The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights Needs to Go
Trump must close the revolving door between the bureaucracy and the NGOs.
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
Though President Trump has taken steps to cut the Department of Education, reports suggest that he doesn’t want to gut every department function. Among other moves, his advisors may want to roll the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights into the Justice Department.
This is a mistake.
Instead of rolling the Department of Civil Rights into any other agency, Trump should abolish it—and make it the poster child for why the Department of Education needs to go. This sub-agency does not serve regular people, even in a superficial way. Instead, it serves bureaucracies and nonprofits, empowering kangaroo court administrators and left-wing “Restorative Justice” programs that have turned schools into war zones.
Tracing its moves since the 1990s makes the clearest possible case for why, as the draft of the Executive Order eliminating the Department of Education says, “the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars—and the unaccountable bureaucrats those programs and dollars support—has failed our children, our teachers, and our families.” It also show links to the lawfare tactics used against President Trump from 2021 to 2024. These were tactics pioneered by 1960s Kennedy-Johnson liberals as part of their core project: transferring power from elected representatives to executives and judges. This core project not only created lawfare; it also empowered the future Education operators who use lawfare today to push their agenda inside and outside of government.
Turning Higher Education into a Kangaroo Court
The Office of Civil Rights was founded along with the Department of Education in 1979. It didn’t get seriously into the business of interfering in education until the eight-year presidency of Bill Clinton. The operator Clinton appointed, Norma V. Cantu, was a beneficiary of the national government’s encouragement of identity-based nonprofits beginning in the Johnson years—specifically, in Cantu’s case, MALDAF (Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund). This funding was an extension of the Kennedy-Johnson project of massively expanding Washington power using legal bureaucracies. It was Johnson’s way of bringing on-the-ground ethnic politics—the ones that had helped keep America’s constitutional democracy under the control of the people—under the control of government experts.
This funding was also part of an establishment Washington drive to replace (d)emocratic politicking via associations and legislatures with “public interest law” of the kind that had pushed Civil Rights. This meant pushing social change not through public persuasion but through legal cases in federal courts. It also increasingly meant ignoring the rulings of those federal courts and using executive agencies to make their own law.
Cantu came from this world, and drew her tactics from it. According to The New York Times, reporting on her first year at the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights:
She has ordered her 10 regional offices to double the number of complaints they investigate. She has told regional officials to hire more bilingual staff members. And her office, which acts as a watchdog against civil rights violations in educational institutions, has unleashed a flurry of regulations on age discrimination and racial and sexual harassment on the job and in the classroom.
Not surprisingly, many of the schools Cantu targeted agreed to “mediation” rather than risk losing their federal funding. This “mediation” began the push toward new policies that began measuring discipline and other policies by their “disparate impacts” on “disadvantaged groups,” skewing government-funded schools further in the direction of bowing to arbitrary Washington dictates.
Authoritarianism at the Office of Civil Rights
The obvious tip-offs to Cantu’s authoritarianism came in the weeds, in Cantu’s extra-legal responses to two decisions by federal courts which went against her sub-agency’s aims. In 1996, the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that affirmative action wasn’t a valid way to promote diversity, but according to reports:
[Cantu] said the decision applied only to the University of Texas Law School--the subject of the case…[and that] the rest of the state’s higher education institutions would risk losing their federal student aid and student loan money if they “failed to take appropriate remedial measures” to get rid of past discrimination.
This led to something extraordinary: President Clinton’s own Justice Department sent Cantu a letter rebuking her. It said that, based on the Constitution, the Court’s ruling applied to all schools within the Court’s district—e.g. schools in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Five years later, on the last day of the Clinton Administration, Cantu, out the door of the Department but undeterred, did the same thing. This time she responded to a 1999 Supreme Court ruling about using Title IX to target sexual discrimination in schools which “held that schools are liable for damages only if they have ‘actual knowledge’ of misconduct by teachers or students and act with ‘deliberate indifference.’” Instead, Cantu claimed in her letter to schools that “the Court's interpretation applies only to lawsuits [brought against schools] not to administrative regulations establishing what schools must do to qualify for federal funding.”
This was not law. This was illegal bureaucracy, what we’ve come to call lawfare: an agency concealing its refusal to follow the Court’s lawful order with legalistic hedging. Shockingly, George W. Bush’s Education Department did almost nothing to roll back this order, instead focusing on using the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights to push its own priorities on schools. This left the Obama and Biden Administrations room to expand its scope.
Obama Administration Operators Inherit Lawfare, Under New Guises
Cantu sat out the Bush and Obama Administrations, but two administrators succeeded her at the Office of Civil Rights under Obama whose moves were more than equal to hers. The first was Russlynn Ali, whose career was fostered by a latter-day version of MALDEF: The Education Trust, which is an instructive case study in the bipartisanship that lawfare practitioners like Cantu used to advance their aims.
Founded in 1996, the Education Trust, like Norma Cantu, came out of the post-Johnson era of government-founded nonprofits. Its founder, Kati Haycock, started her career at the Washington-based Children’s Defense Fund: founded in 1973 to push for government investment in healthcare and education, particularly for minorities, by Marian Wright Edelman, a longtime confidante of Hillary Clinton. In the 1990s, an era when Washington officially frowned on government welfare, Haycock started the Education Trust to help service minority students using a new pitch: Encouraging government to ensure, via centralized data collection and standardized testing, that “no child was left behind.” In Haycock’s own telling:
[T]he biggest accomplishment during her tenure leading Ed Trust was the passage of The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed into law by former President George W. Bush in 2002. The legislation drove the most important changes in the use of data to make the case for education improvement for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.
Without exaggeration, No Child Left Behind can be called an unfolding disaster of corruption, data mining, arbitrary federal mandates, and eventual pushback from both Democrat and Republican states. By increasing federal authority over schools, it also set the stage for an Obama power grab unprecedented in directness and scope. This power grab showed up in two ways, the first under Russlynn Ali and the second under her successor, Catherine Lhamon.
Expanding Schools’ Liability for Sex Discrimination
Ali’s vehicle was expanding Cantu’s 1999 and 2001 orders holding schools responsible for sex discrimination. In 2011, Ali issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” that held universities responsible for "potentially problematic conduct," that could lead to sexual assault. Writing five years later, the Harvard Law professors Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen, the former of whom had clerked for liberal Supreme Court Justice David Souter, accused Ali’s Department of creating “sex bureaucracies” in schools through the country. In fact, Suk and Gersen wrote, the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education had created “an elaborate and growing federal bureaucratic structure that, in effect, regulates sex.”
But this wasn’t the only result of the Letter. One of the ways schools were encouraged (on penalty of investigation or the removal of federal funding) to create an environment in which “potentially problematic conduct” like sexual assault didn’t occur was to make changes in the ways that adjudicating bodies on campus addressed claims of assault. One of these ways, in turn, was to “strongly discourag[e]” the accused from cross-examining his or her accuser, lest this examination “be traumatic or intimidating, thereby possibly escalating or perpetuating a hostile environment.”
Restoration News has reported multiple times, most recently in a double report, about the effects of “trauma creep” on American students. This form of mission creep came from national subagencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), from pharmacological corporations, from educational practitioners of social emotional learning (SEL), and from criminal justice reform practitioners of Restorative Justice. Forcing schools to suspend due process to limit the right of the accused to defend him or herself based on trauma was an example of this move. Importantly, it was only possible for schools to limit due process because they weren’t conducting lawful proceedings in the first place: They were conducting school-run judicial hearings not subject to the legal standards of actual courts.
This point bears repeating: They changed their adjudication processes in order to protect themselves from civil rights investigations from Washington, D.C., meaning that federal bureaucrats had essentially replaced the rule of law with federally-funded kangaroo courts.
Russlynn Ali’s successor, Catherine Lhamon, came directly from the criminal justice reform world. Under Lhamon, who served two stints heading the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (2013-2017, 2021-2025), trauma-based Restorative Justice was forced on schools. By this point, lawsuits alleging improper legal procedures by universities regarding sexual assault off Ali’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter were flying—creating a cottage industry for lawyers representing the accused. But this legal result, and the lives upended on both sides by extra-legal prosecutions, paled in comparison to the violations of civil liberties inflicted via Restorative Justice beginning in 2014.
…And Reverse Racism
Lhamon’s vehicle was a 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter released jointlywith the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights. The point of the 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter was much the same as the point of the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter when it “recommended” disallowing the accused to cross-examine the accuser. It was based on “disparate impact,” which holds that equal justice before the law must be adjusted to account for the different impacts of the same punishment on specific groups. This time, the focus was broader, encompassing gender, sexuality, race, and disability.
The letter, which was rescinded by the Trump Administration in 2018 and re-issued in a subtler form by the Biden Administration in 2023, gave examples of what disciplinary practices merited federal investigation under the disparate impact standard. One such example involved teachers disciplining students of a particular race more than students of other races for using electronic devices in class, even though students of that race used electronics more. Another broader example was “a pattern of harsher and more frequent disciplinary actions across types of discipline, schools, and grade levels for Black students than their white peers, resulting in significantly greater lost learning time for Black students.”
Predictably, the Restorative Justice that schools began practicing off this 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter resulted in disorder and violence. In St. Louis, MO, as Restoration News has shown, chaos was Restorative Justice’s result. Brevard County, FL, lost 50 teachers and bus drivers in two years thanks to the policy. In nearby Broward County, FL, Restorative Justice had already let one mass shooter slide through the cracks: Nikolas Cruz, who shot and killed fourteen students and three staff members at Parkland High School in 2018. Because of Restorative Justice, Cruz had been allowed to continue to come to school before the shooting, despite a record that included being “disruptive by screaming, using profanity and making sexual gestures”; and being “defiant of authority and destructive of property.” And Restorative Justice has spread beyond schools: as Restoration News has recently reported, a Democratic candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice has a record of supporting “the use and expansion of restorative justice and diversion programs” as a County judge.
The Sordid Connections from the DOE
All of this suggests the kind of disorder conservatives associate with the government-backed far-Left: Antifa, offshoots of Democratic Socialists. But lawfare, as we’ve come to learn these past few years, has more iterations than just on the Left. Democrats and establishment Republicans seeking to block a second Trump term were recently its biggest practitioners. Many of them, shut out of power, are now using nonprofits to push the aims they couldn’t accomplish with legal manipulation.
Former Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Civil Rights Russlynn Ali works on education policy for Emerson Collective, the nonprofit behemoth owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of the Apple founder Steve Jobs. Emerson Collective has been described by The Washington Post as “a justice league of practical progressives.” Those “practical progressives” include Ali who, with the support of Jobs, founded an education nonprofit called XQ—“the nation’s leading organization dedicated to rethinking high school” based on “innovative and rigorous learning” which includes encouraging an “equity mindset.”
Beyond using the trick of joining “merit” and “equity” in ways that increase DC’s power, it’s not exactly clear what this nonprofit does. It seems to use technological innovations to connect local schools with nonprofits in the name of helping minority populations. This alone is an example of government-connected corporate nonprofits meddling where they shouldn’t, but two members of XQ’s board are also worth note.
One is the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who, as a forthcoming Restoration report will document, is part of the Committee of 100: a philanthropic organization which pushes DEI initiatives for Asian Americans and closer ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The second is Michael Klein, Laurene Powell Jobs’s right-hand man who has deep ties to Saudi Arabia and, by virtue of China’s growing ties to the kingdom, to the CCP. Notably, the Saudis, with the CCP’s help, have used data collection via artificial intelligence designed to create “smart cities” that critics call “surveillance cities.” Their data collection efforts are being imitated by American operators, and similar uses and abuses have found their way into state education policy via Penny Schwinn, the current Deputy Secretary of Education, as Restoration News has recently reported.
The upshot: Conservatives should not only celebrate the abolishment of the Department of Education, they should also push for the abolishment of the Office of Civil Rights inside that Department. The mission creep by the Office of Civil Rights has been wielded to push radical ideologies from the federal government into schools across the nation, well beyond its intended purpose.
The Trump administration should also be alert for other infiltrations pushed by Washington-connected operators outside of government. No matter the label given to their efforts, these lawfare-wielding operators are not trying to help America’s kids.
Pictures taken by Raul654 around Washington DC on May 7, 2005 and licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0.