A gutted Education Department’s new agenda: Roll back civil rights, target transgender students

I Reported on Racial Politics in This Illinois School District. Now It’s Under Federal Investigation.

Donald Trump’s Department of Education has launched a civil rights investigation into Evanston-Skokie’s District 65, alleging the K–8 school district in Chicago’s leafy suburbs has “widespread policies and practices that discriminate on the basis of race.”I reported on the fraught racial politics in this school district earlier this year, in my story “How One Town Turned a Child’s ‘Cry for Help’ Into a Hate Crime.” In the piece, I recounted what…

Admin calls for significant cuts to Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights

The Trump administration’s budget request submitted to Congress on Friday calls for a $49 million cut to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the bureau responsible for investigating and adjudicating complaints of campus antisemitism. The budget proposal, which slashes a total of $163 billion in spending, also includes what Republican defense hawks are condemning as an effective cut in defense spending and cuts to Federal Emerg…

HOW WE’ RE BEING LOCKED OUT OF EDUCATION

Across America, Black history is disappearing from the classroom—and it’s no accident. New laws are banning lessons on racism, slavery, and civil rights under the excuse of “protecting students.” But let’s be clear: protecting who, exactly? Certainly not our children. When textbooks skip over slavery or rewrite the civil rights movement into a footnote, we lose more than history—we lose power. If Black children grow up not knowing the battles t…

‘Smorgasbord approach to the law’: Effects of rollbacks in trans protections will be ‘wide-ranging’

Trans people across the country are preparing themselves to get through the next four years under Trump. While Trump has promised to roll back protections for trans folks, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court appears to be willing to ignore precedent and “cherry pick” the law in order to undermine Trans rights, says Imara Jones, award-winning journalist and founder of TransLash Media. “There’s no consistency in the law now…They are lit…

A Gutted Education Department Is Rolling Back Civil Rights and Targeting Transgender Students

The Education Department is being radically reshaped away from education, fairness and equity toward a more prosecutorial arm of the federal government as it negates civil rights investigations and ramps up investigations targeting transgender students and schools that apply more event-handed treatment of students and athletes. Civil rights offices are closed. Workers are fired. Investigating discrimination in schools is practically “impossible.…

A gutted Education Department’s new agenda: Roll back civil rights, target transgender students

This story was originally published by ProPublica. In California, the federal government was deep into an investigation of alleged racial discrimination at a school district where, a parent said, students called a Black peer racial slurs and played whipping sounds from their cellphones during a lesson about slavery. Then the U.S. Department of Education in March suddenly closed the California regional outpost of its Office for Civil Rights and f…