On average, the U.S. Department of Education has resolved about twice as many civil rights cases per year under the Trump administration as it did under the Obama administration, the agency said in a news release last week.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has praised her department’s efforts to more quickly resolve civil rights complaints. But critics say the agency has focused on closing cases at the expense of meaningful protections for vulnerable students.
The agency has also seen an uptick in the number of complaints it resolved that required corrective actions from schools, the data say. That includes a 30 percent increase in Title VI resolutions of cases about race or national origin that required corrective action; a 60 percent increase in disability-related resolutions; and an 80 percent increase in Title IX sex-discrimination resolutions.
The data don’t say whether those corrective actions were as broad as those under the Obama administration or more narrowly tailored to the individual student who filed the complaint.
