Comment on FR Doc # 2026-12861

Dear Assistant Secretary Baesler: I am writing as a private citizen in support of the Department's proposal to rescind the Equity Assistance Center Program regulations. My wife and I have four children, and we homeschool them here in Florida. I am a taxpayer who believes this program stopped doing the job that congress assigned to it. I read the comments already filed. Most oppose the rescission, and most are personal testimonials from people who found the centers helpful. I have no reason to doubt a single one. But a testimonial answers a different question than the one in front of the Department. It tells you whether people valued the service. It does not tell you whether Congress authorized it. Gratitude is not authority. Every federal program has grateful clients who enjoy receiving taxpayer money, and if that settled the matter, no program could ever be corrected. On the question that does matter, the centers have already answered for themselves. Their own published history, written by a retired center director, explains that in the 1980s the work moved beyond desegregation to “educational equity,” which it defines as a commitment that “the different characteristics of students must be taken into account” in how they access curriculum and programs. That same history treats an equal approach as insufficient, lists advocacy for social justice among the outcomes it wants schools to produce, and states that the centers now serve districts where desegregation is not an issue at all. Set that beside the law that pays for it. Congress said without regard to race. The centers say characteristics must be taken into account. Both cannot be the mission, and I am not accusing these centers of anything they have not published about themselves. Several commenters warn that regional expertise and relationships will be lost. Some may be. But Congress authorized technical assistance for desegregation and left the Department free to deliver it directly, by contract, by grant, or through another agency. The authority survives this rescission untouched. What goes away is a structure that aimed the money somewhere else, and expertise pointed at the wrong target is not worth keeping merely because it took years to build. My ask is simple. End the federal regulatory framework governing this program. Stop taxpayer dollars from subsidizing DEI, Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and similar programming through it. Restore the program to the lawful technical assistance Title IV actually describes. And return federal education dollars to educational excellence and legal compliance rather than ideological advocacy. I am writing because none of us live behind a wall. The children sitting in public classrooms become the neighbors, coworkers, employers, and officials my children will live among for the rest of their lives. Ideas do not stay where they are planted. A generation trained to sort people by category first will carry that habit into hiring decisions, workplaces, courtrooms, and public office, and my family will live in whatever country that builds. This is my business as a citizen, not only as a parent. Please finalize the rule.