Education Department has flipped its civil rights mission

 Washington Post -  The Trump administration has upended civil rights enforcement at K-12 schools and colleges, prioritizing cases that allege transgender students and students of color are getting unfair advantages, while severe staff cuts have left thousands of other allegations unresolved.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is so short-staffed that some attorneys have as many as 300 cases, making it impossible to devote attention to most of them, current and former employees said. Fewer cases are being closed, and 90 percent of those resolved were dismissed, typically without an investigation, up from 80 percent last year, according to data obtained by The Washington Post.

The office has a backlog of about 25,000 unresolved cases, up from about 20,000 when President Donald Trump took office, department officials said.

At the same time, under Trump, the civil rights office has announced investigations of at least 99 schools, often based on news coverage or complaints from conservative groups... 

These changes define the new tone and mission in the civil rights office, which is aggressively pursuing Trump’s agenda. In choosing its targets, the administration is not just picking different priorities than its predecessors; it’s flipping the interpretation of civil rights law in the opposite direction.