A Promise Unfulfilled: How Title VI is Used to Remedy Racial Discrimination in School Practices

• In Event: Complex Contestation: Understanding the Structures and Actors that Manage Dissent in the U.S. K-12 Political Landscape

Abstract

A vast literature in education demonstrates the myriad ways that racially discriminatory school policies and practices produce racial educational inequalities. Prior research indicates, for example, that teachers’ expectations for their students are racially biased (e.g., Ferguson, 2003; Gershenson et al., 2016), while other work documents discriminatory grading practices (e.g., Quinn, 2020) and discipline practices (e.g., Okonofua & Eberhardt, 2015; Owens, 2022, 2023). All told, this work suggests that rooting out discrimination is crucial for improving the educational opportunities and outcomes for racially minoritized students.
In the United States, responsibility for protecting students’ civil rights in public schools—including protection from racial discrimination per Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—falls to the U.S. Department of Education’s (US ED) Office for Civil Rights (OCR). OCR enforces Title VI and other federal civil rights law by investigating potential violations—initiated largely in response to civil rights complaints filed on behalf of student groups. Yet, despite this integral function, we know remarkably little about how OCR enforces civil rights law in public schools and whether those efforts effectively reshape school policies and practices in ways that reduce educational inequalities.
In the proposed paper, we provide the first systematic evidence describing how OCR has used Title VI enforcement to remedy racial and ethnic discrimination in K-12 public schools. Specifically, we analyze newly available OCR complaint data acquired through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to US ED (Gopalan & Lewis, 2022) merged to FOIA data received by the authors. These data describe the agency’s Title VI investigation work in K-12 public schools over the twenty-year period from 1999 to 2019. We combine these newly available data with public data on student outcomes and district characteristics to describe the types of schools and districts subject to Title VI enforcement.
We first examine trends in the number and types of Title VI complaints filed between 1999 and 2019 and how those cases were resolved. We find that OCR received an increasing number of Title VI complaints each year over this period (from 1,400 to 2,000 complaints). The most common issues reported in Title VI complaints were related to differential treatment/denial of benefits, retaliation, racial harassment, and school discipline. During this same period, most Title VI complaints were closed for administrative reasons (more than 80% in later years). This means that, in most years, the vast majority of Title VI complaints are never fully investigated by OCR.
All told, our preliminary findings suggest that Title VI may be under-enforced, especially considering the breadth of evidence documenting the prevalence of racially discriminatory school practices and policies. Federal civil rights enforcement remains a vital avenue available to parents to address concerns of racial discrimination in school practices and policies. Yet, basic questions about the outcomes of Title VI investigations remain unknown. Given significant evidence that discrimination continues to shape young people’s educational opportunities and outcomes, it is crucial to understand whether policy mechanisms designed to remedy school-based discriminatory policies and practices effectively do so.

Authors

• Rachel M. Perera, The Brookings Institution

• Victor Cadilla, North Carolina State University