Jan Resseger is a wonderful woman who spent most of her career advocating for social justice on behalf of the United Church of Christ. She is now retired but she never stops caring and acting. Here she summarizes the Trump administration’s accelerated retreat from enforcing civil rights laws.

One hint about Trump’s view of civil rights was his appointment of Harmeet K. Dhillon to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Dhillon is a prominent opponent of civil rights and has litigated many cases to oppose policies that she believes are unfair to white men.

She wrote recently:

Nothing, except growing tariffs and the failure to mitigate the damage of the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, has defined Donald Trump’s second term more than the administration’s attempt to undermine civil rights protection for students and educators in our nation’s 13,000 public school districts and the nation’s colleges and universities.

We watched an attack on Maine’s public schools where trans students compete in women’s sports. We watched the Department of Education withhold funds from the Chicago Public Schools because the district has a Black student student success plan that promotes what the Trump administration considers the dangerous principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And just this week, Education Week reported that the Department of Education is cancelling many grants for Full Service Community Schools and the Promise Neighborhoods program where funds are being spent on services the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many of the Department of Education’s efforts to curtail the protection of the civil rights of historically marginalized groups of students have been temporarily stayed by Federal District Courts, but a lot of these cases linger in temporary, local decisions without any legal resolution.

Some colleges and universities have felt enough pressure that they’ve signed agreements to share with the federal government admissions information including high school grades, test scores and family income of all applicants to prove they are not selecting their students based on proxy data that substitutes for race-based affirmative action. Others have lost federal research grants as a punishment for maintaining programs and policies the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and thereby discriminate against the white majority.

Is there any chance the Trump administration’s effort to stamp out civil rights will wind down in 2026?  Here are three events in December that indicate the attacks are likely to continue.

The Trump administration just ended the disparate impact test in civil rights enforcement.  For years the federal government has held schools accountable when data proves, for example, their discipline systems are discriminatory by race or ethnicity or disability status. Evidence of disparate impact has been used for decades to protect students and others from discrimination in institutions that receive government funding including education, law enforcement and fair housing. But that ended abruptly on Wednesday, December 9.

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reported: “(T)he Justice Department moved Tuesday to kill a decades-old provision of civil rights law that allows statistical disparities to be used as proof of racial discrimination. The new regulations reinterpret a key plank of the Civil Rights Act and were issued without an opportunity for public comment, which is unusual for major regulatory action… Conservatives have long argued that proving discrimination should require proof that someone intended to treat people differently. And they say that when people are being judged by data, they feel pressure to make decisions based on racial quotas. In that way, the Trump administration argues, a policy meant to fight discrimination is actually fostering it… Supporters of disparate impact analysis say it is a critical tool because finding ‘smoking gun’ evidence to prove someone intended to discriminate is difficult.” Meckler notes that the way the new guidance was immediately implemented breaks federal precedent: “Federal agencies typically would allow time for public comment before publishing a final rule like this.”

Politico adds that Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, provided her particular justification for stamping out the disparate impact test: “Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ’s civil rights chief, highlighted that the rule change will lead to fewer civil rights lawsuits…. The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination… Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.”

By contrast, last spring when President Trump released an executive order trying to end “disparate impact,” the NY Times Erica Green considered disparate impact’s role in the history of enforcement of the Civil Rights Act: “The disparate impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities.”

Trump’s DOJ just sued Minneapolis Public Schools to end the district’s effort to increase the number of teachers of color.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Anthony Lonetree reported last week: “The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Minneapolis Public Schools, accusing the state’s third-largest district of providing discriminatory protections to teachers of color in layoff and reassignment decisions.  The lawsuit… marks the latest salvo against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—in this case, the district’s efforts to bolster its minority teaching ranks. At issue is a contract agreement with educators that includes language shielding teachers of color from ‘last-in, first-out’ layoff practices and prioritizing the hiring of Black male educators at a north Minneapolis elementary school.”

Lonetree quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi justifying the lawsuit: “Discrimination is unacceptable in all forms especially when it comes to hiring decisions… Our public education system in Minnesota and across the country must be a bastion of merit and equal opportunity—not DEI.”  Here are words from DOJ’s lawsuit itself: “While defendants claim that these provisions are to stop discrimination, they require defendants to blatantly discriminate against teachers based on their race, color, sex, and national origin.”

Lonetree explains the purpose of the school district’s hiring policy: “Students of color comprise nearly two-thirds of the district’s total student population, and Minneapolis Public Schools, like many districts around the state, has sought to place teachers whom students can relate to and aspire to be like.”

Is the Trump Department of Education making the Office for Civil Rights viable again? Will the December 5th recall of furloughed staff help families who have filed civil rights complaints?  After a year of massive layoffs and the closure of seven of the twelve regional offices of the Office for Civil Rights, for CNN last week, Sunlen Serfaty described what might have seemed like exciting news: “Beleaguered employees in the civil rights office got what they thought was welcome news last week. The Department of Education informed employees who had been terminated earlier this year, then placed on administrative leave in an ongoing court battle, that they are to return to work later this month. The email to about 250 employees noted they are needed to address the existing caseload.”

However, in the details in the Department of Education’s December 5th recall notice, there are some serious questions about what is happening: For the Associated Press, Collin Binkley explains: “The Trump administration is bringing back dozens of Education Department staffers who were slated to be laid off, saying their help is needed to tackle a mounting backlog of discrimination complaints from students and families. The staffers had been on administrative leave while the department faced lawsuits challenging layoffs in the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates possible discrimination in the nation’s schools and colleges. But in a Friday (December 5) letter, department officials ordered the workers back to duty starting Dec. 15 to help clear civil rights cases.”  (The emphasis is mine.)

And K-12 Dive‘s Anna Merod quotes Julie Hartman, the Office for Civil Rights’ press secretary for legal affairs emphasizing “in a Dec. 8 email that… (the agency) is  temporarily bringing back OCR staff from administrative leave starting Dec. 15.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Let’s be clear. The Office for Civil Rights has never enforced the 1964 Civil Rights Act merely by charging school districts with violations, getting court orders that school district staff be fired, or imposing fines. OCR’s staff have been known for decades to work with school district teachers, counselors and administrators to develop programs and policies ensuring that children’s civil rights are no longer violated.

There is currently a serious problem at the Office for Civil Rights because all year while more than half the agency’s staff have been laid off, a huge backlog of uninvestigated complaints has built up. Reporters confirm that 2,500 complaints await investigation. NPR’s Cory Turner reports: “(P)ublic data show that OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 cases.”  CNN‘s Serfaty adds that this year  OCR has been “dismissing cases at an increasing pace, court documents reveal. About 7,000 cases have been dismissed under the Trump administration—hundreds more than in the same period last year under Biden.”

All this makes one question whether the furloughed staff are really being recalled to work with school districts to overcome the issues that have stimulated 2,500 complaints filed by families. Kimberly Richey emphasized that the recall of staff on leave is temporary, that the e-mail to staff emphasized the need to clear the backlog of complaints.  What percentage of the complaints processed by returning staff will be pursued with efforts to mitigate civil rights problems, and what percentage will be merely dismissed without further work?

There are additional questions about how utterly temporary the recall of staff might actually be. It is important to recall that Congress passed a continuing resolution to end the October government shutdown and also to delay the massive staff firings launched during the shutdown  by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.  That continuing resolution ends on January 30, 2026.  Are staff at OCR being recalled to work from December 15, 2025 only until January 30, 2026, when they will be permanently terminated?

The future of civil rights enforcement by the Trump administration continues to look bleak. Will the OCR be shut down? Will its work be shunted to the Department of Justice as Linda McMahon continues to dismantle the Department of Education?  The Trump administration has persisted in abandoning what have been—for 71 years since Brown v. Board of Education—historic efforts to expand educational opportunity for groups of children who were historically marginalized.  As 2025 ends, the attack on academic freedom and civil rights does not seem to be winding down.

Once again, Donald Trump posted a derogatory attack on his political enemies. He seems to say that only Democrats were friends and clients of Jeffrey Epstein.

As usual, he sounds like he is ranting and raving. Really, his staff should review what he writes before he posts his vitriolic screeds.

Honestly, the man sounds unwell.

On the afternoon of Christmas Day, he was definitely not sounding presidential, not sounding like a good Christian, not sounding like a family man enjoying a joyous holiday.

He wrote:

The Wall Street Journal reported that Jared Kushner and real estate developer-diplomat Steve Witkoff have developed plans for the reconstruction of Gaza as an elegant, luxurious resort.

The story, if you can open the WSJ, features drawings of a beachfront ringed by futuristic high-rise luxury buildings, harbors with yachts, a dreamscape replacing a devastated landscape. It’s reminiscent of the video released by the White House last year that showed Trump and Netanyahu stretched out on beach chairs on the Gaza beach, enjoying their drinks in the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

The curious part of this fantasy is the claim that that this the cost will be $112 billion.

The presentationhas been shared with the leaders of oil-rich Arab nations.

The unsolved problem: what to do with the 2 million homeless Gazans.

WASHINGTON—Beachside luxury resorts. High-speed rail. AI-optimized smart grids.

Welcome to “Project Sunrise,” the Trump administration’s pitch to foreign governments and investors to turn Gaza’s rubble into a futuristic coastal destination. 

A team led by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, two top White House aides, developed a draft proposal to convert the bombed-out enclave into a gleaming metropolis. In 32 pages of PowerPoint slides, replete with images of coastal high-rises alongside charts and cost tables, the plan outlines steps to take Gaza residents from tents to penthouses and from poverty to prosperity.

The presentation is labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” and doesn’t go into details about which countries or companies would fund Gaza’s rebuilding. Nor does it specify where precisely the 2 million displaced Palestinians would live during reconstruction. The U.S. has shown the slides to prospective donor countries, U.S. officials said, including wealthy Gulf kingdoms, Turkey and Egypt….

In Greg Abbott’s Texas, everything has a price or makes a profit.

Mothers Against Greg Abbott posted this video showing how it’s done.

A for-profit online charter school is opening in a for-profit prison whose inmates are families arrested by ICE.

The school will be supplied by a giant online corporation called Stride, which used to be K-12 Inc.

K-12 Inc. was known for low-quality instruction, low graduation rates, and scandals. Its executives are paid multi-million dollar salaries.

It’s ironic that the government is paying Stride to provide low-quality online instruction to hapless children whose families are about to be ousted from America.

Peter Greene has the story here.

The detention center in Dilley is operated byCoreCivic, a Tennessee-based for-profit operator of prisons, jails, and detention centers. In 2025, they scored $300 million in ICE contracts. 

CoreCivic was founded as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in 1983, by Thomas W. Beasley, Robert Crants and T. Don Hutto. Beasley served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party; Crants was the chief financial officer of a real estate company in Nashville; Hutto was the president-elect of the American Correctional Association, and according to a 2018 Time Magazine investigation, ran a Manhattan-sized Tennessee cotton plantation where Black convicts picked cotton for no pay…

One of its first big investors was Michael Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison (Oracle), who both kicked in money for K12. Steve Fink, a trusted Milliken confidant and lead independent director of Stride, is the brother of Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of Blackrock, which has been a longtime investor in Stride.

In 2011, the New York Times detailed how K12’s schools were failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers wrote tell-alls about their experiences. In 2012. Florida caught K12 using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cyber schools that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country, “despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012.”

In 2013 K12 settled a class action lawsuit in Virginia for $6.75 million after stockholders accused the company of misleading them about“the company’s business practices and academic performance.” In 2014, Middlebury College faculty voted to end a partnership with K12 saying the company’s business practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation and educational mission of the college.”

In 2016 K12 got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, resulting in a $165 million settlement with then Attorney General Kamala Harris. K12 was repeatedly dropped in some states and cities for poor performance.

In 2020, they landed a big contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent); subsequently Wired magazine wrote a story about their “epic series of tech errors.” K12 successfully defended itself from a lawsuit in Virginia based on charges they had greatly overstated their technological capabilities by arguing that such claims were simply advertising “puffery.”

Well, who cares? Who cares if Stride-K12 provides high-quality education? So what if it’s a waste of taxpayer money? The “students” are children who are being deported. Their parents are being deported too. Who cares?

Trump’s hand-picked board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the nation’s Capitol has voted to rename it. It is now the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Early in his term, Trump fired Biden’s appointees to the Kennedy Center board and replaced them with his close allies, including his chief of staff Susie Wiles and Usha Vance, the vice-president’s wife. He named himself chairman of the board. He installed Ric Grennell, former Trump-named Ambassador to Germany, as the new president and executive director, although Grennell had no relevant experience. Trump made decisions about programming, and some groups canceled their appearances to protest his takeover.

Ticket sales and attendance have declined sharply since Trump took over. Many employees have been fired or quit, and were replaced by unqualified friends of Trump. He intends to remodel the center, and patrons of the arts are apprehensive about what he will do. In the decades that he lived in New York City, he never associated himself with venues for the arts, like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

Republicans have mused about renaming the Kennedy Center and changing it to the Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts. Some speculated about renaming the Opera House of the Kennedy Center for Melania.

Yesterday, the board changed the name to the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Trump’s press secretary said the vote was unanimous, but the only Democrat on the board, Rep. Joyce Pratt of Ohio, was muted during the vote and not allowed to speak.

This was no surprise. The board was prepared. The new logo was immediately rolled out:

In reality, the board does not have the power to rename the Kennedy Center. Its name was authorized by law and can be changed only by Congress, just as the Department of Defense cannot be renamed the Department of War without Congress.

What else can he rename for himself? Should the Washington Monument be declared the Trump Monument? Can he replace Lincoln in the Lincoln Monument? Instead of a brooding Lincoln, the new statue would be Trump swinging a golf club. Maybe that’s the purpose of the Arc d’Trump that he intends to build.

Scott Maxwell of the Sun-Sentinel in Orlando calls out state education officials for their double standards. Public schools give state tests and are held accountable for student performance. Private voucher schools are not required to give the tests, and few do. Public schools are required to hire teachers who are detified to teach. Voucher schools can hire anyone, even “teachers” without a college degree. Public schools are not allowed to discriminate against students with disabilities or students who are gay. Voucher schools discriminate against any students they don’t want.

By SCOTT MAXWELL | smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com | Orlando Sentinel

Florida’s new top education official is pretty unpopular these days.

Last week, Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas was booed by local school officials from around the state.

Keep in mind: This wasn’t a room full of lefty liberals. It was a gathering of school board members from across the state — the majority of whom represent rural, Republican counties.

But even conservative leaders have quickly tired of an education official whose top priority seems to be trashing public education.

In fact, that seems to be why Gov. Ron DeSantis picked his 37-year-old former deputy chief of staff for the post — to trash teachers, threaten schools and generally troll public education. It’s like putting a guy who hates puppies in charge of an animal shelter.

Still, big talkers often clam up when pushed to address the facts beyond their cheap shots. And that has been the case here. Kamoutsas loves to claim that public schools are “failing,” but seems thoroughly uninterested in talking about how many voucher and charter schools have been proven disasters.

After all, it has become abundantly clear that Florida’s multi-billion-dollar experiment in school choice has failed a lot of kids. The Orlando Sentinel has documented many examples in its “Schools Without Rules” investigation into voucher (or “scholarship”) schools.

All of it funded by taxpayers. All of it documented in print. Yet most of those school operators didn’t get threats from state officials. They just got more public money.

Some schools were such financial disasters, they shut down in the middle of the year, leaving families stranded. (We found one in Orlando that was evicted from a commercial complex where the neighboring tenants included a place called “Drug Tests R Us.” More recently, a South Florida TV station reported that a voucher school in Fort Pierce closed its doors one weekend in September, “leaving parents scrambling for alternatives.”)

We also found schools that employed “teachers” without teaching credentials or college degrees.

Hundreds also had written policies of discrimination, saying they refused to serve students with autism, in wheelchairs, who are gay or who have LGBTQ parents.

Florida voucher schools fail, stiff teachers — and get more money to try again

So after Kamoutsas threatened to shut down public schools in the name of “accountability,” I asked him why he hadn’t pushed for accountability for all voucher schools as well.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Kamoutsas didn’t respond to that question. Neither did his press office. Suddenly, all the tough talk stopped.

And those messes at taxpayer-funded voucher schools are just the tip of Florida’s increasingly messy school-choice iceberg. Florida’s network of voucher and charter schools keep making national headlines for new problems.

Just last week, the state’s own auditors concluded that Florida’s publicly funded voucher program was such a financial mess that the state couldn’t account for hundreds of millions of tax dollars.

Then there was a report from CBS News that said a startup charter school connected to Erika Donalds, the wife of GOP gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, had enrolled students, only to never open its doors.

Where’s the accountability for that?

A handful of GOP leaders have spoken up. Veteran Republican State Sen. Don Gaetz called for more accountability for voucher money after declaring: “Whatever can go wrong with this system has gone wrong.” And Lt. Gov. Jay Collins tweeted that law enforcement should perhaps probe the “financial irregularities” at the Donalds-connected school.

But Gaetz received pushback. And Erika Donalds said that Collins was only spotlighting problems at her schools because Collins is contemplating an uphill gubernatorial battle against her husband. The reality is that Republican leaders in this state have never pushed for serious accountability for taxpayer-funded schools of choice.

Even after Florida journalists exposed schools that shut down mid-year, hired teachers without degrees or discriminated against students with disabilities, nothing was done. All we heard was more trash talk about public schools and teachers.

Discrimination: Florida voucher schools can reject kids with disabilities | Commentary

Some choice schools do stellar jobs. I’ve been a big advocate for charter schools like UCP of Central Florida that specialize in teaching kids with special needs and do so in caring, effective fashion. And some private schools that accept vouchers are among the best in the state.

But there are also some total dumpster fires. That’s why people who truly believe in accountability believe it should apply to all schools that get public money.

I do. So does the Orlando Sentinel at large. Over the years, this newspaper exposed many problems at public schools — everything from safety violations and poor test scores to unfit teachers and absentee school board members. Usually, public officials agreed that reform and accountability was needed.

Yet most every time we’ve exposed problems in taxpayer-funded voucher schools over the past decade, state lawmakers and education leaders looked the other way.

There are some basic measures that should be in place to protect both students and taxpayers.

Voucher schools, for instance, should be required to publish graduation rates and nationally accepted test scores, hire teachers who are certified or at least have a college degree, disclose all their curriculum, end their discrimination policies and prove that they have their finances in sound enough order to remain open for an entire school year. This is all really basic stuff.

The bottom line: If Kamoutsas and other state officials truly believe in accountability, they’d demand it for all taxpayer-funded schools. And for all the students who attend them.