The Justice and Education departments said in a joint notice published Friday that seven civil rights guidance documents the two agencies issued between 2015 and 2023 are not enforceable, and that they will not rely on any of them when enforcing federal civil rights law.
The documents date to the Obama and Biden administrations. They deal with English learners, harassment tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, racial discrimination in student discipline and the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, which ended race-conscious admissions in higher education. The notice comes from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights. It is dated Oct. 20, carries the signatures of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon and Kimberly Richey, the Education Department's assistant secretary for civil rights, and appeared in the Federal Register on Oct. 23.
Three of the seven are dated Jan. 7, 2015: a Dear Colleague letter on English learner students and parents with limited English proficiency, a fact sheet on ensuring those students can participate meaningfully and equally in school programs, and a companion document for those parents and the schools that communicate with them. The rest are a May 2021 document on confronting COVID-19-related harassment in schools, a May 2023 resource on racial discrimination in student discipline, and a Dear Colleague letter and a separate set of questions and answers, both issued Aug. 14, 2023, on the admissions ruling.
The departments gave two grounds for the notice. Guidance documents do not carry the force of law, they wrote, and some of these documents said so themselves. The agencies' guidance creates no legally enforceable responsibilities beyond what statutes, regulations or binding court precedent already require, according to the notice, which cites the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association for the principle that such documents "do not have the force and effect of law." Even so, the departments said they were "concerned about confusion over the non-enforceable nature of the guidance documents."
The second ground looks ahead. Every one of the documents predates Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the 2024 decision that, as the notice puts it, held agency interpretations must be consistent with the "single, best meaning" of the statute authorizing them. The departments said they plan to revisit all seven in light of that ruling and will not rely on them in enforcing Titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, the Americans with Disabilities Act or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Loper Bright overturned the Chevron doctrine, a 40-year-old precedent that had given federal agencies wide power to interpret and apply the statutes Congress passes.
For some of the documents, the notice confirms a change that had already taken place. The administration had quietly rescinded some of them earlier, K-12 Dive reported, including the 2015 English learner guidance, which the Education Department rescinded in 2025. That guidance, the education trade publication said, set requirements for states and districts to help students and families overcome language barriers, to staff English learner programs sufficiently and to identify and assess those students in a timely way.
The August 2023 questions and answers encouraged colleges to continue targeted outreach meant to keep a diverse applicant pool and to offer pathway programs, according to K-12 Dive. Of the two pandemic-era documents, the publication said, one advised districts on preventing harassment of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in schools, and the other reminded them to address students' behavioral or other needs rather than discipline certain racial groups more harshly.
K-12 Dive described the seven documents as resources and enforcement approaches meant to make schooling more accessible for English learners, Black students and other marginalized students, and it placed the notice within a broader push by the administration to change how civil rights law is enforced for those students. In July, the publication reported, the Education Department rescinded its disparate impact regulations, which had been used for years to investigate districts whose policies were neutral on their face but harmed Black students or other historically marginalized groups in practice. The department also shut its Office of English Language Acquisition this year.
The notice sets no timetable for the review and does not say whether new guidance will take the documents' place.