Go To a Full List of Secretary Decisions

Below is a searchable database of decisions issued by the Secretary of Education organized by docket number. These decisions — known as Decisions of the Secretary — are issued by the Secretary as a part of the Department of Education’s decision-making through administrative adjudication. A few Decisions of the Secretary remand proceedings to an administrative judge for further review and, hence, may not constitute a final agency decision. You may check with the Office of Hearings & Appeals regarding the status of any decision.

Please note that our database containing Decisions of the Secretary is distinct from our database of OHA Decisions, which includes decisions issued by judges within the Office of Hearings and Appeals.

To search the OHA Decisions database, go here.

The Decisions of the Secretary are provided in PDF format. To view or print the document in PDF, the Adobe Reader software must be installed on your computer. The program is available at no cost by clicking here. Please note that some formatting features of the original decisions, such as page numbering, lines, and spacing, may have been modified or lost in the conversion from the original format to PDF. In the event of any discrepancies between the original decision and the versions available from this website, the original decision shall be controlling.

Search the Database of Decisions of the Secretary

Please enter your search criteria in the box below. You can enter legal concepts (such as “ability to benefit”), or case names, or docket numbers (such as “94-216-SP”). The year field pull down menu below allows the user to limit or restrict search results to the year a case was docketed, not the year the decision was issued.

Go To a Full List of Secretary Decisions

Conditions for use of the OHA website: The decisions indexed and made accessible on this website are government documents produced by the United States and, as such, are public domain works that may be freely copied and re-transmitted.