When the U.S. Department of Education opened investigations into four Kansas school districts earlier this month, the call had come from inside the house: the state’s Republican attorney general was among those asking the federal agency to deploy its office for civil rights to look into the alleged wrongdoing.
Since January, the Education Department has wielded its investigative arm, the office for civil rights, to open dozens of probes into states and school districts with policies that allow transgender students to play on athletic teams, use restrooms or locker rooms that align with their gender identity, and change names and pronouns without automatically notifying parents.
In Kansas, the investigations themselves are not unlike others opened against colleges and universities, school districts, state education departments, and athletic associations. But they show how some Republicans are calling on the federal government to bring the hammer down on districts in their own jurisdictions—even if it means those districts risk losing federal funding.
The phenomenon is part of a longer pattern of using the federal office charged with investigating potential civil rights violations in schools for political goals, some scholars say. But, like many things in President Donald Trump’s second term, it’s dialed up.
“In one sense, it’s always been political,” said Shep Melnick, a professor of American politics at Boston College. “In the other sense, this is a level of political cynicism and going after your enemies and supporting your friends that, I think, is unprecedented.”
Kansas AG is ‘grateful’ Trump administration ‘takes Title IX seriously’
Earlier this month, the Education Department announced it had opened investigations into the Kansas City, Olathe, Shawnee Mission, and Topeka districts alleging violations of two federal laws—Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination, and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the primary federal law protecting student privacy.
The cases stem from a complaint filed by the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative policy organization. But the department highlighted a letter penned by Kris Kobach, the state’s attorney general, outlining his concerns that the districts were violating Title IX by allowing transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their gender identity.
Kobach, who was one of several Republican state leaders to sue Democratic President Joe Biden over his effort to expand Title IX protections to transgender students, said in a news release he was “grateful that we now have a federal government that takes Title IX seriously and will ensure that school districts follow the law.”
He’s not the first Republican this year to seek to bring down the force of the federal government on districts in their states.
In April, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., requested that the department investigate the Saratoga Springs City school district for its passage of a policy affirming its “unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive, and high-quality education for every student” and calling Trump administration directives and communications on transgender and immigrant youth “antithetical to the principles of access and inclusion that define our schools and our community.”
The department opened its investigation in May citing a letter from Stefanik.
In Virginia, the Republican governor and attorney general have voiced their support for two sets of civil rights investigations the Trump administration has launched into districts in their state.
Last week, the Education Department announced funding restrictions for five Virginia school districts due to their policies allowing transgender students access to bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin asserted in July that the districts “have been violating federal law,” while Attorney General Jason Miyares said he was “encouraged that the federal government is now working alongside us to restore sanity in public education.”
Youngkin and Miyares also cheered the start of an investigation into Fairfax County public schools in May over a selective high school’s admissions policy that the Trump administration said was racially discriminatory.
And in Maine, a Republican state representative’s social media post about a transgender athlete was the impetus for the Trump administration’s multi-agency action against the state and its university system for a state policy allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports. The state lawmaker, Laurel Libby, joined U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on stage at a press conference announcing a Justice Department lawsuit against the state.
On one hand, these officials’ calls for investigations aren’t always consequential, said Melnick. It can be more like political theater, he said.
But on the other, “when you have a Republican state with pockets of cities that are more Democratic, that really is where an OCR civil rights investigation becomes a weapon that the state officials can use against their Democratic cities.”
To some extent, it’s a continuation of using OCR for policy ends
There’s no precise parallel to the Trump administration’s use of the office for civil rights to propel its political agenda and investigate politically opposed states and districts. But the dynamic isn’t entirely new, said Vladimir Kogan, a political science professor at Ohio State University who studies state and local government.
There’s some history to federal civil rights laws being “co-opted by the political passions of the moment,” he said.
The Obama administration marked a “big regime change” in which the office for civil rights was used to advance a policy agenda, Kogan said.
“They were some of the first people to use the office for civil rights and the ‘Dear Colleague’ letters,” he said. “In some ways, this is kind of just a continuation of that, but from the opposite perspective.”
Obama- and Biden-era guidance, for example, warned school districts that they could be found in violation of civil rights laws if disciplinary policies, even those drafted without discriminatory intent, disproportionately affected a particular racial group—a phenomenon known as “disparate impact” that conservatives have long criticized. Both the first and second Trump administrations reversed those policies.
The same thing happened with extending protections to LGBTQ+ students under Title IX: The Obama and Biden administrations issued guidance doing just that before the Trump administration changed course.
And the Biden administration created a “book ban coordinator” position in OCR in the face of conservative efforts in districts nationwide to remove particular books from school libraries and classrooms and issued guidance stating that such removals could violate civil rights laws. The Trump administration quickly reversed course.
As for Kobach, he’s not the first attorney general to take districts in his state to task over transgender student policies. Last year, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, issued a “legal alert” warning districts to follow the state’s law that dictated schools did not have to tell parents if their children requested a change to their name or pronouns at school.
During the second Trump administration, Kogan said, the dial is “a bit more turned up.”
“It probably gets worse after every administration, because it’s kind of a race to the bottom, where every administration comes in and tries to go twice as hard in the opposite direction as the previous administration,” Kogan said. “I think we’ve seen that again for the past 20 years, at least in the context of civil rights, again with different foci.”
Letters like Kobach’s and Stefanik’s calling for more investigations might just be the start. And they’re coming at a time when OCR is operating with about half the staff it had when Trump took office in January (though that could change in the coming months).
“I assume that a lot of other Republicans—AGs and governors, who are going to be looking at what’s happening in some of the larger, more Democratic cities—are going to say, ‘Hey, that’s a good idea. Let me add that to my political campaign,’” Melnick said.
