Conservative group sues LAUSD over race-based school benefits tied to desegregation policy

The fifth-grade classroom at a Westside Los Angeles elementary school is so full that students’ backpacks spill into the aisles. Thirty-plus children share one teacher. Their parents say they are not guaranteed any formal parent-teacher conferences and that when they applied to one of the district’s coveted magnet schools, their children entered the lottery with fewer points than classmates across town.

Those differences are not accidental. They flow from a decades-old Los Angeles Unified School District policy that gives schools serving mostly nonwhite students smaller classes, extra staff and a leg up in the magnet lottery. Now, that policy is at the center of a federal civil rights lawsuit that could reshape how the nation’s second-largest school system uses race.

On Jan. 20, the 1776 Project Foundation, a conservative education group, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, accusing the district of violating the Constitution, federal civil rights law and California’s ban on racial preferences.

The complaint targets LAUSD’s system for designating certain campuses as “predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian and other non-Anglo,” or PHBAO, and giving those schools benefits that non-PHBAO campuses do not receive.

The foundation argues that the structure “engages in a program of overt discrimination against a new minority: white students,” while also harming some students of Middle Eastern descent and others not counted in the PHBAO category.

“These policies are not just unfair — they’re unconstitutional,” said Michael DiNardo, a Los Angeles attorney representing the foundation, in a statement announcing the suit.

The lawsuit names Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, School Board President Scott Schmerelson and the LAUSD Board of Education as defendants. It asks a federal judge to strike down the PHBAO framework and bar the district from using race-based preferences in how it operates, funds and admits students to programs.

LAUSD has declined to discuss the specifics of the case.

“The district cannot comment on pending litigation,” a spokesperson said in a written statement, adding that LAUSD “remains firmly committed to ensuring all students have meaningful access to services and enriching educational opportunities.”

A desegregation tool under fire

At issue is a policy that traces back to the long-running Crawford v. Board of Education desegregation case, filed in the 1960s, when courts found that Los Angeles schools were “severely segregated” and that minority students suffered documented harms.

As part of court-ordered integration efforts, LAUSD developed the PHBAO designation to identify schools where at least 70% of neighborhood students were Hispanic, Black, Asian or otherwise non-Anglo. Those schools received additional resources and access to programs meant to reduce what the district described as the “five harms of racial isolation,” including low achievement and limited access to college.

Over time, mandatory busing and some court oversight faded. But the PHBAO categories — and the benefits tied to them — remained at the heart of LAUSD’s voluntary integration strategy.

Today, according to the lawsuit, more than 600 schools in the district are considered PHBAO. Fewer than 100 are not.

PHBAO status affects students in several concrete ways.

The complaint says PHBAO schools are capped at 25 students per teacher, while non-PHBAO schools can be staffed at ratios as high as 34 or 34.5 students per teacher, depending on the grade. PHBAO campuses are also allocated additional teachers and administrators, and parents there are guaranteed at least two formal conferences with teachers each year.

The designation also matters in the district’s competitive magnet school system, created in part to promote integration. Students who apply to magnets receive points that increase their chances in the lottery. Those whose neighborhood, or “resident,” school is PHBAO get four points; students at non-PHBAO schools do not.

Other factors, such as whether a student’s resident school is overcrowded, whether a sibling is already enrolled and how often a student has been wait-listed in prior years, can add substantially more points. District observers note that because LAUSD’s enrollment is overwhelmingly nonwhite — about 73% Latino, roughly 10% white and single-digit percentages of Black and Asian students — large numbers of families benefit from the PHBAO preference.

The 1776 Project’s lawsuit does not dispute that history. But it contends that LAUSD has outlived any legal justification for explicitly tying benefits to race.

In its opening pages, the complaint quotes a 1943 Supreme Court decision, Hirabayashi v. United States: “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people.” It argues that by classifying students as “HBAO” or “Other White” and then limiting certain advantages to PHBAO campuses, the district is “publicly touting a program of overt discrimination.”

The foundation says it has members who live in LAUSD and whose children attend non-PHBAO schools. One, identified in the filing only as “Parent A,” has two children in such a school and alleges they sit in larger classes, lack mandated conferences and face worse odds in the magnet process solely because of the racial makeup of their campus.

A test of post–affirmative action limits

Legally, the case hinges on three pillars.

The foundation alleges that LAUSD’s policies violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, enforced through a federal civil rights statute, by treating students differently based on race. It also accuses the district of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans race discrimination in programs that receive federal funds.

On top of that, the complaint invokes Article I, Section 31 of the California Constitution, the provision known as Proposition 209, which voters approved in 1996. It bars public institutions from granting “preferential treatment” on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public education, employment or contracting.

Proposition 209 has already curbed race-conscious admissions in California’s public universities. The new case asks whether K–12 districts can still operate remedies that call out race explicitly.

The lawsuit lands less than three years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, rulings that have spurred conservative groups to challenge race-aware policies at the K–12 level as well.

Pedro Noguera, dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, said the LA case reflects an “increasingly common” strategy.

“Conservative organizations want to claim reverse discrimination based on the idea that helping low-income kids of color hurts affluent white students,” he said in an interview. “There is no empirical evidence to support this claim.”

Ryan James Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, which created the foundation bringing the case, has called LAUSD’s approach “the most blatant example of racial discrimination by a major school district in this country.”

Equity, resources and who benefits

The outcome could alter where LAUSD sends some of its most valuable resources — smaller classes and extra staff — and how it distributes seats in high-demand magnet schools.

Supporters of the PHBAO system say those tools are still needed in a district where students of color disproportionately attend high-poverty campuses and face persistent gaps in achievement and access to advanced coursework.

Tanya Ortiz Franklin, a board member who represents parts of South Los Angeles and the harbor area, said her “greatest fear is not that privileged parties are suing us … but that poor children of color will continue to be overlooked, under-supported, and ultimately unable to achieve their greatest potential” if the district is forced to roll back race-aware supports.

The 1776 Project argues that LAUSD could target aid using race-neutral measures, such as income or neighborhood characteristics, instead of relying on racial classifications. The complaint portrays the current policy as a zero-sum game in which non-PHBAO schools — often with higher shares of white students — are left with larger classes, fewer adults on campus and weaker magnet prospects.

Education and civil rights lawyers say courts have generally allowed race-conscious remedies when they are narrowly tailored responses to proven de jure segregation, but have become more skeptical of ongoing racial preferences absent active court supervision. Whether a policy like PHBAO, rooted in old orders but operating in a new legal era, passes that test is now a live question.

The case is in its early stages. LAUSD has not yet filed a response in court, and no hearing date has been set on the foundation’s request for a permanent injunction.

Behind the legal arguments is a broader tension playing out in school systems nationwide: whether, and how, public institutions can still talk directly about race when trying to repair damage from a segregated past.

In Los Angeles, that debate is no longer abstract. It now runs through full classrooms in non-PHBAO schools and smaller ones in PHBAO campuses, through magnet letters that say “admitted” and those that say “wait-listed,” and through a lawsuit that asks a federal judge to decide where the line falls between remedy and discrimination.