The administration said that civil rights investigators still take every complaint seriously and look into each one before deciding whether to dismiss it or open a full probe. | Getty DeVos closes civil rights complaints at faster clip than predecessor

Betsy DeVos’ Education Department has closed more than 1,500 civil rights complaints at the nation’s schools — including dismissing more than 900 outright — in the two months since her acting civil rights chief took steps to reduce a massive backlog.

The June directive from acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Candice Jackson told the department's investigators to narrow their focus to the merits of a particular claim, rather than probing systemic issues, as they had done during the Obama administration. Jackson also gave regional civil rights offices more autonomy to close cases without approval from D.C.


The dismissals come as civil rights groups and Democrats express fear the Trump administration will “diminish” civil rights enforcement — a major focus of former President Barack Obama’s Education Department. Advocacy groups said that while the data offers just a two-month snapshot, the large number of dismissals and so-called “administrative closures” — in which a case is closed without any findings of wrongdoing — are alarming.

“I am concerned, very concerned” about the number of dismissals, said Neena Chaudhry, director of education at the National Women’s Law Center.

Department officials say they’re just working more efficiently, and making progress on the backlog of civil rights complaints that grew over the last several years. As of Wednesday, the Office for Civil Rights had 7,728 cases pending. It received more than 16,700 complaints in 2016 and has just over 500 full-time employees to handle them.

“Under the previous administration, processing times in OCR skyrocketed and the case backlog became almost unmanageable,” said Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill.

The Obama administration had required investigators to take a systemic view of complaints about discrimination, sexual violence and other issues — looking beyond the specific allegations to determine whether there were broader issues at the schools they were investigating. During the Obama era, the D.C. headquarters also had to sign off on case closures.

Jackson’s memo scrapped those requirements.

In the seven weeks since she issued the directive, investigators closed 1,533 complaints on issues ranging from web accessibility for blind students to claims that college administrators mishandled sexual assault complaints. That represents a nearly 20 percent jump in the number of cases closed during the same period last year, according to data obtained by POLITICO.

“Despite what might have been policy based on good intentions, too many students were waiting months and even years for resolution,” Hill said. “Having cases lingering around for years diminishes civil rights enforcement and hurts students.”

The bulk of the closed complaints — 915 — were dismissed outright, a 13 percent jump over the year before. Another 206 were closed after investigators said they couldn’t find sufficient evidence to support the claims, a 78 percent jump.

Another 215 cases were closed after schools agreed to change policies to come into compliance — nearly double the number of cases that resulted in change during the same period last year.

The administration said that civil rights investigators still take every complaint seriously and look into each one before deciding whether to dismiss it or open a full probe. They have maintained a long-standing practice of calling complainants to see if they have more information than was included in their complaints before dismissing them, officials said.

“There’s no thumb on the scale,” a high-level civil rights official told POLITICO. “It’s where the evidence takes our highly trained investigators and attorneys.”

But the surge in closures is likely to increase the controversy surrounding Jackson, who had already become a target for civil rights advocates and Democrats. Many had already called for the removal of the attorney, best known for her book about the women who accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual advances and for bringing them to a presidential debate last fall in coordination with Donald Trump’s campaign.

Last month, Jackson also became embroiled in controversy about campus sexual assault after telling The New York Times that 90 percent of cases "fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,' 'we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.'" She subsequently issued a written apology.

More than 50 Democratic lawmakers wrote DeVos this week, urging her to nominate a permanent civil rights leader, saying that “actions taken by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) under its current leadership signal an abandonment of its responsibility to protect students from discrimination within the education system."

Jackson’s directives are among the Democrats’ complaints.

The increase in closures includes a spike in resolved sexual violence cases — allegations that colleges and universities violated Title IX by mishandling students’ claims of sexual assault or harassment.

In all, the office has closed 11 sexual violence cases during the Trump administration — eight of which were closed without findings of wrongdoing since June.

The office continues to open investigations into sexual assault at a faster rate than it closes them out, however — opening five such probes this week alone, at Alabama A&M University, George Washington University, Stonehill College, Prairie View A&M University and the University of Vermont. The list of active sexual assault investigations has ballooned to 354 at 250 colleges and universities.

Still, civil rights groups blasted the new direction.

“On the whole, this trend of administrative closures is very concerning,” said Alyssa Peterson, a policy and advocacy coordinator at Know Your IX, a group that advocates for survivors of sexual assault. “The Department's decision to administratively close more cases and to scale back the scope of its investigations is an affront to these students, many of whom risked retaliation and further mistreatment by speaking out publicly.”

Chaudhry at the National Women’s Law Center said they viewed the systemic approach as essential because often, students face similar problems at a particular school. She pointed to a case in Pennsylvania, in which her group is representing three high school students who say they were harassed by another student. It started with one complainant, which led other students to step forward, Chaudhry said.

“Often you will see when there are problems at an institution, it’s not just one person who’s gone through that problem,” she said. “It’s really important that OCR doesn’t have a process that puts the burden on every single survivor at the school.”

The bulk of the closed cases involved allegations of other forms of discrimination. An Education Department official said that many were from so-called “mass filers” — people who submit the same complaint against several schools at once. Many dealt with issues like web accessibility for blind people.

While many of those cases result in changes — in June and July alone, the office closed 93 web accessibility cases through agreements with schools to update their websites — they can be extremely time-consuming and distract staffers from investigating allegations of sexual violence and discriminatory discipline.

One high-level official said just three complainants accounted for more than 6,000 of the 16,700 complaints the office received last year.

The administration is now looking at how to distinguish mass filers and make their complaints easier to process, “so as not to let literally three people control the operation of an entire government agency,” the official said.