Every Tuesday, like clockwork, the U.S. Department of Education updated its public list of schools and colleges being investigated for potential civil rights violations of students.
every Tuesday until January 14, 2025, six days before President Donald Trump is sworn in for a second term. Currently, that online list remains frozen in time, as it was the week before the inauguration.
My colleagues Jodi Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards, both longtime education reporters, regularly used the list in their work. “When we get a call or a tip about a school district, we go look at the school district to see if they’re under investigation,” Cohen told me recently.
Smith-Richards said the data allowed the public to identify patterns in what types of investigations were being opened and where.
For decades, the Office of Civil Rights has worked to defend students’ constitutional rights against discrimination based on disability, race, national origin, and sex. Currently, without a publicly accessible way to track the department’s investigations, journalists, education monitors and parents can be left in the dark.
Early last year, Cohen-Richards and Smith-Richards contacted sources within the Department of Education. They learned that the department had drastically reduced its efforts to investigate certain types of discrimination in schools. They published an article saying that under the Trump administration, the department is now focused on investigations related to curbing anti-Semitism, suspending transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, and combating allegations of discrimination against white students. Complaints about transgender students playing sports or using girls’ restrooms at school were swiftly dealt with, while incidents of racial harassment against black students last year were ignored.
Throughout last year, reporters asked the new leadership at the Department of Education for updates on the investigation. They filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records related to the new investigation and agreements with universities and school districts detailing their plans to remain compliant with federal anti-discrimination laws. They also requested communications with specific civilian groups.
Although the department selectively sends out press releases about some cases, its efforts remain largely hidden. There is no definitive way to know which types of civil rights complaints are prioritized.
By late February 2026, after publishing the first article on the issue and repeatedly asking for information, the department had failed to produce a single record. ProPublica filed suit.
The Education Department asked a judge this month to dismiss the lawsuit. The company said in a court filing that it is reviewing the reporters’ requests and seeking records that are “potentially responsive.”
For most reporters and news organizations, suing a government agency is not the first choice. This is expensive and time-consuming, and records may not be created for months or even years. That’s longer than most reporters spend on a story or project.
I know this first hand. In 2016, ProPublica filed a lawsuit on my behalf against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs seeking records regarding the agency’s handling of Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam War. We wrote about how veterans believe the department mishandles insurance claims related to health issues facing them and their descendants. We obtained records piecemeal over the years, but the case was not concluded until 2021. That was long after our coverage of the subject had tapered off.
Over the years, ProPublica has also sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Internal Revenue Service, and Department of Health and Human Services for failing to submit records under FOIA. This is just a partial list. We recently won a lawsuit seeking access to military court records that had been blocked by the U.S. Navy.
Peeking into records from government agencies has long been difficult under both Democratic and Republican administrations. But we do so because these records belong to us, the public. And they are important tools for the journalism we do to expose abuses of power.
One particular challenge facing journalists today is that the cuts across the federal government under the Trump administration have hit the FOIA office particularly hard. And FOIA requests seem to be going into some kind of black hole. In any case, we have no intention of retreating. We will continue to fight for the data and information to which our citizens are entitled. We are fortunate to have excellent lawyers and outside law firms to assist us.
I asked Cohen and Smith-Richards why the Department of Education’s data is so important. Smith-Richards gave a concrete example. The department has been terminating civil rights settlement agreements with schools and other educational institutions, sometimes without informing the public. For example, the department ruled in 2024 that the bullying of a sixth-grader in Washington state was based on race and gender and constituted a civil rights violation. The district later entered into an agreement with the department to protect students from discrimination based on gender and race. But this year, the ministry terminated the agreement. And although it announced the changes through a press release, there is no indication in its online database that the original settlement is no longer in effect. In many cases, there is also no press release.
So how can the public know about situations like this, I asked? “Either the school district threw up their hands and claimed that the federal government terminated the settlement agreement, or someone whispered it to them,” Smith-Richards said.
How often has this happened? It’s almost impossible to know the full extent. “There’s not some kind of transparent process here,” Smith-Richards said.
Data loss goes beyond new investigations and settlement agreements. For example, through the department’s collection of civil rights data, Cohen-Richards and Smith-Richards were able to determine that special education districts in Illinois had the highest student arrest rates of any school in the country. By knowing this, we were able to dig deeper into the causes of the high clearance rate. They ultimately released findings that also found that one school had more than half of its students arrested during the 2017-2018 school year.
However, the latest data on the ministry’s website is from 2020-21, at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s also unclear whether future data will be made public, given the Trump administration’s plans to shut down the Department of Education.
Cohen and Smith-Richards continue to seek information from the Department of Education. In late March, they filed another FOIA request seeking what they called “very basic information.”
The Ministry of Education confirmed it had received the request. The approximate time we have told you to expect a response is: 262 business days.
Until then, let’s do our best.
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