The New Yorker:

The Department of Education’s abandonment of traditional civil-rights litigation has effectively transported parents back in time, to the era before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

By Eyal Press

During the recent government shutdown, some Republicans in Congress have expressed sympathy for the roughly seven hundred and thirty thousand federal employees who have been performing essential public services without pay. President Donald Trump has struck a different tone, suggesting that some of these workers “don’t deserve” back pay and seizing the opportunity to fire others, particularly those who staff and run what he has called “Democrat agencies.” One of these agencies is the Department of Education, whose Office for Civil Rights enforces laws such as Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—which bars discrimination based on race, color, and national origin—in federally funded schools and colleges. On October 14th, more than two hundred and fifty O.C.R. investigators, mostly attorneys, were informed by e-mail that they were being laid off, the latest in a wave of dismissals that has decimated the agency since March. One senior manager, who described the e-mail as a “gut punch,” said, “I am seeing the 1964 Civil Rights Act eviscerated right before my eyes.”

To Trump, of course, gutting the Civil Rights Act is likely to be a point of pride, enabling the government to focus on more urgent matters, such as protecting white students from the purportedly harmful effects of diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs. The extraordinary lengths to which the Administration has gone to punish educational institutions for adopting such programs are familiar by now. Less familiar are the consequences of its abandonment of traditional civil-rights-law enforcement. One person who has experienced these consequences is Tara Blunt, a resident of Falls City, Nebraska, where, until recently, her son attended a local public school. In the spring of 2022, Blunt’s son, who is Black, and who was in third grade at the time, started getting severely harassed and bullied by a group of white students. They called him a “monkey” and mocked the color of his skin and the texture of his hair. The bullying escalated in the fall, when one of the students physically assaulted him, shoving him to the ground and stomping on his head during recess, where a teacher found him “in the fetal position and crying,” according to school records. The school claims that it called Blunt to inform her about this incident, but she insists that she was never contacted and only found out months later. 

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