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The courts have emerged as a significant hurdle for the Trump administration’s educational policies. President Trump’s initiatives to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within schools, eliminate “gender ideology” from educational settings, and challenge Harvard University have encountered setbacks in court. The administration has frequently criticized these judicial decisions, referring to them as the work of “activist judges.”
Despite these challenges, Trump has achieved notable legal successes, especially in his quest to downsize and eventually dismantle the Education Department. Nonetheless, legal opposition to his policies has been gaining traction.
“What we are seeing is, since the early days of this administration, more teachers, more students, more schools are standing up and saying, ‘That is not what the law says, and that is not how we have decided in our community to educate our students,’” remarked Maddy Gitomer, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, who has successfully litigated against the administration on education matters. She added, “The courage, I think, is contagious. It is spreading.”
But opponents of his agenda are getting results after lawyering up.
“What we are seeing is, since the early days of this administration, more teachers, more students, more schools are standing up and saying, ‘That is not what the law says, and that is not how we have decided in our community to educate our students.’ And I think that the more people we see doing that, the courage, I think, is contagious. It is spreading,” said Maddy Gitomer, senior counsel at Democracy Forward who has successfully won education cases against the administration.
“We are seeing more and more people getting involved in these legal fights, and we are seeing a lot of wins,” she added.
Trump has not shied away from going after judges who have ruled against him in areas such as his tariffs or the deportation of Venezuelan migrants, even receiving rare pushback last year from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts for his attacks on the bench.
Trump’s policies on topics including immigration and transgender rights have overlapped frequently with education, with scores of active cases in the court system.
“The Trump Department of Education is carrying out a clear mandate from parents: get politics and DEI out of classrooms, cut federal administrative bloat, and ensure education dollars are spent directly on student achievement,” said department press secretary Savannah Newhouse. “Challengers who are rushing to the courts claim to act in students’ interests, but their efforts would only lock students into a broken status quo that has already failed them.”
Most recently, educators in Minnesota have challenged the administration’s decision to allow federal immigration officers around school property after agents arrested a teacher in Minneapolis on school grounds.
But setbacks have not slowed the administration down.
The Education Department has opened numerous investigations and threatened funding of schools over transgender athletes on women’s sports team, while the Supreme Court is weighing the legality of the issue.
“What the Trump administration is doing is not actually complying with the law. They’re interpreting Title IX based on President Trump’s executive order. But the thing is, he can’t just change law by the stroke of a pen, and so, their whole interpretation and the way they’re going about pressuring schools or threatening schools by withholding funds that they don’t comply with this interpretation and create exclusive policies is just unlawful,” said Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice and Title IX expert at the National Women’s Law Center.
Last year, Harvard successfully won the restoration of millions of dollars in funding in court after the administration pulled the research money to pressure the university to cough up a fine and make some policy changes.
But Trump hasn’t given up on trying to make Harvard bend: This week he demanded the school pay the federal government $1 billion, up from an original demand of $500 million.
A federal judge, however, has ruled against Trump’s would-be freeze of Harvard’s federal funds — and his attempt to block it from enrolling international students.
Maine, meanwhile, won in a settlement against the administration last year after the Department of Agriculture froze funding over the state’s transgender athlete policies.
And in a case that was celebrated by teachers unions, the administration dropped its appeal of a ruling against its anti-DEI proposals.
“In their first year in office the president and his education secretary have tried — with the stroke of a pen — to rewrite four decades of civil rights law, abolish the federal Department of Education, cripple student borrowers, muzzle academic freedom and deny childcare to families,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
“Their actions have ignored the Constitution, Congress and settled law — which is why we, on behalf of our members, have challenged them in court. The AFT will not stop fighting for kids and their educators’ futures, as well as the futures of their schools and colleges,” she added.
Often Trump wins on education when the matter never enters a courtroom. Major universities including Columbia and Brown did not challenge their federal funding pauses but instead agreed to deals that included financial payments and changes to hiring, admission and disciplinary processes.
“Unfortunately, as we see all too often, universities are more interested, sometimes, in protecting themselves, staying good with the government for access to federal dollars or state dollars, and they’re choosing money over student rights. And I think it’s a real shame, but it’s a long term problem,” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Pressure from the Trump administration or state lawmakers aligned with his agenda has seemed to be enough for some universities to take action.
Recently, Texas A&M announced it is cutting its women’s and gender studies programs. It also fired a professor who kicked a student out of class who called her lesson on gender identity in children’s literature illegal.
That professor recently filed a lawsuit against Texas A&M for allegedly violating her First Amendment rights.
Even K-12 schools have not been immune to taking quick action to appease lawmakers, with several educators fired after making disparaging remarks regarding conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s assassination back in September. Many of those teachers have filed lawsuits, too.
State and federal lawmakers are “asking for universities to punish speech, and that was a really alarming trend,” after Kirk’s assassination, Coward said. “And we hope that these lawsuits start vindicating these rights better.”