State Education’s Rejection of Trump’s Demand to End DEI Shows Agency Leaders’ Disregard for Students

The State Education Department of New York has just dismissed the Trump administration’s directive to eliminate its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates in schools, highlighting once more that the priorities of Commissioner Betty Rosa and her team do not align with the needs of students.

“There are no federal or state laws that prevent the principles of DEI,” asserted Daniel Morton-Bentley, an SED attorney, in a bold three-page rebuttal to the federal government.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that state education authorities confirm the elimination of all unconstitutional DEI programs or face cuts to their federal Title I funding for noncompliance.

SED is firmly standing its ground, claiming that DEI initiatives “merely seek to level the playing field and address the enduring harms of segregation as well as centuries of legal inequity, exclusion, and discrimination.”

Note how they rely on the alleged objective, instead of addressing how DEI actually functions.

DEI perceives everything, including students, solely through the prism of race, fueling racial tensions and distracting from substantive issues with performative activism.

It’s amusing to see this rationale defended by the same SED that is diluting academic standards in the name of equity, as increased numbers of families abandon public schools—where learning loss and chronic absenteeism are on the rise—for charter schools, private institutions, or even homeschooling (if they don’t relocate out of New York entirely).

The Trump administration is simply urging schools to confirm that they are not imposing an identity-focused curriculum on students and are promoting respect for a variety of opinions.

That state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa and her team would rather engage in conflict than clearly commit to this principle says it all.