Not long after President Donald Trump took office last year, Chicago Public Schools landed in the crosshairs of a Republican-led attack on protections for transgender students and programs aimed at helping specific student groups, like Chicago’s Black Student Success Plan.
Trump and his supporters have said these approaches violate federal civil rights laws and, in essence, discriminate against cisgender students and students who aren’t Black.
These issues will likely come to a head on Wednesday when CPS’ Superintendent/CEO Macquline King testifies in front of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. She will speak alongside the superintendents of San Francisco Unified School District and Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia, both of which have policies that are similar to CPS’.
The subject of the hearing, titled “Breaking Trust: Attacks on Parental Rights, Inappropriate Content, and Legal Abuses in America’s Schools,” is broad, meaning the superintendents could be asked about almost anything. But it is expected that Republicans on the committee will focus their questions for King on Chicago’s policies around transgender students and the Black Student Success Plan, which aims to improve the experiences and academic achievement .
Many from Chicago will have King’s back. U.S. Rep Delia Ramirez, who represents part of Chicago and the west suburbs, is holding a press conference before the hearing to demand “an end to the Trump administration and Republicans’ attacks on trans children and Black and Brown students.” The Chicago Teachers Union is sending a bus of students, parents, teachers and at least one school board member, Jitu Brown, to stand with Ramirez.
This will be the first time during Trump’s second term that K-12 superintendents are being called to the Hill to confront questions about these hot-button topics. King will be watched closely by other school districts and education experts, said Eric Duncan, P-12 policy director at EdTrust, a national organization that advocates for equity in education.
Chicago is seen as being at “the vanguard of protecting these student populations” and King will have “the opportunity to share, showcase that, and defend these programs,” he said.
Being in the national spotlight will be a major test for King, who took the helm of CPS just a year ago after being a school principal and serving in the Chicago mayor’s office.
CPS did not respond to questions about how King is prepping. In a statement, a district spokesperson said that King “is prepared to answer any of their questions.”
“As a former CPS student, teacher, principal and now CEO/Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, Dr. King is ready to share her insight and experience with our United States Representatives,” the statement said.
Federal hearing will be big test for CPS leader
The hearing will happen just days after a conservative group, America First Legal, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice alleging that CPS is violating federal law by letting students use the bathroom and names or pronouns that fit their gender identity without informing their parents.
King will be testifying under duress, having sidestepped invitations to testify and eventually being compelled to appear through a subpoena. Tim Walberg, a staunch conservative from Michigan who heads the education committee, said it was the first time he’d forced someone to testify in his year and a half as chair.
King was likely reluctant to go to Washington, D.C. because she will have to walk a tightrope. Chicago parents, students and community activists have demanded the policies that are being scrutinized. Yet she won’t want to make CPS a punching bag more than it already is, or give federal education officials a reason to pull more money, as the district grapples with a $732 million budget deficit.
Already, the Trump administration yanked a $20 million federal grant from CPS over its Black Student Success Plan. And CPS is facing at least two ongoing federal investigations related to that plan and policies for trans students.
Walberg insinuated a funding threat in his letter to King about the subpoena. He wrote that the hearing will further the committee’s understanding of the “effectiveness of federal spending and whether additional remedial legislation may be warranted.”
Duncan said he does not think the Trump administration or Congress is readying to pull back big streams of federal funding from school districts in Democrat-led cities, but they could go after smaller grants.
CPS has long had policies protecting transgender students
More than a decade ago, in 2014, CPS established guidance for “supporting gender diversity.” While Chicago’s school district was not the first to create such guidelines, reporting at the time pointed out that they were more specific than places like Los Angeles and New York.
Those guidelines, which have been updated a few times since, instruct schools to address students by “a name and pronouns that correspond to the gender identity they consistently assert at school” and reminds school staff to protect these students’ privacy like they would any other student’s.
The guidelines say trans students should be able to use the bathrooms “that makes them feel safest and most included in the school.” It also reminds schools that students have privacy rights and that disclosing certain information without a student’s permission could violate federal and state privacy laws.
Several organizations that advocate for LGBTQ students helped write the guidelines. And while there’s long been conservative opposition in Illinois, and elsewhere in the country, to schools having these kinds of policies, in Chicago they were put in place without controversy.
Over the years, speakers at Chicago school board meetings have rarely complained about students using bathrooms or locker rooms based on how they identify.
And in 2020, when CPS revised its sex education policy to make it more comprehensive and inclusive, none of the 177 people who submitted comments urged the school district to exclude information about different gender identities. Rather, the parents and others were more concerned about whether all schools would get the same level of comprehensive sex education and the funding to offer that.
Demonstrators attended a rally for transgender rights in Chicago’s Grant Park in 2023. In Chicago Public Schools, many families and students support the district’s policies that allow trans students to use the bathrooms, names and pronouns that correspond with their gender identity.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times file
For many CPS families and school staff, the concern is how to make sure all students feel safe.
As is true across the country, CPS students who identify as LGBTQ+ are more likely than other students to report feeling persistently sad and hopeless, according to the 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is administered by federal health officials.
That survey also showed 1 in 4 LGBTQ+ students report having made plans to kill themselves within the past year, said Elizabeth Jarpe-Ratner, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Illinois Chicago, who has studied and written about CPS’ sex ed and transgender student policies.
“They also are experiencing absenteeism at higher rates because they don’t feel safe in school, and so this is really, really important for CPS, and for any district, to be able to see this data and figure out how we are going to support our students,” she said.
Protective and inclusive policies and practices, such as curriculum that represents students and families of many backgrounds, and affinity groups for LGBTQ+ students, have been shown to improve students’ attendance rates and grades, she said.
Jarpe-Ratner and her colleagues interviewed 55 CPS social workers between 2014 and 2019 about how they work with transgender students and approach talking to parents.
“Nobody is trying to actively withhold information from parents,” she said. “The policy is written around prioritizing the safety of kids, who, as we know, come from a lot of different situations, and so that’s a clinical judgment for the social worker to work with that student and with that family to make sure that they’re safe and to make sure that they’re supported.”
Chicago communities pushed for Black Student Success Plan
The Trump administration is also scrutinizing CPS’ Black Student Success Plan, and King is likely to face questions about it at the House hearing.
The plan was born out of deep frustration and a community-led desire for CPS to do something about it — a fact observers say King should make clear to members of Congress.
As Dwayne Truss, one of the activists that pushed for the initiative, says: “I am not going to sugarcoat it, test scores for Black students are terrible.”
Only a third of Black students in CPS are considered proficient in reading and 15% are proficient in math, according to recent state test data. By comparison, about 73% of white students were proficient in reading and 62% in math.
“The whole intent was just to gather attention and say: ‘How do we reconfigure something that’s not working? What are we missing? What do we need to address?’” Truss said.
Confronted with this data gathered by Truss and others, Illinois lawmakers required CPS to create the plan. Truss points out that the plan does not demand the school district spend additional money on Black students. Instead, it seeks to improve the daily student experience in hopes that will spur improvement.
The plan looks to address a number of issues, including the lack of Black teachers, compared to the Black student population, and a much higher suspension rate for Black students compared with white students. It also seeks to boost the number of Black students who earn high enough scores on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests to earn college credits.
The plan calls for steps like partnering with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to recruit Black teachers and centering student voices to make schools more responsive to their needs.
Other school districts, like Los Angeles, have similar plans. Though they’ve also faced conservative challenges, and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating Los Angeles’ plan, too.
Duncan from EdTrust and other education experts have said these plans do not violate the civil rights of white students, as the Trump administration contends.
CPS’ plan looks at “very specific indicators of student opportunity” that affect academic outcomes, Duncan said. “I think as long as districts are approaching it from that perspective and are not using it as a way to harm other students, it’s not illegal.”
But he said many who’d like to eliminate any form of affirmative action are itching for the courts, not Congress, to take up the matter. Some would like to see the Supreme Court go beyond the groundwork the justices laid in Students for Fair Admissions, a landmark ruling that banned colleges from considering a student’s race as part of the admissions process.
And he notes “there are advocates from both sides that want some clarity” about whether plans aimed at helping one student group violate the federal Civil Rights Act.