In his first speech as President-elect in November, Joe Biden said that racial justice and the eradication of systemic racism would be fundamental to his administration. A cornerstone of this ambitious goal should be to restore and expand civil rights policy in K-12 education. This policy was scaled back significantly under the Trump administration. The good news is that much of the Trump K-12 education agenda that undone Obama administration initiatives can now be undone.
Since 2016, we have been researching changes in civil rights policy under the Trump administration. We knew from our previous research that the U.S. Department of Education had played an active role in expanding civil rights enforcement during Barack Obama’s presidency, and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign indicated that the new administration would take a dramatically different course. We felt it was important to examine how the changes would affect and how states, school districts and advocacy organizations would react if civil rights were indeed withdrawn. We also hoped that our research would be a valuable resource for future historians; and if politics were to reverse direction again, as in the 2020 elections, we hoped that our research could help identify which rights would then need to be changed.
In order to make systematic civil rights violations visible, civil rights data collection should be fully restored, financed and improved.
We found that the Trump administration was quick to lift key civil rights protections related to school de-registration and the collection of civil rights data. These measures blocked the Obama policies that allowed school districts to engage in voluntary repeal efforts and created mechanisms for intervening in civil rights violations in school districts across the country. In addition, the many other pressing concerns of civil rights groups – such as immigration bans or white supremacist rallies like in Charlottesville, Virginia – challenged the ability of non-governmental organizations to withstand the setbacks to racial education.
We also found that the other branches of federal government – along with state and local measures – prevented deeper rollbacks. However, the Trump administration’s success in rapidly changing civil rights policy suggests areas where the Biden-Harris administration could take immediate, long-term action to restore civil rights without the support of Congress. In 2017, the current administration ended a US $ 12 million discretionary grant program proposed by the Obama administration to provide districts with funds to plan or implement voluntary integration strategies. The several dozen districts that had already applied for grants ran out of much-needed resources to separate their schools. The following year, ministries of education and justice withdrew their guides on acceptable, effective strategies for reaching different schools. While this action did not change the current case law on district action, it did highlight the potential risk faced by districts trying to combat segregation.
In-depth management can do a lot to help districts looking to reduce segregation. Not only can it reintroduce the guidelines for effective and legally permissible strategies, it can also restore a memorandum between ministries of education, transport, housing and urban development between agencies to help communities work together across agencies to promote racial and socio-economic integration positive promotion of housing and schools.
We found that changes in the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights Collection and Enforcement under that administration prevented the investigation and resolution of thousands of civil rights complaints. In addition, revisions to the OCR Case Handling Manual limited the ability to extend individual complaints to more systematic investigations into how, for example, district actions harmed a group of students. These changes put a greater burden on students to identify and challenge each potential violation. So far we have not been able to receive any information on OCR case solutions after 2016. To make systematic civil rights violations visible, civil rights data collection should be fully restored, funded, and improved to monitor inequality that may have increased during the pandemic.
The Trump administration campaigned for school elections and private schools without committing itself to guiding or enforcing civil rights. Research shows, however, that unregulated school selection strategies tend to exacerbate and reinforce existing racist, socio-economic and other forms of stratification.
Biden’s Education Department should use discretionary funds for voluntary incentives to align school election policies with civil rights goals. The next US Secretary of Education should emphasize the importance of creating fair school choice systems where magnets and charters work with traditional public systems to achieve diversity goals.
It is not yet clear whether the Senate will be under Democratic or Republican control; In the second half of the 20th century, however, cross-party collaboration in federal K-12 education policy was the norm. Even during Trump’s presidency, we found members of both party Congress increasing the Education Department’s budget to mitigate the civil rights setbacks. Biden can urge Congress to pass its proposed tripling funding for Title I schools to equitably fund compensation programs in the Every Student Succeeds Act. This would help because the local and state authorities are confronted with significantly lower income and higher expenditure and, unlike the federal government, do not have a deficit.
The Biden-Harris administration does not need to be solely responsible for restoring and expanding K-12 civil rights policy. In our study, we interviewed over a dozen civil rights community leaders who work together in law, advocacy, and politics to advance racially conscious civil rights policies. You can assist the Incoming Education Transition Team and Education Department in maintaining a solid civil rights agenda. Choosing a US attorney general to work for civil rights enforcement will also make a difference. Accepting our recommendations will help reverse the guidelines of an administration that has neglected protecting the rights of color and LGBTQ students.
The next government must reintroduce strong civil rights policies that redefine just and equitable schooling.
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