Professor and colleagues offer educational recommendations for Biden administration
During the last four years of the Trump administration, several key civil right provisions in education to help diversify public schools were rolled back. As a result, president-elect Joe Biden and his administration will need to work on restoring many civil right provisions created during the Obama administration.
Elizabeth DeBray, a professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy, and colleagues provided several suggestions to help the new administration during this critical time in a policy memo titled, “An Agenda for Restoring Civil Rights in K-12 Federal Education Policy.”
“At a time when parents’ interest in diverse schools is growing, the federal government should support voluntary local efforts to diversify public schools,” said DeBray. “Despite clear evidence that students of color experience harsher school discipline and less access to challenging classes than white students, federal investigations of discrimination by the Office of Civil Rights have backed away from examining such racial disparities in how schools treat students.”
DeBray and her co-authors proposed these suggestions based on evidence from a research study funded by the Spencer Foundation. Since 2017, the team has been tracking whether and how the Trump administration has reversed Obama-era policies around race and educational civil rights.