(C) Arizona Mirror This story was originally published by Arizona Mirror and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Arizona moves to comply with Trump anti-DEI order in public schools [1] ['Caitlin Sievers', 'Carolina Cuellar Arizona Luminaria', 'Gloria Rebecca Gomez', 'More From Author', 'December', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2025-12-09 The Arizona Department of Education will have to develop its own definition of “diversity, equity and inclusion” as it moves to comply with President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, issued in January. Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne and his team at the Education Department say that complying with the executive order is vital to protect $866 million in federal public education funding that the Trump administration threatened to hold from noncompliant districts. But because the executive order doesn’t lay out the Trump administration’s definition of DEI, the stakeholder groups tasked with recommending changes to Arizona curriculum, teacher training and school administration policies will have to create their own definitions of the term and hope that they line up with how the Trump administration measures compliance. The Arizona State Board of Education voted Monday to begin amending its structured English immersion training course for educators who teach English language learners, and to revise its professional teaching standards, with a goal of removing references to DEI from both. Two stakeholder groups will be tasked with deciding what changes to make to the training course and to teaching standards and will bring those recommendations to the State Board of Education. The Arizona Department of Education recommended that the state make the changes after Trump in January issued his executive order that aimed to ban diversity, equity and inclusion from the federal government. That was followed by a February letter from the U.S. Department of Education threatening to withhold federal funding from schools who didn’t comply. “Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’and advanced discriminatory policies and practices,” the U.S. Department of Education said in the letter. The “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” executive order, along with the Department of Education letter, have been challenged numerous times in federal courts across the country, many of them imposing temporary stays of the order. Most of those cases are pending final judgement. Diversity, equity and inclusion practices were adopted in schools and businesses across the country in an effort to ensure that people from marginalized groups get the same opportunities as other people who don’t face the same barriers, and to ensure that people from those groups feel comfortable working in environments where they are in the minority. But the anti-DEI push led by Trump and embraced by Republicans — nearly 80% of GOP voters are white, and about two-thirds are older than 50 — has gone far beyond canceling programs aimed at increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in federal agencies and programs. For example, Trump’s executive order led to the deletion of Pentagon webpages honoring the work of Navajo Code Talkers and the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of all-Black pilots, during World War II. It also resulted in the suspension of programs designed to help prevent sexual assault in the military. The webpages were restored after public backlash. “We are concerned that efforts to eliminate DEI programming within Arizona public schools could have similar unintended consequences — robbing Arizona students of their ability to learn the history of their state and nation and preventing important programming designed to keep them safe,” Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, said in a statement. A lengthy public comment period during Monday’s State Board of Education meeting included a mix of commenters, many of them current or former teachers, both praising the decision to comply with the anti-DEI executive order or criticizing it. Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, told the board that she adamantly opposed the proposal. “Any educator will tell you that gutting standards around responsiveness to cultural backgrounds, cultural competence, celebrating cultural diversity, and leveraging home language and cultural assets, truly, it would be educational malpractice, and would erase what makes our students unique,” she said. Mario Acosta, a psychologist who formerly worked for Tucson Unified School District, said that the plan to rid these programs of DEI-related language would send the state backward. Acosta pointed out that Pima County is a multicultural area, with many families with origins in Mexico as well as various other parts of the world. “These antiquated ideas are not based on anything that has to do with evidence-based research or findings,” Acosta said. The Arizona Education Association also opposed the changes, saying in a letter to the Arizona Department of Education last week that the Trump administration had no power to enforce the executive order and that following through with the anti-DEI plan would have disruptive consequences in the classroom. The AEA wrote that the plan “risks a cascading ‘race to the bottom’ in which educational standards are regularly opened and revised to align with shifts in political priorities instead of the direct needs of Arizona students.” But Susan Groff, who said she’s been an educator in Arizona since 1978, told the board the changes were needed. “I don’t believe that the original authors of Arizona’s teaching standards ever intended the DEI terms to mean what they’ve come to mean in recent years,” she said. “In our standards, equity simply meant giving every student fair access to learning, seating a child where they can hear, providing large print, or pre-teaching vocabulary for English learners. But nationally, the same terms were reinterpreted in ways the authors never foresaw, and in some cases, this led to lower academic expectations, or disruptions that families did not support.” Pamela Kelly, a former teacher of English language learners, agreed with Groff, saying the plan was “not political.” “I cordially urge the board to authorize this work immediately, so educators can provide the focused, compliant, and high quality instruction our students in Arizona deserve,” she said. (Groff and Kelly are both allies of Horne’s, and have spoken at press conferences in support of his policies.) Horne told the board that, contrary to what he’d heard in some news reports, the changes wouldn’t impact instruction about the history of Native Americans or any other cultural group. Horne claimed that he introduced the idea of teaching about various groups during his first term as superintendent, from 2003 to 2011. Nearly 20 years ago, during his first stint as superintendent of public instruction, Horne was behind a ban on ethnic studies in public schools that was later found to be unconstitutional and rooted in racism. The Arizona Department of Education plans to begin convening stakeholder meetings to work on policy revisions in February with the intention of bringing suggestions to the board in September. Horne told the board that he worried that the timeline wasn’t quick enough. “If President Trump says he’s gonna do something, my experience is that he does it, whether you agree with him or not,” he said. “And he has said that he will cut off funding if DEI is maintained, and I just hope September is soon enough.” The February letter from the U.S. Department of Education said that it would begin investigating districts that failed to comply within two weeks. That was 42 weeks ago. 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