Cuts to the Office for Civil Rights will impact schools across the nation

When a Philadelphia parent discovered their child was facing antisemitic harassment at school last year — including Nazi salutes and swastikas — they had a place to turn for help. The federal Office for Civil Rights stepped in, conducted an investigation, and in December 2024, forced the Philadelphia School District to implement reforms after finding over 200 incidents of harassment that administrators had failed to address.

Less than three months later, that kind of protection offered by the OCR is essentially gone.

In March, the Trump administration gutted the federal office, firing nearly half its workforce and shuttering seven regional offices, including the one that covers Philadelphia. While officials maintain the office is still protecting children’s civil rights, the numbers tell a different story: complaints are up 9%, while resolved cases are down 40% in just the first months since the cuts. Families have been left stranded as skeleton staff buckle under mounting demands.

This catastrophic rollback comes as stubborn inequalities remain entrenched in school systems. Without federal oversight, they can continue unchecked.

In 2013-14, federal data revealed, among other findings, that Black students were nearly four times as likely to be suspended as white students. The Obama administration issued guidance, which was rescinded by the Trump administration, warning that such disparities could trigger investigations.

Philadelphia, with high rates of racial disparities at the time, was among 52 major districts investigated, creating pressure to reform processes.

As a result of initiatives like the school diversion program, and policies such as restricting suspensions for kindergarten to second graders, Philadelphia lowered its suspension rate from 11.5% in 2013 to 5.7% in 2023. It is unlikely any of it could have happened without the OCR’s data and enforcement.

Philadelphia collects and reports its data through accessible school profiles managed by the Division of Evaluation, Research, and Accountability. But researchers at Arizona State University found that only seven states — Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee — earned an A grade for that kind of data transparency. Thirty-four states, plus Washington, D.C., received a C or worse.

For more than five decades, the Civil Rights Data Collection has captured data on students’ equal access to educational opportunities, collecting information disaggregated by race, gender, disability status, and English learner classification from all public schools across the United States.

This data has empowered families and provided advocates with actionable information: which students were being denied access to advanced classes, which schools were overdisciplining students with disabilities, and which districts were systematically failing their most vulnerable populations.

Now, that evidence-gathering infrastructure is crumbling, with education officials withdrawing the proposed 2025-26 data collection and providing no updates on its future.

In places without transparent data, patterns of discrimination can easily go unaddressed.

Utah’s Davis School District doesn’t publicly report data by race or demographic, and therefore allowed incidents of racial harassment to go unaddressed for years — until a federal investigation exposed hundreds of documented slurs and physical assaults against Black and Asian American students.

Going forward, Utah’s inadequate data collection will be the only measure available unless families and advocacy organizations demand transparency and accountability from state and local authorities, and develop independent monitoring systems to fill the gaps.

Another example is Louisiana, which has a suspension rate nearly twice the national average, but doesn’t disaggregate its data by race (one of the reasons it earned a failing grade for transparency). Federal data have revealed that while Black students represent only 45% of enrollment, they are overrepresented in disciplinary actions — accounting for 67% of suspensions, 69% of expulsions, and 68% of arrests. This kind of disparity persists in other states, such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama.

The need for federal oversight becomes even clearer when you consider that corporal punishment — explicitly designed to cause physical pain — remains legal in 14 states, mostly in the South, where Black students are disproportionately affected by it.

The Trump administration claims freedom as its motivation for disbanding OCR offices, but are students in the Davis School District less free to learn because federal investigators intervened to stop racial harassment? Should we expect states with deep-rooted inequality to stop addressing long-standing issues if they know the OCR cannot act?

The administration has gone beyond staffing cuts — it’s fundamentally changing how civil rights laws work. Recent policy changes eliminate “disparate impact” enforcement, meaning schools can no longer be investigated for policies that harm students of color unless officials prove intentional discrimination. This echoes Andrew Johnson’s post-Civil War approach of federal withdrawal from civil rights enforcement, which helped usher in the Jim Crow era.

When information disappears, so does accountability. Philadelphia’s progress shows what’s possible when federal pressure prompts local change, but that model is at risk as federal oversight vanishes. Without data to expose problems and federal authority to address it, institutional discrimination can continue unnoticed and unchallenged.

The future of educational equity depends on our willingness to notice, to challenge, and to demand data transparency from our schools. And that begins by restoring the kind of data collection and enforcement only the OCR can provide.

AJ Ernst worked as a teacher and administrator in Philadelphia for 13 years and has his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.