Every Tuesday, almost like clockwork, the U.S. Department of Education would update a public list of schools and colleges it was investigating for possible violations of students’ civil rights.
Every Tuesday, that is, until Jan. 14, 2025, six days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term. Today, that online list remains as it was that week before inauguration: frozen in time.
My colleagues Jodi Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards, both longtime education reporters, used that list regularly in their work. “You would get a call or a tip about a school district, and you would go and look up the school district to see if it was under investigation,” Cohen told me recently.
We need a lot more lawsuits like this. It is one of the very few ways left to fight back that actually works.