We are encouraged by news this week that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is launching an investigation into the disciplinary policies of Richmond Public Schools.

Advocacy groups sought the federal probe after reviewing stinging data showing that African-American students and students with disabilities are unfairly and disproportionately suspended from school compared with their white counterparts.

Last month, Rep. A. Donald McEachin asked the federal department to investigate not only Richmond, but all of the public school systems within the 4th Congressional District that he represents.

If his letter prompted or accelerated the Office for Civil Rights’ decision to undertake the investigation, we are appreciative. The problems have been festering far too long without earnest and sustained efforts to address them. The futures of too many children have been put in jeopardy by the bias within the school system. For many youngsters, unequal discipline and punishment signal the start of the school-to-prison pipeline, with students winding up in the juvenile, and later adult, prison systems.

In May 2016, the Office for Civil Rights announced that it had received a record 10,392 complaints in 2015 from people and organizations across the nation. In response, it launched 3,000-plus investigations that resulted in more than 1,000 key resolutions reached with institutions.

A report hasn’t been released yet about the number of complaints the Office for Civil Rights received in 2016, but the one filed by the Richmond Branch NAACP, the Virginia ACLU and the Legal Aid Justice Center on behalf of two African-American students would be among them.

While we cheer the probe, we have some misgivings, chiefly that the Office for Civil Rights is now under U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, a Trump administration pick with no experience or clear understanding of the public school system and its problems. Our fear is that she will use the data from the Richmond probe and others merely as a show-and-tell to advance her belief and desire for school choice. She may point to the myriad of deep problems within the nation’s public schools to push her initiative to give parents taxpayer-funded vouchers to move children to private schools.

Or, she may make the investigation meaningless and without adequate remedies for those impacted now and in the future.

Last week, Secretary DeVos appointed Candice Jackson to lead the Office for Civil Rights. Ms. Jackson, a Stanford University graduate with a law degree from Pepperdine University School of Law, is viewed as a troubling choice for the job because of her lack of experience in civil rights enforcement and her writings expressed hostility to civil rights and the value of diverse student bodies. According to an article on Ms. Jackson in “Diverse: Issues in Higher Education,” she once claimed she was discriminated against for being white.

“I am concerned that it reflects a belief that may stifle efforts to further the implementation of policies and practices that will try to remedy the racial inequality that exists, and does not show an understanding of the ways in which the nation’s history of racial discrimination have resulted in a society in which opportunity is not equally available,” Dr. Erica Frankenberg, co-director of the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Pennsylvania State University, stated in the article.

With Ms. Jackson at the helm of the federal investigation, we are unsure how thorough and meaningful the probe will be.

Rep. McEachin expressed similar reservations in a statement to the Free Press on Wednesday.

“I immediately began my research on Candice Jackson when I learned about her appointment as the assistant secretary of the Office for Civil Rights within the Department of Education,” he stated. Her “past positions on affirmative action and her seeming insensitivity to differently abled students’ needs do not lead me to believe that our student, teachers and parents will have an advocate supervising OCR.”

“However, I hope that I am mistaken and that, in spite of her past, the investigators who work in OCR will still conduct a thorough and fair investigation so that our children will be able to thrive.”

Regardless of the outcome, we must understand this is a call to people within the community to stay on top of the situation, to continue to gather facts and help point Richmond and other public school systems toward experts who can help provide solutions, perhaps through model schools that have employed successful anti-bias strategies.

We cannot rely solely on the federal government at this time to provide a path to success. With that in mind, we point out that Rep. McEachin also has established a community-based task force to focus on this problem.

We look to that group to also come up with recommendations to help solve a tough, but not intractable problem. Our children deserve the best efforts we can provide.