Obama-Era Education Meddling Leaves Minorities Worse Off

On September 12, the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project released a paper about illegal overreaching by the Obama-era Education and Justice Departments, which resulted in policies that still persist today. The paper, written mostly by people with a civil rights background, examines three areas in which the federal government attempted to micromanage educational institutions by imposing new rules that never went through the legally-prescribed rule-making process and purported to do so based on anti-discrimination statutes passed many years ago. These rules dealt with three areas: (1) transgender bathroom, locker, and dormitory room access under Title IX, a statute which bans discrimination based on “sex,” not “gender identity”; (2) investigations by colleges and schools of sexual assault and harassment claims, also under Title IX; and (3) school districts that suspend more students of one race than another, or whose discipline policies have an unintentional “disparate impact,” under Title VI, a statute which bans intentional racial discrimination.

I am the principal author of the portion of the paper dealing with topic (3), the 2014 Obama administration “Dear Colleague” letter that pressured schools to have equal suspension rates for different ethnic groups, even if the only reason ethnic groups had different suspension rates was because of students’ conduct, not racism – i.e., different ethnic groups had different rates of violating school rules.

The Trump administration has taken some action on the first two areas..

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