Education Dept. Says It Will Scale Back Civil Rights InvestigationsIn the good old days under Obama, the following was a federal matter:By ERICA L. GREEN JUNE 16, 2017
WASHINGTON — The Department of Education is scaling back investigations into civil rights violations at the nation’s public schools and universities, easing off mandates imposed by the Obama administration that the new leadership says have bogged down the agency.
According to an internal memo issued by Candice E. Jackson, the acting head of the department’s office for civil rights, requirements that investigators broaden their inquiries to identify systemic issues and whole classes of victims will be scaled back. Also, regional offices will no longer be required to alert department officials in Washington of all highly sensitive complaints on issues such as the disproportionate disciplining of minority students and the mishandling of sexual assaults on college campuses.
The new directives are the first steps taken under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to reshape her agency’s approach to civil rights enforcement, which was bolstered while President Barack Obama was in office. The efforts during Mr. Obama’s administration resulted in far-reaching investigations and resolutions that required schools and colleges to overhaul policies addressing a number of civil rights concerns.
That approach sent complaints soaring, and the civil rights office found itself understaffed and struggling to meet the department’s stated goal of closing cases within 180 days.
For example, the department received a complaint that a black student at the Lodi Unified School District in California, about an hour south of Sacramento, received harsher punishment than a white student after the two were in a fight.The Obama Administration was shocked, shocked to learn that black students in the Lodi school district got in trouble more on average than other students:
According to a published settlement agreement, the investigation found that schools with higher percentages of black students established stricter punishment for discipline incidents, and a review of four years of data revealed that black students across the district received disproportionately higher levels of discipline than white students.Something that the Obama Administration, however, never ever looked into was whether there is a single school district in this country where blacks don’t misbehave more often. Because, after all, that might raise doubts about federal power grabs in school districts that come under the Eye of Soros. If virtually every single school district in the country was guilty, then the Obama Administration could take over any school district’s policy on anything it wanted, usually with the cooperation of Obama-friendly elements within that district.