(CN) — The nation’s second-largest teachers union sued the Department of Education on Tuesday, blasting the Trump administration’s sweeping attacks on race considerations in schools as both unconstitutional and unconscionable.
The suit — filed by the American Federation of Teachers, its Maryland affiliate and the American Sociological Association in a Maryland federal district court — challenges the Education Department’s recent instructions ordering the elimination of practically any race-based consideration across K-12 and collegiate institutions.
Those instructions, sent to school officials in a Feb. 14 “Dear Colleague” letter, assert that federal law prohibits schools and colleges from considering race in admissions, hiring, financial aid and all other aspects of campus life. Any school’s failure to eliminate racial considerations in those policies within two weeks, the department’s Office for Civil Rights said, would bar it from receiving federal funding.
With only days left before the department’s purported Friday deadline, the American Federation of Teachers is seeking to shut down the policy shift entirely before it takes effect.
“This vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself,” American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said in a press release. “It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenant of the United States since its founding.”
Noting that legal precedent bars government officials from “trampling the First Amendment rights of federal fund recipients,” the union argued in court filings that implementation of the Education Department’s letter would prohibit protected constitutional freedoms.
Those freedoms, the union said, include educators’ right to teach without government interference and students’ right to associate in voluntary groups connected to race or national origin.
Additionally, the union argued, the letter’s failure to define key terms such as “diversity,” “DEI” and “race-based decision-making,” as well as its failure to clearly state what conduct it does and doesn’t prohibit, renders it unlawfully vague under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause.
“The overbreadth and vagueness of the law, and the content-based restrictions it places on speech and expression, will force plaintiffs’ members to choose between chilling their constitutionally protected speech and association or risk losing federal funds and being subject to prosecution,” the union wrote in its complaint.
Additionally, because the letter fails “to acknowledge, much less sufficiently explain” the Education Department’s policy changes, carrying out its statement would qualify as an Administrative Procedure Act violation, the union said.
Furthermore, the union stressed in court filings that teachers nationwide could not sufficiently teach their students without acknowledgment of race.
“Black Americans were enslaved by law, laws prevented Black Americans from owning property, attending public schools, and voting,” the union wrote. “This is, by definition, a legal structure that imposes differences based on race. It is therefore not possible to teach bare factual information about history without acknowledging structural racism — but doing so would now seem to constitute illegal discrimination in the eyes of the Department of Education.”
An Education Department spokesperson declined to comment on pending litigation.