Statistics released by the Department of Education reveal that the Office for Civil Rights received a record-breaking number of discrimination complaints in the last fiscal year, between October 2021 and September 2022.
During this period, the federal agency logged roughly 19,000 complaints, doubling the number received during the previous fiscal year and shattering the 16,000 cases registered back in 2016, the New York Times reports.
“It reflects the confidence in the Office for Civil Rights as a place to seek redress,” the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights Catherine Lhamon told the Times. “At the same time, the scope and volume of harm that we’re asking our babies to navigate is astronomical.”
While many complaints focused on hate crimes and some were related to certain high-profile cases in Arizona and Iowa, the majority of discrimination complaints came from students with disabilities. Indeed, an analysis of over two decades of Education Department data indicates that disabled students are the largest claimant group, according to EducationWeek.
Additionally, left-leaning civil-rights groups such as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP, and the Legal Defense Fund have used civil-rights-discrimination suits to challenge educational institutions for failing to uphold inclusive learning environments. In particular, former president Donald Trump’s appeals for creating a “1776 Commission” and molding a “patriotic education” system galvanized many of these organizations’ activities.
More recently, conservative nonprofits have adopted a similar approach. With the 1619 Project’s growing popularity, and the seeping of identity politics into elementary education, conservatives have begun to turn to the Education Department’s complaint mechanism as a means of challenging the cultural zeitgeist.
Parents Defending Education filed numerous suits citing Title VI violations on the basis of “race, color, or national origin” for the 2022 fiscal year. The introduction of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, such as school trips or programming advertised exclusively to members of minority groups, has been a particularly polarizing issue.
“The shift toward race-conscious policies means that schools are consciously injecting race into things, when we believe they should not be,” Nicole Neily, the founder of Parents Defending Education told the Times. “I worry that in this continued obsession of trying to inject identity into everything, it almost undermines where there is real injustice.”
The news comes as educators continue to grapple with the lingering effects of the pandemic. Standardized-test scores for American high-school students have plummeted to a 30-year low while an endemic teacher shortage continues to plague impoverished school districts.