The Department of Education did not make a decision. It picked a word and cut with it. A decision has reasoning behind it. This one had a label, and the label was enough to cancel nearly every grant in two teacher-training programs before anyone defined the word.
The word was “divisive.” The department attached it to two teacher-training programs, canceled 104 of 109 grants worth about $600 million, and finished in under two weeks. Under two weeks left no time to read what the grants actually paid for. The word covered 104 different budgets at once.
A federal judge in Massachusetts went looking for the reasoning and found none. The ruling called the directive arbitrary and capricious and pointed out that it is hard to see how something can be “anti-racist” and “discriminatory” at the same time. The department’s own category contradicted itself. A directive that cannot separate those two cannot sort 109 grants.
The department answered the ruling by repeating the word. Taxpayer dollars, it said, should not fund “divisive ideology.” That is the sentence that canceled the grants, now offered as the defense of having canceled them. The department had no second sentence, so it said the first one again.
The court left the department’s goals alone. It struck the directive because no reasoning stood behind it. A cancellation takes a signature. A cancellation that survives a court takes a reason, and the department shipped the first without the second. The court asked for the reason and recorded that none was there.
Programs training teachers for rural Appalachia and high-need districts lost their money to a word the department never defined. The court asked for the definition. The department sent the word back. It had two weeks to write that definition and used them to cancel the money instead.
The department moved fast and never wrote a reason down. The court noticed, and a reason was all it asked for. The department did not have one.
Source context: JURIST
“The Label Was the Decision” audio version
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