In April, the U.S. Department of Education used a landmark law intended, in part, to end racial discrimination to investigate Chicago Public Schools over a "Black Students Success Plan," after a complaint that the program discriminated against students of other races.
In July, the department ruled five Virginia school districts had violated another civil rights law, intended to protect women and girls from sex discrimination and harassment, by allowing transgender students to use school facilities based on gender identity, not biological sex.
And just last week, the Trump administration announced a similar finding against Denver Public Schools, warning the district to, among other things, "adopt biology-based definitions for the words 'male' and 'female'" within 10 days or risk losing federal funding.
The country's federal civil rights laws, written to protect marginalized groups from discrimination, have become an unlikely tool in the Trump administration's efforts to end targeted support for students of color and protections for transgender students.
Of this new campaign, the Trump administration insists it is enforcing decades-old civil rights laws as they were intended.
Julie Hartman, an Education Department spokeswoman, told NPR in a statement that the administration has a legal obligation "to ensure that federal funds are not sponsoring discrimination against students."
Democrats decry the moves as a cynical misreading of federal law and the height of hypocrisy after President Trump pledged to respect states' rights to manage their own public schools.
The stakes for K-12 schools are high, as districts that choose to resist the Trump administration could lose funding that helps them support some of their most vulnerable students, including children with disabilities and those living in poverty.
Battling interpretations of Title IX
Title IX was intended to prevent sex discrimination and harassment in any educational setting that receives federal funding. The Obama and Biden administrations also used the law to protect the rights of transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity.
The Trump administration argues that interpretation violates the rights of women and girls. Instead, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the department's enforcer of civil rights laws, is focused on "Getting Men Out of Women's Sports" – the title of an executive action issued in February that says allowing athletes to compete on sports teams based on gender identity "is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls."
"This interpretation [of the law] doesn't bear any relationship to the actual charge of Title IX," says Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw OCR during both the Obama and Biden administrations.
But conservative legal scholars say it's Democrats who strayed from the law.
"The Biden administration did a lot to more or less bastardize the civil rights laws and schools' compliance with them," says Leigh Ann O'Neill, senior legal strategy attorney at the conservative-leaning America First Policy Institute.
The truth of Title IX is that the law makes no mention of gender identity. And so, just as the Biden administration interpreted it to include protections for transgender students, the Trump administration is now interpreting the same law to do the opposite.
"I thought that the Obama administration was wrong to mandate doing things on the basis of gender identity. I think the Trump administration is wrong to do the opposite," says R. Shep Melnick, a political science professor at Boston College and author of The Transformation of Title IX. "I think it should be up to the states, localities and school districts."
Some states have codified protections for transgender students, including the Virginia Values Act, which prohibits discrimination based on a list of traits, including gender identity. But this is also locking many districts in a federal-state battle of wills with the Trump administration.
"What I find curious is that an administration that campaigned on eliminating [the Education Department] to return rights back to the states is now saying states don't have the right to decide whether or not they want to actually protect their most vulnerable students," says Sheria Smith, a former civil rights attorney in OCR's Dallas office and president of the AFGE Local 252, a union that represents many department employees.
Smith was terminated and the Dallas office closed as part of recent, dramatic cuts to OCR.
How the Title IX fight is playing out in districts and states
In a press release, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the five Virginia districts the department was investigating were following "woke gender ideology in place of federal law" and "have stubbornly refused to provide a safe environment for young women in their schools."
In a public letter, Michelle Reid, the superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools, one of those five districts, pushed back, assuring families "our policies and regulations are consistent with controlling state and federal law," and she said a joint request from the districts entreating the department "to engage in thoughtful discourse was denied."
The Education Department has also joined with the Justice Department to create a new Title IX Special Investigations Team. In an April release, McMahon warned schools, "There's a new sheriff in town. We will not allow you to get away with denying women's civil rights any longer."
Denver Public Schools superintendent Alex Marrero said the department is using its investigation into his district to pursue an "anti-trans agenda through the weaponization of Title IX."
In a statement, Marrero said of this investigation: "Make no mistake: there was no on-site review, not a single witness interview was ever conducted, and not one substantive conversation with any OCR attorney ever occurred. The District's requests for conversation, clarification, mediation, and discussion of remedies all went unanswered. This is unprecedented behavior from an OCR we no longer recognize."
The administration isn't just taking its Title IX fight to individual districts, either. In March, the department notified Maine's state department of education that its policies supporting transgender students violated Title IX and, a month later, the Justice Department sued the state.
"It is very, very rare, outside of early school desegregation, to refer cases to the Department of Justice. The idea of referring entire states – if it's not literally unprecedented, it is extremely unusual," says Melnick.
California and other Democratic strongholds, including Illinois, Oregon and Washington, are or have been under investigation and could potentially lose billions of dollars in federal funding.
Julie Hartman, the Education Department spokeswoman, told NPR that the administration has given California and Maine "every opportunity to voluntarily come into compliance with the law and repeatedly, they have rejected those opportunities to do so."
Other Title IX cases are at a standstill
Some legal advocates also worry that, with the administration so focused on rolling back rights for transgender students, it is pulling back on one of its signature responsibilities under Title IX.
Amanda Walsh, an attorney with the Victim Rights Law Center (VRLC), a group that provides legal services to sexual assault survivors in Massachusetts, says the VRLC has a handful of outstanding sexual assault and harassment complaints with the department and no idea where they stand after it closed seven of OCR's 12 regional offices, including in Boston, where Walsh and her colleagues had been working with OCR attorneys.
"When the office closed, we received no outreach from OCR about the status of those complaints, where those complaints would be transferred, who would be the right point person to contact if we had questions about those complaints," Walsh says. "Still to this day, we have no information about our pending OCR complaints on behalf of our clients."
VRLC is now suing the Education Department, arguing that the closure of OCR offices and the termination of more than half of its investigators has left OCR "hobbled" and "incapable of addressing the vast majority of OCR complaints."
Walsh says, for now, she would hesitate to recommend that clients who have experienced sexual assault try to seek a remedy through the Education Department and OCR.
"My sense is that OCR has truly come to a grinding halt, except for cases that I think push the administration's agenda forward."
In a statement, Julie Hartman said, "The Trump Administration's OCR has taken unprecedented action to reverse the damage of the previous Administration and combat discrimination in our nation's schools and campuses. … OCR is vigorously upholding Americans' civil rights, and will continue to meet its statutory responsibilities while driving to improve efficiency."
Title VI: A new interpretation of racial discrimination
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits any institution that receives federal funding – including K-12 schools, colleges and universities – from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. Moments before President Lyndon Johnson signed the law with Martin Luther King Jr. standing behind him, he told the country that "its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide but to end divisions – divisions which have lasted all too long."
While Title VI has been used by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to safeguard the rights of Black Americans and other historically marginalized groups, the Trump administration is using it to go after both K-12 schools and colleges for preferencing minority students in access to programs and admissions.
In February, the Education Department's acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, issued a letter to schools opining that "educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon 'systemic and structural racism' and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them—particularly during the last four years—under the banner of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' ('DEI'), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline."
Trainor's implicit warning: The Trump administration would be using Title VI to crack down on what it considers discrimination against white and Asian American students.
Trainor and OCR also told school districts they would be required to sign a new form, re-certifying their compliance with Title VI or risk losing their federal funding. Federal judges later blocked the effort saying the department hadn't followed proper procedure.
Title VI cases against schools and colleges
In May, OCR launched a Title VI investigation into one Illinois school district for, among other things, sponsoring "affinity groups" that were restricted by race and, according to a department press release, "pressuring educators to 'acknowledge white skin privilege.'"
In June, the Trump administration escalated a fight with New York's education leaders, claiming the state's ban on school mascots and logos that use Native American imagery was silencing the voices of Native Americans and was itself discriminatory because schools would not be compelled to stop using other culturally-specific mascots or logos like Dutchmen or Huguenots.
"What we see now is an Office for Civil Rights that is not neutral," says former OCR head Catherine Lhamon, "that is not there for every student, and that is picking and choosing both which laws that it's interested in and which students' rights it's interested to protect."
The Trump administration's biggest Title VI cases have so far come not against K-12 school districts but elite colleges and universities, including Columbia, Harvard and Brown, for allowing the spread of antisemitism on their campuses. These investigations are remarkable not only because of the schools' high profile but because the Trump administration cut or froze billions of dollars in federal funding without following a process clearly laid out in law.
Lhamon says, "This administration hasn't investigated, has a suspicion something may be wrong, withholds millions, sometimes billions of dollars in federal funds, and then insists on a set of prescriptive, very detailed changes that are well afield of the topic that the administration claims to be investigating."
In the agreement Brown University signed with the Trump administration in response to its Title VI investigation into antisemitism, Lhamon points out that the first changes Brown committed to weren't about antisemitism at all but gender, including a commitment to define "male" and "female" consistent with the Trump executive order titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."
"Certainly many of these universities had a problem of not cracking down on some pretty serious harassment of Jewish students," says Melnick, who has spent decades studying civil rights enforcement. "But then the administration has seized on that to say, 'OK, this is going to be the mechanism for doing all of these other things that we care about.'"
Christopher Schorr, who runs the Higher Education Reform Initiative at the America First Policy Institute, takes no issue with this broad approach. "Obviously, the campus antisemitism crisis in many ways was the doorway through which a lot of this is happening and through which the administration can now get a handle on the larger pattern of abuse of civil rights law."
If the administration was serious about stopping antisemitism, says Sheria Smith, the former OCR attorney, it would not have closed seven of OCR's regional offices. "I can't help but think that that's all lip service when the very office that was handling the majority of our antisemitism cases, the Philadelphia office, was closed with no plan on what happened to those complaints."
Federal funding is on the line
For institutions of higher education, the stakes are clear: The administration has no reservations about stopping vital federal funding before the legal process has played out.
For K-12 schools, the administration has only just begun to move toward funding cuts. In the case of those five Virginia districts that the Education Department says are violating Title IX, the department recently announced it is taking next steps toward a full funding cut – a move so unusual the department hasn't done it in decades, according to Education Week.
In her letter to families, Reid, the Fairfax County Public Schools superintendent, said up to $160 million in federal funding could be at risk.
Melnick points out, during the Obama and Biden administrations, "conservatives were very angry at the Office for Civil Rights" for using its leverage over schools to force them to embrace the administration's policy priorities.
Now, Melnick says, "all the things they criticized, they're doing on steroids."
Though federal funding to K-12 schools makes up a small share of district budgets, around 11%, that money plays an outsized role in helping their most vulnerable students, including children with disabilities and those living in poverty.
That financial reality means many districts, and potentially entire states, must now weigh the possibility that fighting the administration on one civil rights front – say, to support transgender students – could mean losing money to help other vulnerable children.
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