The Trump Administration Is Quietly Preparing to Bring Back School Segregation

[Celerity]

It starts with vouchers and the destruction of the Office for Civil Rights.

https://prospect.org/2025/11/19/trump-administration-quietly-preparing-to-bring-back-school-segregation/


President Trump signs an executive order with Secretary of Education Linda McMahon at left, July 31, 2025, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo

Not so long ago, the days of racial segregation were thought to be long past. Jim Crow apartheid was firmly part of America’s shameful past—and few episodes were more despicable than bestial white adults throwing objects and screaming death threats at a six-year-old Ruby Bridges for attending a previously whites-only school. But there have always been enemies to school integration, and they are making moves to bring it back. At least for now, the tactics are quieter, using tools like school vouchers and selective destruction of federal law enforcement. Donald Trump is making Jim Crow great again by pushing “school choice” and gutting the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) functions as the Department of Education’s civil rights watchdog. Advocates, students, or parents can file complaints to the office, which then investigates to determine if a complainant’s civil rights (based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age) were violated.

At its best, OCR is a transformative institution, providing long-overdue justice and helping schools protect their students—and not just from racist abuse. In 2014, the Obama OCR played a critical role in reforming the sexual assault prevention policies at Princeton University. It found, after a four-year probe, that the school “failed to provide a prompt and equitable response” to three students who had filed sexual harassment or assault complaints, and violated students’ rights by using a standard of proof higher than the federal recommended standard for sexual harassment or sexual assault. The university had to pay fines and reimburse the tuition of some of the survivors of the assaults. More recently, in 2024, OCR found the Owasso School District in Oklahoma was in violation of Title IX when a trans student’s assault at the hands of two students resulted in their tragic suicide.

OCR, like any agency, has its flaws—its process is quite slow, for instance. But on balance, it is a safeguard for all students on campus, and especially women and minority groups. And that is precisely why it has been targeted by the Trump administration. Last year, the far-right Heritage Foundation’s white nationalist blueprint to reshape America—also known as Project 2025—outlined a troubling plan for OCR in which it would be moved to the Department of Justice and transformed into a weapon to “punish schools for teaching critical race theory” and “transgender insanity.” Sadly, as with much of Project 2025, this vision is coming to pass. In addition to cutting half of OCR’s staff (who are now set to be reinstated after some court battles), from March 11 to June 27 of this year Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Donald Trump dismissed over 3,400 discrimination complaints with either settlements or claims the evidence was insufficient.



Instead of spending time on those complaints, McMahon and her team are now targeting schools whose diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are allegedly violating civil rights law—specifically, the alleged civil rights of white students who didn’t get into a given selective school in favor of students of color, who are assumed to be less deserving by definition. All of this comes out of the 2023 Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively found race-based affirmative action programs in higher education unconstitutional. That decision’s logic—that attempting to rectify historic injustices and account for the effects of centuries of discrimination is the real civil rights issue—is the pretext for much of McMahon’s assault. Thus do laws meant to rectify the lasting legacies of racism become tools of legal bigotry.

snip