Running the rights scam at DOE

National Review, March 13, 1987 by Lawrence Uzzell

RUNNING THE RIGHTS SCAM AT DOE

AMERICA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS givehigher status to the value of "equality' than do schools in countries run by avowed Marxists. It is easier here than anywhere else in the world to use equality as an excuse for mediocrity. One reason is that we have established entire educational institutions that specialize in disguising education issues as civil-rights issues. Probably the most important of these is an obscure but powerful unit of the U.S. Department of Education called the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

With 832 staffers, OCR commandsabout one-fifth of the department's total manpower, strategically deployed in ten regional offices that investigate and "advise' schools and colleges. Many of this unit's decisions would never survive referenda among the very groups it claims to protect. Ignoring the "back to basics' preferences of most black and Hispanic families, it has tried to mandate bilingual instruction, outlaw father-son social events, forbid school dress codes that distinguish between boys and girls, and crack down on standardized tests and on schools that group children by academic ability. It intimidates principals who suspend unruly students, prohibits single-sex gym classes--and forces colleges to finance abortions.

With all this, OCR has never yetfully exercised the powers it theoretically claims. But its advances outnumber its retreats. The test for the Reagan Administration is not whether it is enforcing OCR's regulations more "reasonably,' but whether it is preventing future excesses by dismantling regulations that grossly distort the civil-rights laws. Except for one overrated court decision, the Administration flunks that test. OCR is ready for a Hart or Cuomo Administration to continue the agenda that Jimmy Carter left unfinished.

OCR's hunting license is Title 34,Subtitle B, Chapter I of the Code of Federal Regulations--eighty-odd fine-print pages that purport to interpret about four paragraphs of civil-rights law. Every word of this text was written in the 1960s or 1970s--mostly by OCR lawyers committed to feminism and racial quotas. Ronald Reagan's appointees have made only one substantive change; even that one was initiated by the Carter Administration when Joseph Califano decided that regulating school dress codes was "nonsense.'

OCR's regulations are extraordinarilydetailed--especially in pushing what Cornell political scientist Jeremy Rabkin calls "unisex totalitarianism.' A foreigner reading these regulations could easily conclude that Americans fought a civil war over sex, not slavery.

IF ENFORCED to the hilt, the regulationswould bar any community, outside of a few enclaves such as Greenwich Village, from running schools that reflect its cultural preferences. The regulations forbid schools to separate the sexes in any course, except for contact sports, sex education, and choruses "based on vocal range or quality.' They command schools and colleges to provide "equal athletic opportunity' for both sexes, and they insist that colleges treat "termination of pregnancy . . . in the same manner . . . as any other temporary disability.'

On racial questions, lawyer andpsychologist Barbara Lerner of Princeton, New Jersey, observes that OCR "did some good work in the 1960s, when the issue was real, hard-core segregation in the South.' But its current writ, composed by what she calls "a biracial gang of bureaucrats, politicians, and street hustlers who make their livings off rhetoric about racist America,' embraces the "race-conscious' strategies that became fashionable in the late 1960s and 1970s. It openly invites schools to engage in preferential treatment: "Even though an applicant or recipient [of Department of Education grants] has never used discriminatory policies . . . [its] services and benefits . . . may not in fact be equally available to some racial or nationality groups. In such circumstances . . . [it] may properly give special consideration to race, color, or national origin.'

OCR is "obsessed with numbers,'says one Reaganite official in the Department of Education. Its regulations show it: "A vocational education center . . . will be presumed unlawfully segregated if . . . it has since its construction been attended primarily by members of one race, national origin, or sex.' Are the students' choices free? Do authorities deliberately steer them by race? The regulations do not even acknowledge such issues: Both implicitly and explicitly, they reduce justice to statistics. The official likens OCR to Robert McNamara's Pentagon: Its "best and brightest' are "caught in their own machinery' of body counts.

Some civil-rights veterans now seemto agree. Charles Glenn of the Massachusetts Department of Education-- one of the principal architects of busing in Boston--observes that "we keep trying to repeat our successes, when the payoff is smaller and smaller . . . you can't batter down the doors when the doors are already down.' Now a supporter of parental choice in education, he suggests that "the time has come for those of us who are committed to racial justice and to the interests of poor children to consider laying to rest the strategies which served us well in the 1960s and even more recently.' But Glenn's message has yet to reach egalitarian zealots such as Representative Ted Weiss (D., N.Y.). Last year a Weiss subcommittee issued a report condemning even the Reagan Administration's modest changes in OCR for "refusing to fully use its authorized powers of enforcement.'