Dear Colleague: Do what the Ed Department wants -- or else

"Dear Colleague," the U.S. Education Department starts its "guidance" letters to school districts. Just a word of advice. We can't order you to take it. But, if you want to avoid a costly civil rights investigation and keep your federal funding, you'd better.

It's a "bureaucratic sledgehammer," writes Robert Pondiscio in the New York Post. And a bit of a shakedown.

Elon Musk's slash-and-burn boys won't be able to cut much from the U.S. Education Department, because the multi-billion-dollar items go to programs Congress has legislated, he writes. "Title I’s $18 billion for poor kids? Mandated. IDEA’s $15 billion for special education? Same deal. Pell Grants topping $30 billion? That’s the Higher Education Act, not some rogue educrat’s hobbyhorse."

And the cost of "Dear Colleague" letters doesn't show up in the federal budget. State and local taxpayers pay the cost of compliance.

The Obama administration's 2011 Title IX letter on sexual violence told schools and colleges to adopt a lower standard of evidence for alleged sexual assaults on campus, with no need for legal protections for the accused. "The result was an explosion in the number of Title IX coordinators hired, each earning $150,000 a year or more," adding up to hundreds of millions of other people's money, writes Pondiscio. Colleges and universities spent more to defend against lawsuits by accused students -- and to pay judgments. Betsy DeVos rescinded the letter in 2017.

A January 2014 discipline letter, issued with the Justice Department, warned districts that racial disparities in K-12 school suspensions could be a sign of bias.

Districts "embraced trendy fixes like restorative justice, or simply stopped disciplining unruly kids altogether," writes Pondiscio. "Teachers got implicit bias training costing $2,000 to $10,000 per session, with no guarantee that it works; facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked every classroom time-out by race."

In addition to the extra costs, "teachers complained that relaxed student discipline was creating classroom chaos," he writes.

The Biden administration used a 2021 executive order to put “gender identity” under Title IX’s umbrella, backed by an Education Department guidance. Comply or lose federal funds.

Now Trump is back in power. His executive order on “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”

warns schools that what the Biden administration considered transgender students' rights is now a denial of girls' and women's "equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”

Maine's governor, a Democrat, says the state won't comply. The Philadelphia School District also says it will let biological males compete on biological females' teams, risking $33 million in federal funding.

School leaders across the country are vowing to ignore the Education Department's Feb. 14 letter warning against treating students differently because of their race, reports Linda Jacobson on The 74. (A document explaining the letter released last week reassured some, she writes. Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney, called it ”downright reasonable.”)

California's Long Beach Unified School District plans to open a Center of Black Student Excellence in May, despite the letter by Craig Trainor, the top civil rights official at the department.

“It is just a letter. It’s not rules or regs. It’s not changing law,” said Sonia Park, executive director of the Diverse Charter Schools Association.

The American Federation of Teachers, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, has filed a federal lawsuit saying the “vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself,” reports Jacobson.

An earlier executive order from the president told the Education Department to "devise a plan for stripping districts of their federal funds if they advance 'discriminatory equity ideology'," such as critical race theory, she writes.

Parents Defending Education lists districts with DEI policies and initiatives. "Last year, it forced the Los Angeles district to revise its Black Student Achievement Plan, which provided additional counseling and academic support in schools predominantly serving Black students," Jacobson writes. "All students, not just those who are Black, are now eligible for the extra help." 

Here's the group's round-up of President Trump's "executive orders aimed at reshaping federal policies, eliminating DEI initiatives, restoring biological reality and enforcing merit-based practices."