Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
Public health's accreditor may delete the word "racism," and syllabi will follow
CEPH is weighing removal of the competency requiring students to learn how structural bias and racism undermine health. The language will not be final until 2027; self-studies are being written now.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- The Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) competencies are the set of educational requirements that schools and programs of public health are required to teach their students.
- CEPH is weighing the removal of language that specifically requires schools to teach about "structural bias, social inequities, and racism"; the potential changes are not finalized.
- When programs apply to renew their accreditation, they must show that their students engage with the topics set forth in the CEPH competencies.
- CEPH currently accredits 68 schools of public health.
- CEPH currently accredits 190 programs of public health.
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Why it matters
The Council on Education for Public Health, which sets the curriculum competencies that every accredited US school and program of public health must teach, is weighing removal of the requirement that students learn how "structural bias, social inequities, and racism" undermine health [1][2]. Because programs seeking renewal must show that their students engage with the topics in the competencies, one deleted sentence propagates into hundreds of syllabi and self-study documents [3].
The scale is not trivial. CEPH currently accredits 68 schools of public health and 190 programs of public health [4][5], 258 accredited units in total [1].
The paper trail is short and legible. The current wording, adopted in 2024, requires that educators have students "discuss the means by which structural bias, social inequities, and racism undermine health and create challenges to achieving health equity at organizational, community, and systemic levels" [6]. A near-identical competency was already on the books in 2019, when CEPH published a blog post titled "When current events collide with CEPH competencies" [7]. A year after the 2024 adoption, following Trump's return to office, CEPH proposed replacing it with "analyze the factors that create disparate health outcomes" [8]. After comments from program heads, that was replaced again with "Examine systemic factors that contribute to challenges in achieving optimal population health for a given community or communities" [9]. Three wordings are now on the record for a single competency [2]. Named mechanisms became unnamed factors.
Executive director Laura Rasar King told STAT she would not comment on the competencies because they are still under development, and that the language will be finalized in 2027 [10][11]. Asked about the role of political pressure, she wrote that CEPH's goal is "to maintain rigorous standards while ensuring that our criteria are appropriate and workable for accredited schools and programs in the diverse legal and policy environments in which they operate" [12].
Nobody in the source material claims CEPH was ordered to do this. The Trump administration has not directly targeted CEPH as it has other accrediting bodies, though an executive order threatened some accreditors with loss of federal Education Department recognition over diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives amounting to unlawful discrimination [13][14]. Several public health professors said schools in more conservative states may face pressure from state legislatures to avoid certain terms or topics [15].
That is the operator's problem: the constraint is a forecast, not a rule. Michael Siegel of Tufts told STAT that CEPH cannot call racism a public health crisis, as it did in 2020, and then "just decimate the entire competency so that students in public health aren't required to learn about it" [16][17]. Lauren Junge-Maughan, president of the National Association for Doctors of Public Health, which publicly objected, said the competencies "are basically the foundation for every program of public health that's CEPH-accredited in the country" [18][19]. Marc Kiviniemi of the University of Kentucky, a state with a Republican-controlled legislature, called the new language a reasonable middle ground, describing the goal as students who can understand and analyze how structural and social issues work [20][21].
Watch whether the third draft survives the next comment round intact, whether the finalized 2027 text retains any named mechanism, and how CEPH squares the deletion with its own 2020 statement. Watch also what programs write into 2026 self-studies while the standard is unsettled.