The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights may not last long in Trump’s America, its employees and advocates fear. The transition’s stated intention to “streamline the department,” coupled with a stated goal to overturn Obama-era executive overreaches, spells trouble for the department’s small but active office.
Thus, a planned “celebration” of OCR’s accomplishments at the Department of Education headquarters Thursday morning was really more of a funeral. If an alien from a more sensible planet had dropped in on the event, he would have noted tearful sniffling and prayerful entreaties to stay strong and keep the faith—and assumed something more than federal money and power had been lost.
In nearly eight years under the Obama administration, celebrants recounted, the office has issued 34 “policy guidance documents.” These are edicts reinterpreting existing laws—new executive entanglements, made mandatory by funding incentives, that also serve a moral imperative.
They’ve closed 66,000 investigations, every one of them initiated to bring a school or college in line with OCR’s federal mandates. Among these are the 2011 guidance concerning campus sexual assault; a more recent and no less controversial guidance to clarify that gender segregation is discriminatory; and a racial equity check on disciplinary practices that has, in some cases, been linked to increased violence in schools.
But in the minds and hearts of those who’ve carried them out, OCR’s goals guided the nation toward the light of righteousness and salvation. There is no higher aim than theirs: to show every child the federal government believes in his or her ability to succeed. The message of federally-ordained disciplinary reforms is, in Secretary King’s words, “We love you and we want you to be successful.”
“The work of OCR,” King told the audience, many of whom work at the civil rights office, “is just critical to the mission of schools to save lives.” What he seems to have meant, but cannot say in a secular age, is that before federal education reforms save lives, they save souls: “That kind of [unconditionally loving] culture in a school … has been the difference for some kids between whether or not they drop out, whether or not they have the opportunity to graduate, or whether or not they stay connected to school or become disconnected and end up getting involved in violence.”
In a testimonial video in-between tributes, former Assistant Education Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali cast the office of civil rights as a benevolent higher power. “OCR’s job is to protect young people, and young people and their teachers and communities need to have faith that OCR will respond to them. So call on it.” Seek, she might have said, and ye shall find.
And, addressing the room, former Education Secretary Arne Duncan said of OCR, “People call us, call you, when they’re going through horrific times and when they’ve tried 12 other things.” Duncan promising OCR will be there in your darkest hour could be a priest explaining the extra-liturgical function of his ministry. It seems cruel that OCR, considered a source of intimate comfort and moral guidance, might fall at the whim of an incoming president. (If only there were an entity more permanent than a president, more powerful than government, that can save souls and bring comfort to the weary…)
Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, assured career bureaucrats they’re doing “the Lord’s work” and then issued a grandmotherly scold: “You’re probably going to have some real bad days,” she said—but, “You stay in place.”
“We’ve been here before, but not this bad,” Edelman told them. Under President Reagan, she said, “We lost billions, but we got it back”—and “we figured out how to make sure that we protected the structure of the laws.”
The Trump administration could, however, overturn each of OCR’s extra-legal guidances with its own subsequent guidance—a simpler process than restructuring the law. The Obama administration made OCR a vehicle for profound executive overreach, a practice which Trump-the-candidate condemned. Soon, his administration will inherit the power to pull OCR’s policy-levers as they see fit.
“An OCR that recommits itself to protecting students from discrimination while also ensuring that students’ fundamental rights are respected would be an enormous change for the better,” Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told TWS previously. FIRE is currently sponsoring a lawsuit against OCR for the denial of due-process rights to a student accused of misconduct under the office’s 2011 guidance.
But the Obama administration’s playbook also paves the way for the incoming administration to wield OCR’s guidance mechanism with a similar disrespect for fundamental rights. However well-meaning, eight years of federal vox dei have dangerously undermined self-government.
