In contrast, the Obama administration closed 8,637 cases during its last year in office. For example, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) closed a total of 17,797 cases in 2017 and another 14,074 cases in 2018. On civil rights oversight and enforcement, the Trump administration shifted the focus away from systemic conditions in public schools. Wong and Coral Flanagan Tuesday, June 7, 2022 Trump administration officials unilaterally launched actions aimed at weakening enforcement of student rights and civil rights in public schools. Using unilateral actions, President Trump significantly weakened federal oversight to reverse a growingly assertive federal role that was supported by the Obama administration. One can also view Trump’s unilateral approach as a continuation of recent patterns where presidents turn on a regular basis to executive and administrative tools to reverse the policies of a prior administration. Further, the administration enjoyed mixed success in gaining congressional approval for budgetary requests in education including proposals to repurpose categorical funding for school choice and to downsize the U.S. There was little expectation when Trump took the presidential oath in January 2017 that Congress had an interest in revisiting or reopening these issues addressed in the bipartisan ESSA adopted in December 2015. ESSA granted states flexibility when it came to accountability and placed restrictions on federal interference in state education decision-making or set common standards across states.
THE CONCEPT OF OVERSIGHT REFERS TO THE EFFORT MADE BY SERIES
Trump’s lack of legislative accomplishments in education policy can be attributed in part to Congress’s enactment of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the latest in a series of reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) originally passed in 1965. To be sure, Trump’s presidency did not pursue major legislation in public education. Rabe, and I document in our new book published by the Brookings Institution Press-“ Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism”-Trump’s education policy agenda aimed at weakening federal oversight and reversing Obama’s commitment on civil and student rights in public schools. Like his predecessors, President Donald Trump had the opportunity to use his executive, administrative, and political power to shape education policy. Barack Obama used Race to the Top grants and federal waivers to engage states to adopt systemic initiatives, such as the Common Core learning standards and direct intervention strategies to turn around low-performing schools. Ronald Reagan appointed a national commission that crafted the seminal report, “A Nation at Risk,” that connected student performance to global competitiveness. presidents have used their executive, administrative, and political power to pursue policy goals that galvanized the nation’s attention to issues of equity and accountability in our public schools.
Identifying education as a top presidential issue may seem surprising because education is primarily a state and local responsibility, and because the federal government has provided only about one out of every 10 dollars in school spending. Nonresident Senior Fellow - Governance Studies, Brown Center on Education Policy
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