Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, few reporters have chronicled the inner workings of the Department of Education as thoroughly as Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen.

Since Jan. 20, they’ve shared bylines on eight stories about the department, many focused on its Office for Civil Rights. Both reporters have covered education for years, including stories about how different school districts discipline kids and troubling conditions at an unregulated, for-profit boarding school (which was featured in a Dispatches newsletter last year).

Reading Smith Richards and Cohen’s stories, you’ll learn that the Department of Education is — or was — one of the largest federal enforcers of civil rights in the country, and that a large share of the discrimination complaints investigated in any given year involved students with disabilities. 

Many of those investigations have now been idled, as the Trump administration fired about half of those employed by the Office for Civil Rights and closed seven of 12 regional offices across the U.S. Investigators who remain face extreme caseloads and, as ProPublica as recently reported, require permission from Trump appointees to open up new investigations on specific topics.

I talked to Smith Richards and Cohen about their ongoing coverage, how students are affected by changes at the federal level and who they want to hear from as they continue reporting. Our interview has been condensed and edited. 

What stories did you expect to tell about the Department of Education in the second Trump administration. How did that change or not?

Jodi S. Cohen: The president made no secret when he was campaigning, and from his very first days in office, that his goal was to dismantle the Department of Education. And education is something that touches every single person in this country. It matters to everyone.

Jodi S. Cohen, reporter and editor

Jennifer Smith Richards: We made a decision pretty early on to really focus on the Office for Civil Rights, because it’s so consequential to the way that schools function and the way that students and families experience schools, and we knew they were going to move very quickly on dismantling that division specifically.

Jennifer Smith Richards, reporter

What kinds of cases does the Office for Civil Rights usually cover that are being impacted by these cuts? Who are the students involved?

Cohen: The OCR takes complaints from students and their families and from others involved in schools related to discrimination, whether that’s based on disability or race or sex. Its core function is to make sure that students are able to achieve and get a free and appropriate education without discrimination.

They’re students in your neighborhood schools with all kinds of concerns. A student in California who is being called racial slurs and who is receiving harsher discipline than white students. A student in North Carolina who was diagnosed with diabetes and the family had requested a plan, which they’re entitled to, to provide accommodations. It’s complaints about students with disabilities being put in seclusion rooms in violation of the law.

The goal of filing complaints is to obtain some sort of change at the school district or at the college, often not just for the student who’s making the complaint, but to get some sort of systemic change so that there’s a solution going forward.

Smith Richards: When the administration came into office, there were more than 12,000 pending cases. That’s not even just complaints, those are cases that were actually examined and opened. 

This is an agency the public can access and ask for help from, and it doesn’t cost anything. It’s a way to really try to fix a problem that your child is experiencing in your school or college that doesn’t require you to go out and hire a lawyer.

In comparison, you’ve reported that the administration is opening up new investigations, including many focused on trans students. How is that happening if all these other cases are so short-staffed? 

Smith Richards: There’s no evidence of an increased number of complaints about transgender students coming in from the public. But the Trump administration is using something called a directed investigation, which is essentially where the administration decides that this particular topic is important and they want to fully investigate it. 

What we have seen in a couple of the directed investigations is that they went very quickly. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of fidelity to the methods and the procedures that the OCR is known for. 

What other changes is the administration making to the Department of Education?  

Cohen: Pulling very large amounts of funding, billions of dollars, from school districts, state education authorities, colleges, universities that do not align with how his administration sees the world.

We’re also watching the Federal Student Aid office, the office within the Department of Education that administers financial aid, as well as what happens to Title I funds, the supplemental funds that are provided to high poverty schools.

Smith Richards: One of the things that I think is important to understand is that the core functions of the department were pretty simple to begin with: provide services and support to students, disburse federal funding, administer Federal Student Aid, uphold civil rights in schools and collect data about schools and education. One of the first things the Trump administration did was wipe out the entirety of the branch that collected data about schools and did research about schools — a really critical repository of what we know about American education. 

We hear a lot about cuts to individual universities, and those are always really big stories that reporters focus on deservedly. But the Trump administration also came in and wiped out regional labs all over the country that were designed specifically to help and support schools. 

What do you want people to know about how you’re approaching this reporting, especially if they’re impacted and are interested in talking to you? 

Smith Richards: Just the fact that you’re talking to us doesn’t mean that you have to be in a story. The point of reporting and talking to as many people as possible is so we are as informed as we can possibly be as we write a story. It helps us to understand what they’re going through and what their situation is. If they don’t want to be part of a story, we are respectful of that, and we take their privacy very, very seriously.

Cohen: I would say that we are very deliberate in our reporting; we take student privacy seriously. We’re also really interested in hearing from the school districts about what their interactions with the OCR have been like since January. In addition to parents and caregivers, we’re hoping that school districts reach out. 

Education Department spokespeople did not respond to questions and requests for comment sent over several weeks before Smith Richards and Cohen’s latest story about changes in the civil rights division. The department has said publicly it would still meet its legal obligations. 

Read the full story

A Gutted Education Department’s New Agenda: Roll Back Civil Rights Cases, Target Transgender Students