The U.S. Education Department is considering a proposal to narrow civil rights investigations to focus on individual complaints rather than systemic problems, reports the Associated Press.
School districts won’t be held accountable and “parents will have less opportunity to get justice,” said Miriam Rollin, director of the National Center for Youth Law.
. . . Rick Hess, director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, praised the revisions, saying Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was seeking 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,” he said.
President Trump has called for cutting the department’s budget, which could eliminate 40 of the Office for Civil Rights’ 570 employees.