Report > Civil and Constitutional Rights, Title VI and Equal Protection, Title IX and Equal Protection
All the Woke We Cannot See: One School District’s Foray Into Discriminatory DEI and Response to Federal Civil Rights Enforcement
By Paul Zimmerman | June 17, 2026
Key findings
- The U.S. Department of Education’s (ED or the Education Department) return to federal civil rights enforcement based on the rule of law has led some observers to argue that discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and practices are in retreat at schools, colleges, and universities. Others remain unconvinced and contend that such moves are insincere and that DEI will resurface with the next change in administration.
- This report examines how one school district, City Schools of Decatur (CSD), Georgia, has navigated the Trump administration’s efforts to purge racially discriminatory policies and practices from federally funded education programs and activities.
- Until recently, CSD invoked the historic scourge of racial discrimination under Jim Crow to justify its own regime of disparate treatment based on race. It referred to its discriminatory efforts as “paying the debt”—that is, offering special support to students due to their race and training teachers and staff to blame white supremacy for achievement gaps in the district.
- Through race-based decision-making, “equity” pressure and racial affinity groups, and training for teachers and curricula that malign America as inherently racist and portray “whiteness” as the villain of our national story, CSD shunted aside academics as it made race central to the district’s philosophy and operations.
- In response to the 2024 elections and the enforcement priorities of the Trump Education Department, CSD quietly removed its most racially charged content and communications from its website. After years of rampantly discriminatory training, indoctrination, and practices, however, the question arises whether this removal of materials reflects genuine policy changes or a hiatus in the district’s DEI efforts pending a change in administrations. CSD has never permanently rescinded its discriminatory DEI policies to comply with federal and state law.
- Federal and state civil rights officials should investigate CSD, mandate that the district formally rescind its racially discriminatory policies and revise its practices, and direct the district to comply with the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and applicable state law.
Executive Summary
Under the second Trump administration, the Education Department has moved aggressively to prohibit federally funded K–12 schools, colleges, and universities from leveraging DEI offices and programs to discriminate based on race, sex, or other factors. This has had the welcome effect of forcing many institutions to retreat from unlawful programs. But do they view this retreat as a permanent off-ramp from discriminatory DEI practices, or as a temporary detour from race-based policies that will end once the enforcement threat has passed?
This report represents a case study examining how the school board and administrators of a public school district in Georgia justified racially discriminatory treatment in its classrooms. CSD spent millions of dollars to require administrators and educators to examine their decisions and teaching through a racial lens and to indoctrinate students into a race-based agenda, including the following:
- CSD’s equity office trained nearly all teachers and other staff in schizophrenic “Beyond Diversity” ideology, which both accepts that race is an imagined construct and then requires that all district decisions be made in reference to that construct.
- CSD established equity teams in all schools and launched racial affinity groups to further the message that failing to be anti-racist means being the enemy.
- CSD’s school board drafted a policy that would have explicitly required race-based decision-making throughout the district. Responding to advice from its attorney, the board adopted a sanitized version of the policy that removed its obsessive focus on race, but members communicated that the move was aimed at deflecting attention from Georgia authorities rather than reflecting any substantive change.
- CSD built a resource database that contained racially discriminatory materials, including a push to “decolonize” curricula by insisting on a critical refocus on each person’s racial “identity” as a fundamental aspect of how one views one’s society, country, institutions, and each other.
The Trump Education Department quickly made known its hostility to DEI and its commitment to ensuring that federal funding does not go to recipients that discriminate based on race. In response, while the CSD school board has formally maintained its “equity” policies, CSD staff have quietly removed racially discriminatory resources from the district’s website, revised descriptions of “equity” to characterize it without reference to race, and parted ways with key personnel who drove the district’s DEI efforts; however, the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 require more of school boards and public-school administrators than temporarily placing policies “on ice” and removing them from official websites. Accordingly, this report urges federal and state civil rights officials to investigate CSD and examine to what extent racially discriminatory DEI exists in the school district’s policies, practices, and programs.
