Why We Are Suing the Department of Education

Every Tuesday, almost like clockwork, the U.S. Department of Education would update a public list of schools and colleges it was investigating for possible violations of students’ civil rights. Every Tuesday, that is, until Jan. 14, 2025, six days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term. Today, that online list remains as it was that week before inauguration: frozen in time. My colleagues Jodi Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards, both longtime education reporters, used that list regularly in their work. “You would get a call or a tip about a school district, and you would go and look up the school district to see if it was under investigation,” Cohen told me recently. The data also allowed the public to spot patterns in what types of investigations were being opened and where, Smith Richards said. For decades, the Office for Civil Rights has worked to uphold students’ constitutional rights against discrimination based on disability, race, national origin and gender. Now, without a publicly accessible way to track the office’s investigations, journalists, education watchdogs and parents could be left in the dark. Early last year, Cohen and Smith Richards reached out to sources inside the Department of Education. They learned the department had significantly cut back its efforts to investigate some types of discrimination in schools. They published a story about how the department, under the Trump administration, is now focused on investigations relating to curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students. Complaints about transgender students playing sports and using girls’ bathrooms at school had been fast-tracked while cases of racial harassment of Black students last year were ignored. Throughout last year, the reporters asked the new Department of Education leadership for updates on investigations. And they filed Freedom of Information Act requests, seeking records regarding new investigations and those related to agreements with universities and school districts that detailed their plans to stay in compliance with federal anti-discrimination law. They also requested communications with specific private groups. Although the department selectively sends press releases about some cases, the work mostly remains hidden. We have no definitive way of knowing which types of civil rights complaints it is prioritizing. By late February 2026 — a year after we published our first story about the issue and after asking repeatedly for information — the department had failed to produce a single record. ProPublica sued. The Education Department asked a judge this month to dismiss the case. It said in a court filing that it was still evaluating the reporters’ requests and searching for “potentially responsive” records. Suing government agencies is not a first choice for most reporters and news organizations. It’s costly, time consuming and may not produce records for months or even years — longer than most reporters spend on a story or project. I know this firsthand. ProPublica filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on my behalf in 2016 seeking records related to the agency’s handling of Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam War. We had written articles about how veterans believed the department had mishandled claims related to health issues they and their offspring faced. We got records in dribs and drabs over years, but the lawsuit didn’t come to a close until 2021, well after our reporting on the topic had tapered off. Over the years, ProPublica also has sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services over their failure to turn over records under FOIA. And that’s just a partial list. We recently won a suit against the U.S. Navy seeking access to military court records it was blocking. Prying records from government agencies has been challenging for a long time, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. But we do it because these records belong to us, the public. And they’re a critical tool for the journalism we do to expose abuses of power. One particular challenge journalists face today is that layoffs across the federal government under Trump have hit FOIA offices particularly hard. And FOIA requests appear to be going into what seems like a black hole. Regardless, we don’t intend to back down. We will continue to fight for data and information to which we believe the public is entitled, and we are fortunate to have outstanding lawyers and outside law firms ready to help us. I asked Cohen and Smith Richards why the Department of Education data was so important. Smith Richards gave me a concrete example: The department has been terminating civil rights resolution agreements with schools and other educational institutions, but it sometimes hasn’t told the public it has done so. For example, the department had ruled in 2024 that the bullying of a Washington sixth grader was based on race and sex, and amounted to a civil rights violation. The school district then entered into an agreement with the department to protect students from sex- and race-based discrimination. But this year, the department ended the agreement. And though it did announce the change via press release, there’s no indication in its online database that the original settlement is no longer in force. In many cases, there are no press releases, either. So how would the public even find out about situations like this, I asked. “Either a school district has raised their hand and said the federal government has terminated its resolution agreement,” Smith Richards said, “or it’s gotten whispered to somebody.” How often has this happened? It’s almost impossible to know the full scope. “There’s not some sort of transparent process here,” Smith Richards said. The loss of data goes beyond new investigations and resolution agreements. For example, through the department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, Cohen and Smith Richards were able to determine that a special-education district in Illinois had the highest rate of student arrests of any school in the country. Knowing this allowed them to dig deeper into what was causing the high arrest rate. They ultimately published an investigation that also found that in one school, more than half of its students were arrested during the 2017-18 academic year. But the most recent data on the department’s website is from 2020-21, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. And given that the Trump administration plans to shut down the Department of Education, it’s unclear if future data will be released. Cohen and Smith Richards continue to seek information from the Education Department. In late March, they filed another FOIA request for what they described as “very basic information.” The Education Department acknowledged receiving the request. Here’s roughly when it told them to expect a response: 262 BUSINESS DAYS. Until then, we’ll keep at it. ProPublica needs your help to track how the upheaval of public education is affecting schools and colleges in your community. Take a few minutes to join our source network and help guide our coverage. The post Why We Are Suing the Department of Education appeared first on ProPublica.