As President Donald Trump and administration officials are preparing to tear down swaths of the Department of Education, they’re also ramping up the department’s efforts to exert control over schools to an unprecedented level in pursuit of their right-wing vision for education.
On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Trump is preparing to sign an executive order directing his new education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps” to close her department “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
While the department was created by Congress and can only be closed by Congress, the aim of the order appears to be to cut many of the programs administered by the department under the guise of returning “authority over education to the states and local communities.”
There are, however, some programs the department is required to maintain by law, namely the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Civil Rights. The Office of Civil Rights was created in order to ensure compliance with civil rights laws in federally funded schools, most prominently Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial and sex discrimination respectively.
In order to ensure compliance, the office conducts investigations and reviews into areas like grading, financial aid, admission and recruitment. However, the Trump administration had paused investigations conducted by the office up until Thursday, when they lifted the pause for disability investigations. The pause remains in place when it comes to investigations concerning sex and racial discrimination.
Rachel Perera, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, told Salon that while the department is neglecting its duty to enforce civil rights laws, it's also twisting the meaning of those laws in pursuit of its own ideological ends.
“They’ve put a pause on all typical civil rights work like responding to civil rights complaints from parents and advocates,” Perera said. “All of that work has been put on pause and instead they’re suing civil rights law to try to further their right wing agenda.”
Specifically, the Trump administration is using the department’s power to go after diversity, equity and inclusion programs as well as transgender students. Perera notes that they’ve been using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination, to attack inclusion programs, while claiming that they amount to “anti-white discrimination.”
As it stands, it’s somewhat unclear as to what exactly qualifies as a diversity program according to the Trump administration. Recent directives from the department have neglected to define what qualifies as DEI, which has created confusion as to whether things like clubs surrounding a specific ethnicity or a Black history course might violate the administration’s new edict. They’ve also stated that race-based programs “would not in and of themselves violate Title VI.” The new policies have already drawn lawsuits claiming that the policies are problematically vague.
Despite the vagueness of the order, some schools are moving to preemptively comply with the untested order, scrubbing their websites of mentions of diversity and changing programming.
Perera added that the administration has been leveraging Title IX of the act, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools, to attack transgender Americans over issues like their participation in sports, while “At the same time, they won’t be using Title IX to address issues of sexual discrimination or sexual assault on college campuses.” She said she expects this to continue after Trump's anticipated executive order.
For example, the Trump administration has claimed that Maine is violating federal law by allowing transgender athletes to participate in sports and has used the Office of Civil Rights to initiate a review of the Maine Department of Education. Indeed, a letter sent to state officials charged that the state was violating Title IX "by denying female student athletes in the State of Maine an equal opportunity to participate in, and obtain the benefits of participation, ‘in any interscholastic, intercollegiate, club or intramural athletics’ offered by the state by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes in current and future athletic events."
Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, responded, saying: "I imagine that the outcome of this politically directed investigation is all but predetermined.”
All of this amounts to “a dramatic expansion” of the federal government’s role in education, in Perera’s words.
“A point I want to make here is that this use of the Office for Civil Rights to promote their right-wing agenda contradicts their stated intention of sending education back to the states,” Perera said. In the process, she added, they are “upending the meaning of these civil rights laws.”
