Law professor: Expect big rollback of civil rights enforcement in education under Trump and DeVos
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s first official policy act was to support the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the Obama administration’s federal guidance protecting the right of transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice. News organizations reported that DeVos was personally opposed to the action but went along with it. If she was discomforted by it, she gave no hint when she spoke late last week about it at a conference of conservative Republicans.
“This issue was a very huge example of the Obama administration’s overreach to suggest a one-size-fits-all, federal-government approach, top-down approach to issues best dealt with at a personal level, at a local level,” DeVos said in response to a question from CNN contributor and Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany.
Civil rights advocates fear that that was just the first in what will be a series of actions by the administration and the Education Department to roll back federal protections for students. One of them is Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and author of the 2016 book “Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline.” He also writes the Education Law Prof Blog.
Here is an interview that Black did with Jennifer Berkshire, author of the Have You Heard blog and podcast. Berkshire is a freelance journalist and public education advocate who worked for six years editing a newspaper for the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts. This first appeared on her blog (formerly known as EduShyster), and she gave me permission to republish it:
Jennifer Berkshire: The Trump administration has just rescinded guidelines to schools banning discrimination against transgender students. There’s a lot of speculation about just how “joint” the joint letter from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions actually was. But you seem Law professor: Expect big rollback of civil rights enforcement in education under Trump and DeVos - The Washington Post:
