A conservative think tank led by former Department of Education officials has filed a federal civil rights complaint against an Illinois high school that announced it was implementing a grading system meant to equalize student outcomes by race.
In a Wednesday letter to the U.S. Department of Education, the president of the Defense of Freedom Institute Robert Eitel requested that the department’s Office for Civil Rights open an investigation into Oak Park and River Forest school district near Chicago after it began instituting “equitable” grading practices at a district high school.
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The district directed the school to eliminate “policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that reinforce or fail to eliminate different outcomes by race” when issuing grades, including penalties for late assignments and absenteeism.
In the letter to the department, Eitel said the school district’s directive violated constitutional protections, as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“District 200’s announced intention to revise grading policies to benefit students from particular racial or ethnic backgrounds blatantly violates both of these [laws],” Eitel wrote in the letter.
In a press release, Eitel, who worked at the Department of Education under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, said that the district’s directive would ultimately serve to harm students.
“[The district] seeks to implement a race-based grading policy that not only violates the Constitution and civil rights law but also harms the very students it is intended to help,” Eitel said in a press release. “Instead of focusing on the real issue at hand — the lack of education freedom for these students, who have to rely on a government-run K-12 school system that consistently fails them — the district wants to obfuscate by eliminating objective measures of academic achievement.”
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“This not only sets up students for failure in life but also stigmatizes students of certain races by sending the message that without the help of policies that discriminate against their peers, they cannot succeed,” he said. “We are asking OCR quickly to investigate and end these unlawful racially discriminatory policies.”
