Is the Minneapolis Public School District Discriminating Against Students Based on the Color of Their Skin?

Defending Education is seeking the answer to this questions for students and their parents.

The organization filed last Friday filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) for separating children by race.

MPS administrators certainly know that the U.S. Supreme Court ended segregation of schools in 1954, as Defending Education noted. The court ruled that separate race-based schools were inherently unequal.

The high court in 2022 cited Brown when it ruled that race-based admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violated the Equal Protection clause.

From Defending Education’s complaint to OCR (PDF):

Home to over 30,000 students, MPS is the third-largest school district in Minnesota. But MPS actively discriminates against its students based on race. Several MPS high schools prohibit white and Asian students from enrolling in certain courses on black culture. The courses count toward MPS’s electives requirement, meaning that white and Asian students must choose from a narrower list of class options in order to graduate.

The names of the two segregated courses are “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge.”

Some government-supported schools have been resistant to dismantling policies design to judge individuals based on the color of their skin.