The New York State Education Department has defied the Trump administration’s directive to remove Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion guidelines from schools. This action highlights that the priorities of Commissioner Betty Rosa and her team do not prioritize the best interests of students.

“There are no federal or state laws prohibiting the principles of DEI,” wrote Daniel Morton-Bentley, an attorney for SED, in a defiant three-page response to the feds.

President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order requiring state education officials to affirm that all unconstitutional DEI programs are eliminated — or have their federal Title I funding halted for noncompliance.

SED is digging in, insisting DEI initiatives “simply aim to level the playing field and redress the ongoing harms of segregation and centuries of legal inequity, exclusion and discrimination.”

Notice how they fall back on the supposed goal, rather than confronting how DEI actually works.

DEI views everything, including students, purely through the lens of race, stoking racial tensions and wasting everyone’s time and energy on woke kabuki theater.

Of course this nonsense gets defended by the same SED that’s watering down academic standards in the name of fairness, as ever more families flee the regular public schools — where learning loss and chronic absenteeism have skyrocketed — for charters, private academies and even home schooling (if they don’t leave New York completely).

The Trump administration is merely asking schools to affirm that they’re not foisting an identity-based curriculum on students — and are fostering respect for diversity of opinion. 

That state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa and her minions would rather fight than explicitly attest to that is all you need to know.