Education Department Proposes Cutting Down Civil Rights Investigations In Schools

The Education Department Wednesday proposed to cut down the scope of civil rights investigations at schools, focusing on individual complaints rather than general problems.

According to the Associated Press, during the Obama administration, if a student complained of discrimination in a particular class or school, the education agency would not only examine the case but would also examine if the incident was part of a systemic problem required to be solved.

It has been proposed that the word "systemic" be removed from the guidelines with regards to the department’s civil rights procedures.

This change would allow schools to have a greater say in how a case is handled, compared with the student or the parent who filed the complaint. It would eliminate the appeals process.

However, it is reported that the document is just a draft. The final version will likely be published next year after receiving suggestions and proposals from staff.

The proposal comes as the Trump administration looks for ways to streamline work and cut down budgets of many federal agencies. The administration has called for a $9 billion, or 13.5 percent, cut to the education budget. This would mean the loss of more than 40 employees out of about 570 at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, AP reported.

According to the report, the Education Department did not offer any remarks on the proposed revisions.

Seth Galanter, former principal deputy assistant secretary for human rights in Obama’s Education Department, criticized the proposed revisions. According to Galanter the civil rights office’s function of identifying and solving systemic problems is central to it's mission.

Galanter gave an example of a complaint of a white and a minority student getting into a fight where the minority student was disciplined more harshly than the white student. Under the current procedure, optical character recognition (OCR) would examine that particular case but also look at whether that teacher, school or school district was engaging in other similar discriminatory behavior.

"It’s a very surface level fix that certainly will make that particular parent happy, but isn't fulfilling OCR's obligation. OCR is underfunded and understaffed and in order to get through all the complaints in some kind of timely manner, staff is being forced to give them superficial treatment," Galanter said.

Miriam Rollin, director of the National Center for Youth Law, said that these changes coupled with eliminating the appeals process, were not good news for the students.

"School deficits will be held accountable less for violations and parents will have less opportunity to get justice," Rollin said.

Director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess, admired the revisions. He said that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is looking to fix the Obama administration’s tactic of using the agency’s civil rights investigations to push policy.

"What the Department of Education is talking about is wholly sensible and is an appropriate and totally unsurprising correction to what the Obama administration did," Hess said.