate federal funding for public schools that promote anti-racism or accurately teach America’s racial histories.
Yet often missing in this education news coverage is the justification for race-inclusive curriculum and policies. America’s system of K-12 education was built and still stands on a foundation of systematic racism: Jim Crow segregation, mortgage redlining, disparate school funding, racially biased discipline, and countless discriminatory practices that stymied Black students’ access to and opportunity for an equitable education.
In short, hard-won gains for Black students are under threat and being undone. Attempts to fix generations of systemic racial discrimination are being redefined as “reverse racism.” And a new era requires new tools for journalists thrust into covering this unfolding education story.
Here are five questions to investigate the targeted erasure of equity and how schools will prepare Black students for higher education and careers amid widespread attacks on public education.
Rachel Perera, a fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said reporters should approach stories on racial equity rollbacks with a more expansive view to improve the public’s understanding of how history has shaped the present.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is the successor to affirmative action, she explained, which had an explicit intention to directly address the deep inequities and compounded disadvantages that Black Americans faced prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“There’s this longer history that can help education reporters tell a more complicated and complex story,” Perera said.
Additionally, reporters should ask sharper questions about the original purpose and goals for equity programs, and whether those goals have changed in response to attacks on equity.
Among Perera’s chief concerns is that districts may undo equity initiatives in response to legal and political pressures, despite ongoing racial disparities in academic performance. It’s important for journalists to ask districts how they plan to continue serving the students those programs were intended to support.
“Most educators understand the nature of educational inequality in a very concrete way,” she said. “A good place to start is by interrogating how they will still achieve their initial objectives.”
Reporters should examine indicators – such as student engagement and attendance, participation in advanced coursework and graduation rates, in addition to test scores – to assess the ongoing impact of restructuring or ending equity efforts.
Antar Tichavakunda, an assistant professor of education at the University of California-Santa Barbara, gave some basic markers of a high school with a college-going culture:
Black students disproportionately attend under-resourced high schools with limited course offerings and inadequate staffing. So beyond the basics, he advises reporters to ask more nuanced questions on the cultural relevance of college advising:
The dismantling of college affirmative action policies puts even more onus on high schools to provide postsecondary education and career guidance. Journalists can hold listening tours to gather input, understand concerns and gauge schools’ effectiveness in meeting the needs and preferences of Black students and families.
“It’s helpful to ask specifically how they’re supporting Black students in the college process,” Tichavakunda said. “If they take a race-neutral approach that raises a red flag for me.”
Journalists are experiencing difficulties reporting at the moment. Disaggregated student data is a common tool used to identify disparities or inequalities that are present within specific subgroups. Access to data on the performance of Black students is now hindered by the active dismantling of the U.S. Education Department and the gutting of federal agencies—such as the National Center for Education Statistics and Office for Civil Rights—that collect and report race-based school data. Some are working to protect and preserve data.
Perera worries about school leaders preemptively obeying directives that lack legal merit, such as the Trump administration’s executive order alleging “indoctrination” in public schools. Multiple federal laws prohibit the federal government from dictating K-12 curriculum or instructional decisions.
“I would be very surprised if it stood up to a legal challenge if they punished a school district for what they teach by cutting off federal funding,” she said. “But people don’t have a clear understanding of what the federal government has the authority to do.”
She predicts that equity initiatives will remain in the crosshairs—and school districts, feeling the rising heat of political rhetoric, may act impulsively to end race-conscious efforts.
In this and similar scenarios, journalists should hold school officials accountable for these decisions with probing inquiries:
Perera said it will ultimately be up to communities to hold their local school boards to task for pulling back on efforts to address long-standing inequities.
That’s exactly what’s happening in LA Unified, where community members have gone on the offensive—standing by BSAP, talking about its added value, and lifting up the ways it’s working for Black youth.
“I hope that more reporters take a look at this,” UCLA’s Howard said. “I think there’s a lot we can learn from them.”
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