This past week, the long list of Trump administration efforts that have been shot down by federal judges got a new addition. D.C. Federal Judge Tanya Chuktan ruled on Thursday that the Education Department’s decision to delay the implementation of a rule demanding school districts address racial disparities was “arbitrary and capricious” and must be reversed immediately. Although there’s no immediate word as to the consequences, she further ruled that the department broke the law because of the absence of a “reasoned explanation” for their lingering delay.
The rule had been set in motion at the end of the Obama administration, but its more than two-year delay ended up as “one of the most significant policy moves… to date” from Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, as The New York Times put it.
Imagine being defined by opposition to a measure combating minority groups’ disadvantage that someone else had tried to implement. It’s not even as though they simply turned a blind eye — they actively worked against students whose positions the Obama team had been trying to elevate.
The binding rule in question requires states to look for possible “significant disproportionality” among students of various races who are in special education programs, otherwise in non-traditional, restrictive classroom settings, and/or disciplined. Subsequently, school districts where the gaps are discovered are required under the measure to appropriately fix the disparities, setting aside 15 percent of their federal funding for the task.
The Education Department had claimed while the rule was still in limbo that they were concerned about the emergence of “racial quotas,” ignoring the specific prohibition against the adoption of such a system in the original rule. They also ignored the fact that economic conditions and even personal bias have long ensured that some form of those “quotas” are in place, specifically claiming that disparities did not necessarily represent some deeper ill.
The real question is simply whether or not the system will be bent to help those left behind.
The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates’ Executive Director Denise Marshall praised Chuktan’s ruling, asserting:
‘The court has sided with the children whom the department had deemed unimportant through its actions.’
This case is not the first in which DeVos has sided against certain groups of students. Late last year, the Education Department unveiled proposed new rules governing sexual harassment and assault on college campuses, severely limiting the definition of harassment to only include cases where the behavior “effectively denies a person equal access to the school’s education program or activity.”
They went further, even allowing an alleged harasser or assaulter to question their accuser, although it would be completed through an intermediary under the provision.
DeVos also proposed to let for-profit colleges off the hook from regulations previously demanding their former students fall in line with certain “gainful employment” standards, even if those former students had been left hanging by what turned out to be a defunct program.
Maybe these moves explain why after literally record-high senior staff turnover inside the Trump administration, DeVos is still around.
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