Editorial: LAUSD should fight for its Black Student Achievement Plan

It’s been more than 20 years since the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law, its goal to make schools accountable for educating all children. Before the law passed, schools gave the test scores for all students in a grade, a practice that often hid the reality that there was an achievement gap between white students and their Black and Latino classmates.
Those gaps were alarmingly wide, especially for Black students. For all the problems with No Child Left Behind, and there were many, it at least ushered in an era of awareness about how many students urgently needed help and put pressure on schools to do more for the students who had been slighted by their schools.
So it is disappointing that an actual effort to shrink the gap — the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Black Student Achievement Plan — was challenged as racist in a federal civil rights complaint by a conservative Virginia group. The achievement plan provides funding for extra counselors and enhanced curriculum to schools with large percentages of Black students.
Given the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling prohibiting the use of affirmative action in college admissions, LAUSD officials could have eliminated the $120-million-a-year program in response to the lawsuit. Instead, the district removed any racial preferences, extending the program to help a wider band of underserved students, but ultimately reducing resources for Black students, who make up 7% of the student population.
The decision was expedient and got the case dismissed, but L.A. Unified should have fought harder to keep the program as it was. If schools aren’t going to put special effort and funding into raising the achievement of Black students, what are all those demographic breakdowns by race, which districts are required to collect and publicly report, meant to achieve? It’s hard to avoid the impression that the group filing the complaint, Parents Defending Education, is fine with tsk-tsking lower scores for Black students but doesn’t want anything actually done about them.
There are grounds to defend the program, even in California, which bans affirmative action in the public sector. John Affeldt, a managing attorney at the nonprofit civil rights law group Public Advocates, said government agencies are constitutionally allowed to use “race-conscious remedies” to make up for past race-based discrimination. District leaders certainly should be able to do this.
For decades, low-income schools in the district, many of them predominantly Black, actively discouraged their students from taking the A-G courses that would qualify them for the state’s four-year colleges and universities. Some schools didn’t even offer the needed classes, and sometimes students in these schools were automatically enrolled in easier courses. Advanced Placement offerings were sparse when they existed at all. The teachers in these schools had less experience. Math and science classes were often taught by rotating substitutes who had no expertise in the subjects.
This isn’t ancient history; the situation continued into the early part of the 21st century.
The disparities have affected Latino students as well, but L.A. Unified’s record of giving short shrift to Black students has a much longer history. Many of the schools that were given fewer resources or that directed students away from college were almost entirely Black in 1980; they became predominantly Latino by early this century.
L.A. Unified appears to have ample reason to admit that it shortchanged Black students. Now is the time to fight for the children and teens it let down for so long.