A decades-old policy meant to combat the harms of school segregation in Los Angeles was challenged in federal court on Tuesday by a conservative group that says the policy discriminates against white students.
The policy dates back to the 1970s, when the Los Angeles school district, the nation’s second-largest, was under a court order to desegregate and improve conditions for students of color.
The policy offers smaller class sizes and other benefits to students at schools whose enrollment is predominantly Hispanic, Black or Asian — a majority of the district’s schools.
The plaintiffs argue that students at schools with more white students receive “inferior treatment and calculated disadvantages,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday by the 1776 Project Foundation, a group that opposes racial preferences in education.
“This is the most blatant example of racial discrimination by a major school district in this country,” said Ryan James Girdusky, a conservative political consultant and the group’s founder.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles school district said officials were reviewing the lawsuit, but did not immediately provide a comment.
The lawsuit is the latest effort to roll back race-based policies in education, including court-ordered desegregation remedies, in a fast-shifting legal landscape remade by the Trump administration and the Supreme Court.
The Los Angeles school district remains among the most segregated in the country, with wide test score gaps between racial groups, well short of the ideals that motivated a 1963 desegregation lawsuit and the lengthy legal battle that followed.
Like many other districts, Los Angeles never truly integrated its schools. A short-lived mandatory busing program ended in the early 1980s.
Nationally, many school desegregation efforts faded long before the Trump presidency. U.S. school segregation has increased since the early 1990s.
Still, the politics around civil rights have shifted significantly under President Trump. Federal officials have backed away from enforcing efforts to help Black students and other groups that historically faced discrimination, and instead prioritized investigating what they see as unfair treatment of white students.
A 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing race-based affirmative action in college admissions has galvanized conservative groups and the Trump administration, which has pushed to apply the ruling beyond college admissions.
“We are living through an era of racial revanchism,” said Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School who wrote a book about the affirmative action decision. He said the Trump administration and others have often interpreted the ruling beyond the scope of the decision itself.
In Los Angeles, the 1963 lawsuit led to series of remedies. In addition to the busing program, “racially isolated minority” schools that could not be desegregated were designated to receive certain supports, said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer with Public Counsel in Los Angeles, who represented plaintiffs toward the end of the desegregation case.
That included setting a maximum teacher-student ratio for the schools.
The schools eventually became known as “predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian or other non-Anglo,” Mr. Rosenbaum said. Schools qualify if they have a resident population that is more than 70 percent nonwhite, according to the district’s website.
That takes in the vast majority of public schools in Los Angeles, whose student enrollment today is more than 70 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Black and 3 percent Asian. About 10 percent of students are non-Hispanic white.
More than 600 schools in the district qualify, according to the lawsuit, while fewer than 100 do not.
Qualifying schools have student-to-teacher ratios of no more than 25 to 1, compared with nonqualifying schools, where the ratio may be as high as 34 to 1, according to the lawsuit. Students at qualifying schools also receive extra points when applying to the district’s selective magnet schools, the lawsuit says.
“We don’t think the court order is relevant anymore to the present day, and it is currently inflicting present day harms,” said Aiden Buzzetti, president of the 1776 Project Foundation.
The group has argued that students of Middle Eastern descent, classified as white by the school district, miss out on benefits, and so do students of color who attend whiter schools.
Courts have often been more receptive to efforts to help students on the basis of family income rather than race. In 2024, Los Angeles recast a program meant to lift scores for Black students to include other factors, after a federal civil rights complaint.
Racially segregated schools are associated with wider gaps in student achievement, but research has shown that these academic differences can be entirely explained by differences in school poverty. In other words, segregation is harmful because it concentrates Black and Hispanic students in high-poverty environments, often with less access to qualified teachers.
“Segregation is not just by race — it is by race, by class, by teacher experience, by curriculum,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, who served as an expert witness for the judge in the 1963 school desegregation case.
Referring to the broader political movement to view remedies for historical racial discrimination as discriminatory against white Americans, he said, “For those of us who have worked in civil rights for the last 50 years, this is the ultimate degradation of the whole principle of civil rights.”
Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools.
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