Federal lawsuit challenges LAUSD magnet admissions and class-size benefits tied to race-based PHBAO designation

Parents learn about a little-known advantage

Late on a recent weeknight, parents crowded into a Los Angeles school auditorium to hear how to get their children into the district’s coveted magnet programs. One mother, whose child attends a campus on the city’s west side, said she arrived believing the system was competitive but fair.

Then she learned that students zoned to certain schools automatically receive bonus “magnet points” that significantly boost their odds of admission. Those points are tied, in part, to whether a child’s neighborhood school is classified as “predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian and other non-Anglo.”

“I thought it was about your kid’s record and how long you’ve been applying,” she said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. “I didn’t know there were extra points based on the racial makeup of where you live.”

That discovery sits at the heart of a new federal lawsuit accusing the Los Angeles Unified School District of violating civil-rights laws by giving extra benefits to campuses in mostly nonwhite neighborhoods.

The lawsuit and what it seeks

The 1776 Project Foundation, a conservative nonprofit, filed suit Jan. 20 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleging that the nation’s second-largest school system uses an outdated, race-based scheme that disadvantages white and some Middle Eastern students.

The complaint, 1776 Project Foundation v. Alberto M. Carvalho, et al. (No. 2:26-cv-00548), names Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, school board President Scott Schmerelson and the district’s Board of Education in their official capacities. It seeks to block Los Angeles Unified from using racial composition or “proxies” for race to determine which schools receive smaller classes, additional staff, mandated parent-teacher conferences and admissions priority in magnet programs.

“Los Angeles Unified engages in a program of overt discrimination against a new minority: white students,” the foundation alleges in its filing. It also describes students of Middle Eastern descent as part of a “disfavored group” at nonpreferred schools.

The suit does not list individual parents as plaintiffs. Instead, the 1776 Project Foundation claims associational standing on behalf of members with children in the district, including an unnamed “Parent A,” who it says fears retaliation if identified. Parent A’s children attend a campus classified as “non-PHBAO” and, according to the complaint, sit in larger classes, receive fewer required parent conferences and recently lost out on a magnet seat in part because they did not receive “PHBAO points.”

Los Angeles Unified has said it cannot comment in detail on pending litigation. In a brief statement, the district said it “remains firmly committed to ensuring all students have meaningful access to services and enriching educational opportunities.”

What “PHBAO” means

At issue is a little-known designation that has shaped district policy for decades: PHBAO, shorthand for “Predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian and Other Non-Anglo.” Under district criteria, a school is labeled PHBAO if more than 70% of its resident students fall into those categories. All other campuses are considered non-PHBAO.

The foundation says more than 600 schools in Los Angeles Unified are PHBAO, compared with fewer than 100 non-PHBAO campuses.

How the designation affects resources and admissions

The classification carries tangible consequences. According to the lawsuit and district documents, PHBAO schools are required to keep class sizes significantly smaller, with student-teacher ratios capped at about 25-to-1. Non-PHBAO schools, by contrast, may have classes with roughly 34 students per teacher.

The complaint also says PHBAO campuses receive additional staff and administrators, and that only these schools must provide at least two parent-teacher conferences each year for every student.

In the competitive magnet system, students whose neighborhood, or “home,” school is PHBAO get four extra priority points. Those points, in a heavily oversubscribed program, can determine who gets a seat.

“Children who attend non-PHBAO schools are given inferior treatment and calculated disadvantages in the quality of their education and their access to magnet programs simply on the racial classification of the school they attend,” the foundation alleges.

Origins in court-ordered desegregation

District integration materials and past court records describe PHBAO as a tool born out of the long-running Crawford desegregation case. In 1970, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge found that the district operated substantially segregated schools and that minority campuses were more crowded and under-resourced. Courts later identified five “harms of racial isolation,” including low academic achievement, low self-esteem and overcrowded conditions, and ordered Los Angeles Unified to develop a “meaningful desegregation plan.”

PHBAO and associated benefits — such as reduced class sizes and targeted magnet recruitment — were part of that response, intended to address the harms in overwhelmingly Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Supporters of the lawsuit argue those remedies have outlived their legal justification.

“Categorizing schools based on racial or ethnic composition and then assigning benefits based on that categorization raises serious constitutional questions,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of the California Policy Center, a conservative advocacy group that backs the challenge.

“Favoring minority students over white and Middle Eastern counterparts as some vestige of a poor legal decision in the 1970s can be seen as discriminatory and potentially unconstitutional in 2026,” he said.

The 1776 Project Foundation frames the case as part of a broader effort to end race-based policies in public education. “What began as a temporary measure to address segregation has become a rigid system of racial favoritism that excludes thousands of students from equal opportunity,” its president, Aiden Buzzetti, said in announcing the suit.

The group and its allied political action committee have been active in school board elections across the country, supporting conservative candidates who oppose diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and what they call critical race theory.

Critics: lawsuit distorts history and current practice

Civil-rights lawyers and education scholars say the lawsuit misrepresents both the history and current operation of Los Angeles Unified’s programs.

“These programs were part of a court decree to remedy decades of discrimination in under-resourced schools,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a longtime civil-rights attorney who has litigated against the district in the past. “Resources were directed to all students attending separate and unequal schools. The lawsuit is one that only a fan of Jim Crow could support.”

Tanya Ortiz Franklin, a Los Angeles school board member, said she worries that if PHBAO-related supports are dismantled, “poor children of color will continue to be overlooked, under-supported, and ultimately unable to achieve their greatest potential.”

Researchers say the underlying inequities that prompted the original court orders have hardly disappeared.

“This is a misguided attempt to rewrite the history of school desegregation in the country,” said Tyrone C. Howard, who directs UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. He pointed to persistent gaps in achievement and access to advanced coursework for Black and Latino students in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Pedro Noguera, dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, said the case reflects an “increasingly common” strategy by conservative groups to claim reverse discrimination.

“The idea is that helping low-income kids of color hurts affluent white students,” he said. “However, there is no empirical evidence to support this claim.”

A shifting legal landscape

The legal backdrop to the challenge has shifted in recent years. In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, amending the state constitution to bar public institutions from granting “preferential treatment” based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in education, employment and contracting. The 1776 Project Foundation argues PHBAO benefits are precisely the kind of preferences Prop. 209 forbids.

More recently, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the University of North Carolina held that race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities violated the Equal Protection Clause. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that ending racial discrimination “means eliminating all of it” and stressed that race-based programs must have “meaningful end points.”

Although that ruling applied to higher education, conservative organizations and some officials in the Trump administration have cited it to push for the rollback of race-conscious policies in K-12 schools, including magnet admissions, scholarships and equity programs.

Los Angeles Unified, with about 380,000 students who are roughly 74% Latino, 10% white, 7% Black and 3% Asian, has already adjusted at least one initiative in response to legal pressure. In 2024, the district restructured a support program originally aimed at Black students so that it served all students on certain campuses, after questions were raised about whether it complied with Prop. 209 and the Supreme Court’s guidance.

What comes next

The PHBAO lawsuit arrives at an early stage. As of early February, no substantive rulings had been issued. The case could take months or years to resolve and may eventually reach the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

If the foundation prevails, Los Angeles Unified could be ordered to stop using PHBAO classifications altogether and to redesign how it allocates smaller classes, extra staff and magnet preferences — likely relying on race-neutral factors such as poverty, academic performance or neighborhood conditions. That could lessen disparities between PHBAO and non-PHBAO schools or, critics warn, thin out resources at high-need campuses without providing meaningful gains elsewhere.

Other large districts that still use race-related criteria to identify priority schools or award admissions advantages would be watching closely.

If the district successfully defends PHBAO, courts could signal that race-conscious remnants of old desegregation plans remain permissible when tied to ongoing harms and structured to serve all students on affected campuses. That outcome might embolden other systems to maintain or refine similar approaches, even as political and legal scrutiny intensifies.

For now, the lawsuit has laid bare a question that has haunted American education for more than half a century: how long school systems may explicitly take race into account to repair the legacy of segregation — and whether, in trying to make opportunities more equal, they may be accused of tipping the scales in the other direction.