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on civil rights, the next conservative Administration should take sweeping action to assure that the purpose of the Civil Rights Act is not inverted through a disparate impact standard to provide a pretext for theoretically endless federal meddling.

Assistance to States for the Education of Children with Disabilities;

Preschool Grants for Children with Disabilities (Equity in IDEA)

• Effective January 18, 2017, the department issued final regulations under Part B of IDEA that require states to consider race and ethnicity in the identification, placement, and discipline of students with disabilities. The new Administration should rescind this regulation.

Students should never be denied access to special education services because of their race or ethnicity, but this is happening in school districts across the country thanks to the Obama Administration’s Equity in IDEA regulation. This was not the intent of the regulation, but it is an inevitable byproduct of its flawed assumptions. The Obama Administration looked at the racial statistics on special education assignment and made two assumptions: that African American students were disproportionately overrepresented, and that this overrepresentation constituted a harm that required federal pressure to ameliorate.

School districts deemed to overrepresent minority students in special education assignment, or in discipline amongst special education students, are tagged by their state education agencies as engaging in “significant disproportionality,” and are required to reallocate 15 percent of their IDEA Part B money into coordinated early intervening services that are intended to address the “root causes of disproportionality.” In practice, this can mean raiding special education funding to pay for CRT-inspired “equity” consultants and professional development.

This is especially problematic given that both of the assumptions behind Equity in IDEA are flawed. Special education services provide extra assistance to students; they do not harm them. And according to the most rigorous research on the subject, conducted by Penn State’s Paul Morgan, black students are actually underrepresented in special education once adequate statistical controls are made. That means that this regulation effectively further depresses the provision of valuable services to an already underserved group.

• The next Administration should immediately commence rulemaking to rescind the Equity in IDEA regulation. No replacement regulation is required.

• ©The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OQSERS)

should prepare a digest of the best research on this subject and share