Stopping Race-Based Funding and Restoring Fairness in Portland Public Schools

Raseley and Families for Fair School Funding v. Portland Public Schools

Portland Public Schools proclaims in its own budget documents that race “suffuses” every decision it makes, as it strives for “racial equity and social justice.” Decades of Supreme Court precedent calls that discrimination. And it’s unconstitutional. This lawsuit seeks to establish critical precedent against race-based funding formulas and reaffirm that every student—regardless of the color of their skin—deserves equal resources. 

Portland father Richard Raseley and Families for Fair School Funding—a nonpartisan association of Portland-area residents he founded—partnered with the Center for Individual Rights to challenge two of the District’s “Racial Equity and Social Justice” policies. The first distributes school staff and funding based on the racial composition of each school’s student body. The second abolished the local school foundation fundraising model because racially minded activists thought locally raised money benefited schools with predominantly white and Asian-American student populations more than others. Together, these “equity” policies have left dozens of Portland schools with fewer teachers, less funding, and parents who are blocked from trying to cover the gaps. 

Why This Case Matters

Portland is not alone in what it is trying to do. School districts across the country are watching public institutions use “equity” and “social justice” as justifications for distributing government resources based on race. This case will determine whether a public school district can do what the Constitution has long forbidden: treat children differently based on the color of their skin. 

For the families in this lawsuit, the harm is not theoretical. Their children attend schools that receive less funding—and have fewer staff—because of the racial composition of their student bodies. Parents who spent years building community fundraising programs that directly benefited their children’s classrooms have been hamstrung. The community engagement that local school foundations represented —$3.4 million raised in the final year they operated independently—dropped by more than 80 percent, down to $593,324 in the first year under the new fundraising policy. 

Even when those foundations were permitted to operate, they could only partially offset what the Equity Funding formula denied—schools that raised the most still did not receive as much per-student funding as schools that qualified for equity funding. The District’s decision to abolish the local school foundation eliminated the one tool parents had to narrow a gap the District’s own formula created, making an already serious injury worse. 

A ruling in this case will do more than reverse two policies in one school district. It will reaffirm that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment is not suspended when government officials label its discrimination “equity,” and it will protect every public-school student’s right to be treated as an individual—not as a representative of a racial category. 

Background 

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees every person “the equal protection of the laws.” Its core purpose, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, is “doing away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.” In 2023, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that guarantee in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, ruling that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it” and that “no State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.” 

Portland Public Schools has built its operations around race for more than fifteen years. In 2011, the District’s Board adopted a “Racial Educational Equity Policy” committing the District to provide “additional and differentiated resources” based on race to close achievement gaps that the District itself acknowledges reflect “complex societal and historical factors” affecting school districts across the country. In 2013, the District translated that commitment into its budget through an “equity” formula (now called “Equity Funding”) that distributes staff and money to schools based on the racial composition of their student bodies. 

The District’s 2025–26 budget declares that race “suffuses” every element of its strategic plan and confirms that the “primary focus” of its operational framework “is on race and ethnicity.” In February 2026, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an independent investigation into a District program available exclusively to Black students, citing potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

The Fourteenth Amendment permits race-conscious government action only in the most extraordinary and narrow circumstances—specifically, where a government entity seeks to remedy its own prior intentional discrimination. Portland has identified no such discrimination by Portland Public Schools. The District’s own documents attribute the achievement gap it seeks to remedy to societal forces beyond any school district’s walls. That is not a legal basis for imposing racial classifications on today’s students and today’s parents.