A U.S. Department of Education memo that suggests a more narrow approach to civil rights investigations is being blasted by civil rights advocates as a “retreat” from the protection of students against acts of discrimination.
“This sounds like, ‘We see no evil. We only investigate what is requested and otherwise we see no evil,’” said Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies within The Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “To me, that’s really an injustice.”
The memo, recently uncovered by ProPublica, states “effective immediately, there is no mandate that any one type of complaint is automatically treated differently than any other type of complaint in respect to the scope of the investigation, the type or amount of data needed to conduct the investigation, or the amount or type of review or oversight needed . . . ”
The memo singles out and cancels an Obama administration era rule that OCR investigators obtain three years of past complaint data or files in order to assess the compliance of a target of a discrimination complaint.
If a complaint filed on behalf of a student claims that the student was unfairly disciplined because of race, for example, it will now be up to OCR investigators to determine what other data is needed to determine if the students’ peers from other racial groups were treated differently, the memo states.
“For the sake of clarity, these instructions mean that OCR will only apply a ‘systemic’ or ‘class-action approach where the individual complaint allegations themselves raise systemic or class-wide issues or the investigative team determines a systemic approach is warranted through conversations with the complainant,” the memo states.
