The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Decades after Jim Crow battles over legal school desegregation, students continue to encounter discrimination that interferes with their ability to learn. The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has frozen active student civil rights investigations. The Post highlighted one instance in Michigan where a Black fifth grader endured racial slurs like “monkey,” the N-word, and hearing her skin was “burnt like a piece of chicken.” As the Biden administration was winding down, the student’s parents filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the division of the Department of Education tasked with protecting the civil rights of students. But after the Trump administration took charge, the investigation was frozen, along with over 30 others, according to the Post.
While the OCR is still pursuing cases, the office has been flipped on its head—turned into a political weapon aimed at perceived threats to modern conservatism, reflected in its focus on investigating trans athletes or alleged racism against white students. Less discussed is how many of the office’s previous functions have ceased. The case in Michigan was one of almost three dozen that were completed or in their final stages at the end of the Biden administration. Since Trump retook the White House, OCR has only reached three settlements.
Resolving Problems Before They Start
This isn’t a matter of enforcement capacity. The OCR has easy-to-implement tools to resolve many civil rights issues without a full investigation, namely the Office for Civil Rights’ technical assistance program. The regional offices used to offer on-site consultations and training to schools, advocates, administrators, districts, and states about their specific civil rights obligations. Such technical training often helped prevent disputes before they even happened, or resolved them at an early stage without need for courts or hearings. Seven of the 12 offices were shuttered last year.
Michael Pillera of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights explained that a single phone call can resolve a matter quickly. “Students, parents, teachers, school leaders, and others could call, email, or otherwise contact OCR to ask questions about their rights and the legal requirements under civil rights laws,” Pillera told the Revolving Door Project. The assistance from the OCR to help navigate the infrastructure moved civil rights “from rights guaranteed on paper to rights realized,” he said.
In 2024, OCR responded to 11,000 inquiries and conducted 211 technical assistance presentations. Not every civil rights problem requires a federal investigation—and not even the federal government has the resources to investigate every single issue across the country. The OCR helped school administrators understand what laws require and how to comply with federal antidiscrimination law.
In 2020, when changes to Title IX were being implemented, technical assistance offered detailed guidance on how schools should approach the changes. At the end of the year, the department handling technical assistance requests issued a 111-page repository of questions it had received about implementing the Title IX rule, addressing issues ranging from confidentiality and retaliation to K-12 proceedings. The model allowed OCR to do more than answer individual questions: Guidance developed in response to one institution’s concerns helped schools across the country understand their obligations before a dispute required formal enforcement.
Dismantling Student Civil Rights
In addition to the damage to the technical assistance program, the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the Office for Civil Rights’ Equity Assistance Centers, the successors to 1960s “Desegregation Assistance Centers.” More than 120 districts are still subject to active federal desegregation, but in February 2025, the Education Department terminated grants supporting all four Equity Assistance Centers. The administration culled these historic programs as part of the broader right-wing effort to slash federal support for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. The terminations were challenged in court and some infrastructure was restored, but the cancellations disrupted work already under way and forced layoffs of key staff.
That was just round one. In its FY2026 budget request, the Trump administration requested zero dollars for the training program that had received $6.6 million in fiscal year 2024. The administration argued that the program had strayed far beyond Title IV’s statutory purpose, and that states and localities could choose to fund comparable services themselves. In June 2026, the Education Department proposed rescinding the federal regulations that govern the Equity Assistance Center program altogether.
Taken together, the grant terminations, proposed elimination of funding, and potential regulatory changes represent a sustained effort to dismantle the federal infrastructure that has provided schools with civil rights technical assistance for decades.
The administration’s own data shows that the Equity Assistance Centers are working as intended. Four out of five school districts reported increased awareness after receiving assistance; more than 85 percent reported major policy changes or practices related to students’ ability to participate in educational programs. These numbers all exceed the department’s own target data.
The Education Department Abandons Schools
As federal technical assistance capacity diminishes, schools and families are left with fewer avenues for resolving civil rights disputes. Teachers and administrators will have to make determinations about whether students’ civil rights have been violated.
Former Office for Civil Rights officials told the Revolving Door Project that shifting civil rights enforcement responsibilities to the Department of Justice would bring a suite of problems, especially since the DOJ is not equipped to replicate the OCR model. Unlike OCR, which has historically processed large numbers of individual complaints from students and families, the DOJ is typically more selective about the cases it pursues, focusing its resources on larger cases with broader impact. OCR’s regional structure allows schools and districts to seek guidance about potential civil rights problems before they become formal complaints, while the DOJ is not structured to reproduce at a similar scale.
States and localities do not have the resources of the federal government—and the reason the feds got involved in protecting schools from discrimination in the first place is that local officials did not want to do it at all. Due to lost expertise, problems that could have been corrected informally will persist. Schools will have to wait years for resolution from OCR because of the already substantial backlog that the Trump administration’s staffing cuts and reorganization threaten to worsen. Those comparable services could cost a school district a substantial amount of money, while simultaneously creating worse environments for students experiencing discrimination.
Discrimination has clear, tangible effects on students’ learning and lifelong well-being. Aprile Benner of University of Texas at Austin reviewed nearly two decades of scholarship and found that racial and ethnic discrimination during adolescence is associated with mental and physical health harms, and can lead to poor academic performance. Benner also pointed out that in schools where prejudice is worse, academic achievement is also lower. The purpose of technical assistance and the Equity Assistance Center infrastructure is to help schools identify and address the kinds of discriminatory practices that research has repeatedly associated with poorer educational outcomes.
Looking Beyond the Trump Administration
Rebuilding the Office of Civil Rights does not simply mean restoring the pre–January 2025 status quo. The office already faced significant backlogs and capacity constraints. A future administration should rebuild it around prevention, accessibility, and timely enforcement. OCR must restore regional capacity and staffing, fully fund OCR technical assistance and Equity Assistance Centers, improve public reporting on complaint timelines and dispositions, and strengthen complementary state civil rights capacity without treating states as substitutes for federal enforcement. And realistically, in order to rebuild the onetime national political consensus that fighting discrimination is a priority, we will need to embed a renewed OCR with a communications capacity to sell the stories about the heartbreaking bigotry too many students face—and how the forces of hate can and are being defeated.
That’s because the Office for Civil Rights exists to protect students. A Black fifth grader should not have to know what OCR is. Her parents should not have to become civil rights experts to get their child’s school to respond. A school should not need a yearslong investigation to understand that a Black child repeatedly called the N-word or a “monkey” demands intervention. That is the value of preventive civil rights infrastructure. When it works, protecting a student’s rights does not always require years of investigation or litigation. Sometimes, all it takes is picking up the phone.
