This year marks the 40th anniversary of Title IX, the civil rights law that ensures educational institutions that receive federal funding do not discriminate on the basis of sex. Secretary Duncan has said that Title IX is “one of the great civil rights success stories in education.” To kick off the anniversary year, Secretary Duncan and Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali joined Lisa Maatz of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) for a Title IX tweetup.
Maatz and the AAUW took questions from Twitter users, and Secretary Duncan and Ali responded via Twitter. Here are just a few of the questions and answers addressed during the tweetup:
To see more of the conversation, follow Arne and the Office for Civil Rights on Twitter, and click here to see the #T9Talk discussion.
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What can the civil rights division do when school administrators violate the law, and threaten to retaliate against parents and students who report gay bashing? Will OCR make sure that staff are charged with federal crimes and removed from the schools?
I have a plea regarding Title IX and sexual assault on college campuses. We need DOE OCR guidance on Title IX responsibilities and school counselors. Mandated reporting of sexual assaults perpetrated on adult college students is having a negative affect on reporting and help seeking by survivors. I’m an attorney and I’m hearing from counselors at several institutions that the reaction to the April guidance letter has been that everyone must report every assault that they learn about in any capacity.
The AAUW has little credibility with regard to title XI and its effect on men and boys. Their own report on boys and girls educational performance (http://www.aauw.org/learn/research/upload/whereGirlsAre.pdf) goes into great detail on how there is no boy crisis in education and gains by girls have not came at the expense of boys. It shows how the achievement gap favoring girls is much larger in reading than the gap favoring boys in math. It drives home the point that even though the gap favoring girls is larger, boys are performing better now than in the past so there is no need to focus extra resources on boys. If you look at the data, the same conclusion although not stated can be drawn for girls and math. Girl’s math scores are at their highest point in history and the achievement gap has shrunk. HOWEVER, we hear today from the AAUW that title XI should be used on STEM with regard to girls. A double standard for sure. Using the report data and the same line of reasoning, boys and girls are both performing at their highest levels in history and neither group needs special focus. Efforts should be focused on raising achievement for all. Using the AAUW’s report data only, we should be focusing title XI support on boys’ literacy since that is where the greatest gaps exist. This support would take the form of ensuring the curriculum contains required reading that is of substantially equal interest to both boys and girls. It would require school and classrooms to have substantially equal reading material of interest to both genders.
The point is any recommendation from the AAUW should be critically analyzed especially when they involve boys.
This goes for sports as well and education.