A document obtained by the Associated Press shows that the Education Department is considering narrowing the scope of civil right investigations at schools. It may change the current practice of looking into systematic issues when a discrimination complaint is made and only look at the incident itself.
Under the Obama administration, cases of student’s complaints of discrimination in certain schools were examined by determining whether there was a much broader, underlying systemic problem which needs to be dealt with.
The word “system” was removed from the proposed revisions to the procedure, which civil rights officials at the department received last week. Schools would also be allowed have more freedom in deciding how to handle a case and the appeals process would be eliminated.
For the time being the proposal is only a draft, while the final version will likely be published in 2018 after suggestions from staff.
The action is in line with efforts by the Trump administration to make the work of numerous federal agencies more efficient and to trim the budget. The administration has required a $9 billion cut to the education budget, resulting in the loss of about 40 of the 570 employees at the agency’s Office for Civil Rights.
The proposed revisions were criticized by Seth Galanter, former principal deputy assistant secretary for human rights in the department, who pointed out that the most important mission of the civil rights office is to discover and resolve systemic problems.
“It’s a very surface level fix…but isn’t fulfilling OCR’s obligation,” Galanter said, adding that “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.”
Yet another proposed revision says that a resolution agreement could be negotiated between schools or school districts and the agency, before findings are provided to parents in a letter. Galanter also criticized that revision, saying that it means parents would be kept in the dark.
“The letter may still reach the same result, but it may be completely diluted of any fact that would inform the parent and the community about what’s going on in the school,” he said.
Miriam Rollin, director of the National Center for Youth Law, condemned the changes, which she claimed, coupled with the elimination of the appeals process did not work in favor of students because schools wouldn’t be held accountable for violence and parents would have fewer opportunities “to get justice.”
The director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute hailed the revisions as a fix “to what the Obama administration did.”
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