Education watchdog group Defending Education filed a new federal civil rights complaint against the Los Angeles Unified School District on Wednesday, targeting the district's $175 million Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) and citing an October 2024 hot-microphone recording that appears to show top district officials directly contradicting representations made to federal investigators. Fox News confirmed the complaint, reporting the story under its education section with the headline "LA schools accused of quietly funding race-based programming for Black students only."
The BSAP was launched in 2021 to address documented disparities in educational outcomes for Black students in the nation's second-largest school district. The program has spent $125 million to date, with an additional $50 million allocated for the 2025-2026 school year. A first civil rights complaint filed by Defending Education in July 2023 alleged the program violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment by excluding students of other racial backgrounds from specific resources and supports. That complaint was dismissed in July 2024 after LAUSD represented to federal investigators that it had shifted to race-neutral resource allocation — that the program's benefits would be available to all students based on need rather than race.
The new complaint is based on an October 22, 2024 LAUSD board meeting recording in which, during a break, board president Jackie Goldberg was heard on a live microphone asking of protesters questioning the program's changes: "Do they not know that nothing has changed?" Superintendent Alberto Carvalho responded: "Nothing has changed," with Goldberg adding: "How do they not know that?" The exchange appears to directly contradict LAUSD's representations to federal officials that led to the 2023 complaint's dismissal — suggesting the district told federal investigators the program had become race-neutral while internally acknowledging it had not. LAUSD has not publicly responded to the hot-mic recording's legal implications.
The complaint arrives as the Trump administration's Department of Education and HUD are pursuing a broad enforcement agenda targeting race-conscious programs at state and local levels. The BSAP complaint joins the Washington State mortgage program investigation, Harvard's multibillion-dollar DOJ antisemitism lawsuit, and the administration's targeting of DEI requirements in medical school accreditation as part of a systematic federal enforcement posture against race-targeted programming. Whether the BSAP complaint advances under the Trump administration's education enforcement priorities — or is absorbed into a broader anti-DEI enforcement initiative — will determine whether the hot-mic recording produces regulatory consequences for the district.
Left-Leaning Emphasis
- Left-leaning education advocates argue the BSAP addresses a well-documented achievement gap — Black students in LAUSD have measurably lower graduation rates, standardized test scores, and college enrollment rates than peers of other backgrounds — and that targeted programs designed to remediate documented historical and systemic inequities serve a compelling educational purpose that should not be conflated with illegal discrimination.
- Progressive commentators noted that the Trump administration's broad anti-DEI enforcement agenda, of which the BSAP complaint is a part, represents a fundamental reinterpretation of civil rights law: treating programs designed to help disadvantaged minority students as if they were discrimination against majority students, inverting the purpose for which Title VI was enacted.
Right-Leaning Emphasis
- Fox News and civil rights watchdog groups framed the hot-mic recording as a smoking gun — LAUSD officials privately acknowledged they had misled federal investigators, continuing a race-exclusive $175 million program while claiming to federal officials it had been converted to a race-neutral model, which constitutes deliberate misrepresentation to the government.
- Right-leaning coverage treated the complaint as a straightforward equal protection case: the BSAP excludes students of Asian, Latino, white, and other backgrounds from specific supports solely on the basis of race, and the Supreme Court's recent jurisprudence on race-conscious programs makes that exclusion constitutionally and statutorily untenable regardless of the program's stated remediation purpose.