Ed Scraps Tool to Investigate Discrimination

The U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday that it’s abandoning provisions of civil rights law that protect students against institutional policies that disparately impact minority groups. Now only intentional discrimination violates the law, according to the department’s final rule.

ED officials say that the decades-old provisions under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “allow demographic data alone to establish that a school violated federal civil rights laws, even if there is no facially discriminatory policy, practice, or discriminatory intent involved,” forcing educational institutions to consider race in their decision-making.

“These regulatory changes will help ensure fair enforcement of Title VI, as intended by Congress,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a news release. “The Trump administration will always hold schools accountable for discrimination and ensure all students in America receive the equal educational opportunities and equal treatment to which they are entitled by law.”

Other federal agencies have made similar moves in response to an April 2025 executive order by President Donald Trump that called for eliminating the consideration of disparate impact “in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.” In June, the Department of Justice issued an opinion declaring the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s disparate-impact guidelines unconstitutional. The Department of Transportation scrapped the legal concept that same month in its own final rule.

Against that backdrop, the Education Department’s shift may not be surprising, but it’s still “astonishing,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led the Office for Civil Rights during the Obama and Biden administrations.

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Lhamon argued that ED mischaracterizes disparate impact as condemning practices as discriminatory purely based on demographic data when, in reality, it’s an “investigative tool” that’s used as part of a larger analysis process. During Lhamon’s tenure, OCR investigators sometimes concluded that a school or college’s practice did disparately affect different groups, but the institution had a justified or lawful reason for it that didn’t amount to discrimination, she said.

In contrast, the Trump administration regularly uses universities’ admissions data, disaggregated by race, to accuse institutions of violating civil rights law, which seems to take the approach that ED says it’s against. Lhamon called it “the height of irony” that “the Trump administration tells other people not to do what it is lawlessly doing.”

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A group of 60 civil rights and education organizations—including EdTrust, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Center for Racial and Economic Justice at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco—argued in a joint statement that the policy shift will leave students of color without federal protection from policies that disproportionately harm or disadvantage them. The group urged the department to reverse course.

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The department made its final rule without any prior public notice or the typically required comment period—similar to other policy changes the Trump administration rushed through. ED officials claimed the new rule falls under an Administrative Procedure Act exemption for issues related to “agency management or personnel or to public property, loans, grants, benefits, or contracts” because the policy shift concerns nondiscrimination criteria for institutions to receive federal funding.

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