Department of Education’s Civil Rights-Related Regulatory Agenda
Author: Andrea Stagg, Director of Consulting Services
The Department of Education’s 2026 Agency Rule List includes planned actions on proposed and final regulations that relate to civil rights, including Title VI and Title IX. These rules each include tentative dates, and at this point many of those dates are in the past. Still, reviewing these planned agency actions can provide readers with an idea of the direction ED is intending as far as civil rights interpretation and enforcement, among other topics.
Title IX
A planned Title IX regulation will define sex as referring “exclusively to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.” This planned change is intended to be consistent with Executive Order 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (January 20, 2025).
Title VI
ED’s current 2026 agency rule list includes three Title VI regulations. One of the regulations, dated July 2026, removes the disparate-impact theory of race-based discrimination “to align Department regulations with Supreme Court precedent that requires Title VI violations to rest upon intentional discrimination.” Although the agency rule list includes a placeholder date for this rule (07/00/2026), this regulation was published late July 2026, as discussed in our article, dated July 24, 2026.
A second, planned regulation dated July 2026, is intended to streamline OCR’s enforcement process, including when OCR seeks to terminate federal funds for institutions that fail to voluntarily come into compliance after findings of intentional violations.
The third is a Title VI-related regulation that is intended to clarify how Title VI impacts diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and how Title VI protections apply to race-based, race-exclusive, or race-conscious educational programs or criteria. Recent ED Title VI enforcement has focused on race-exclusive and race-conscious educational programs, as discussed in our March 25th article.
Closing
The Department’s regulatory plans include other topics, including FERPA. In fact, the planned FERPA update, currently dated “09/00/2026,” has been on the regulatory agenda for years without ever coming to fruition. Specifically, the planned FERPA regulations are intended to clarify when education records may be disclosed without consent and to define “education records” more clearly. These planned updates span presidential administrations, which is not unusual. Remember that most of these listed regulations discussed above have not yet been published; only summaries of what they intend to address have been included in the regulatory agenda. Still, education professionals can gain insight into the Department’s plans by reviewing the planned actions, whether the regulations are published imminently, sometime in the future, or perhaps not at all.
