The Education Department is supposed to investigate every civil rights complaint it receives, complaints that represent kids whose rights are being violated. But under Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary, that’s just too much work for something as unimportant as civil rights. So the Education Department has started dismissing hundreds of complaints, and is saying, up front, that one reason for dismissing a complaint is that it comes from an activist who files a lot of complaints:
Among the changes implemented immediately is a provision that allows the Office for Civil Rights to dismiss cases that reflect “a pattern of complaints previously filed with O.C.R. by an individual or a group against multiple recipients,” or complaints “filed for the first time against multiple recipients that” place “an unreasonable burden on O.C.R.’s resources.”
So far, the provision has resulted in the dismissal of more than 500 disability rights complaints.
Although the new rules allowing masses of complaints to be dismissed supposedly don't target advocacy groups filing class-action-style complaints:
Rachel M. Kleinman, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that the new manual was “yet another avenue for O.C.R. to not seriously investigate systemic race discrimination.”
The group has filed complaints on behalf of large groups of black students it believes were being disproportionately affected by law enforcement policies. Already, one case has been closed by the DeVos administration, and the department declined to conduct a broader analysis.
“They seem to be closing all of the pathways for students to have their rights enforced by the federal government,” Ms. Kleinman said.
Yeah, that seems to be the goal. And the Trump-DeVos Education Department is getting really good at it.