Betsy DeVos does not care about protecting the civil rights of this nation’s students. While this isn’t “new” news and just proves that she is philosophically aligned with the rest of the dangerous buffoons that make up the Trump administration, it also marks a new terrible and truly scary direction for the Department of Education under her watch.
Under the Obama administration, the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department not only investigated civil rights complaints but certain complaints, such as ones on racial disparities and mishandled sexual assault allegations, would then lead to an automatic investigation into larger systemic patterns and problems at the institution. However, Betsy and company don’t believe in systemic injustice and oppression. So they think this approach is unnecessary. They’ve already made changes to guidelines so that local officers get to decide now if they even want to pursue complaints and certain complaints no longer trigger automatic investigations. And now Betsy says that the Office of Civil Rights will be returned "to its role as a neutral, impartial, investigative agency."
In a July 11 letter to Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, DeVos asserted that the department's civil rights arm under the Obama administration "had descended into a pattern of overreaching, of setting out to punish and embarrass institutions rather than work with them to correct civil rights violations and of ignoring public input prior to issuing new rules." [...]
DeVos wrote that the agency is "unwavering in its commitment" to defend students' civil rights. But during the Obama administration, the office "all too often handled individual complaints as evidence of systematic institutional violations," she wrote. Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, told the office's regional directors in June to stop doing just that.
In case you were wondering what happens when people are put in charge of agencies that they have absolutely no qualifications to run and have a well-documented history of bigotry and exclusion and using their money and power to influence policy, this is exactly what happens. It is the systematic dismantling of policies designed to protect the most marginalized. On the surface, a “neutral” and “impartial” agency might sound good, though it’s arguable that humans can ever really be impartial.
But Betsy DeVos and Candice Jackson (the head of the Office of Civil Rights) have not shown any evidence whatsoever that they intend to be impartial in matters of civil rights—in fact, just the opposite. They’ve already shown incredible bias and done some pretty damaging things like allowing anti-LGBT groups to speak at Education Department events and meeting with groups that intimidate rape survivors when discussing campus rape policies. These things are not neutral. Violence, hate and bigotry are never acceptable and should never be given a platform—especially when trying to protect people’s civil rights.
Conservatives had frequently criticized the Obama administration for issuing far-reaching, albeit nonbinding, "guidance," for instance, informing states they must allow transgender students to access bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with their gender identity or risk loss of federal funds. Conservatives contended such "guidance" sidestepped the formal rule-making process. The Trump administration rescinded the transgender guidance earlier this year.
This is not about reducing backlog, making sure rules are properly followed or making processes easier. This is a tactic to allow religious fanatics the ability to use the government to push their homophobic agenda. It’s how racists get around having to comply with the law. It’s how sexual assault gets normalized and goes unpunished. It basically guarantees that when students have their civil rights violated, the administration will have policies that allow them to sit idly by and watch. This move is anything and everything but neutral or impartial. And with Jeff Sessions in charge of civil rights at the federal level, progress toward equality continues to be set back decades with this administration.