Civil-Rights-Discrimination Complaints More Than Doubled for the Education Department in 2022

Statistics released by the Department of Education reveal that the Office for Civil Rights received a record-breaking number of discrimination complaints in the last fiscal year, between October 2021 and September 2022.

During this period, the federal agency logged roughly 19,000 complaints, doubling the number received during the previous fiscal year and shattering the 16,000 cases registered back in 2016, the New York Times reports.

“It reflects the confidence in the Office for Civil Rights as a place to seek redress,” the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights Catherine Lhamon told the Times. “At the same time, the scope and volume of harm that we’re asking our babies to navigate is astronomical.”

While many complaints focused on hate crimes and some were related to certain high-profile cases in Arizona and Iowa, the majority of discrimination complaints came from students with disabilities. Indeed, an analysis of over two decades of Education Department data indicates that disabled students are the largest claimant group, according to EducationWeek.