The Trump administration filed a lawsuit against Minneapolis Public Schools this week, claiming that the district’s teacher contract gives preferential treatment to educators of color.
“This preferential treatment is plainly discriminatory and unlawful,” claims the federal complaint from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which alleges discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, and sex.
Minneapolis Public Schools declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
Marcia Howard, the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators also declined to comment on the lawsuit. “Release the Epstein files, that’s all I’m saying,” she said.
The complaint stems from a provision in the teacher contract settled in March 2022 to end a three-week strike of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators. Typically, teachers receive layoffs and involuntary reassignments based on seniority. But this rule often privileges white teachers, because teachers of color are more likely to be new to the classroom. In the Minneapolis teacher contract adopted in March 2022, “underrepresented” teachers can retain their jobs out of seniority order.
This provision in the contract sparked rightwing outrage and a lawsuit in state court. Deborah Clapp, a Minneapolis taxpayer, sued in August 2022, claiming that her tax dollars were going toward an unlawful activity.
The case came before the Minnesota Supreme Court in October 2024. In practice, the contract provision has yet to come into play because Minneapolis Public Schools has not laid off any teachers since 2010. Attorney Tim Sullivan, arguing for Minneapolis Public Schools, told the Minnesota Supreme Court during October oral arguments that the district had not spent any funds to implement this provision of the contract. Attorneys for Clapp did not identify any specific expenditure the district had made to implement the contract either.
In recent years, Minneapolis Public Schools has made budget cuts of non-tenured teachers, which don’t count as layoffs and have not triggered the contract provision. For example, in spring 2024, facing a massive budget deficit, Minneapolis Public Schools “excessed” 452 teachers, removing them from their positions with the right to apply for other jobs in the district. In the end, 50 lost their jobs altogether.
Of those, 36% were teachers of color — in a district where the number was 22% overall. But because those teachers were not tenured, Minneapolis Public Schools said, the job losses did not count as layoffs and the contract provision did not apply.
In January 2025, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that Clapp did not have standing and dismissed the case. At the time, Tom Fitton, the president of Washington, D.C.-based conservative legal group Judicial Watch, which represented Clapp, said his group would ask then-President-elect Donald Trump to investigate the contract as a “blatant civil rights violation.”
In its complaint filed Tuesday, the Justice Department pointed not only to the contract provision aimed at protecting “underrepresented” teachers, but a slew of other contract provisions including an “Anti-Bias Anti-Racist Educator Development and Advisory Council” and culturally responsive support for teachers of color. The Justice Department accused Minneapolis Public Schools of “a pattern or practice of discrimination against MPS teachers.”
It also alleged discrimination in the district’s partnership with Black Men Teach, a nonprofit that places teaching fellows at Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary School. These teaching fellows receive five additional professional development days to participate in training with Black Men Teach.
“Of course, only black men can be ‘Black Men Teach Fellows,’ so women, whites, Asians, and others need not apply,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit asks the court to order the district to stop implementing the contract provisions.
