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Education Dive
Title IX resolutions climb as DeVos pushes to clear backlog
Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
April 6, 2020
Dive Brief:
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which
investigates violations of federal discrimination laws, closed
thousands more Title IX complaints than it received during the first
two fiscal years of the Trump presidency.
In the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, there was an 80% increase in the
number of Title IX cases the administration resolved that involved a
school changing its policies or practices, the office's annual report
shows.
The department has proposed drastic changes for how colleges should
handle reports of sexual violence under Title IX, the federal sex
discrimination law. The final version of these rules is expected to be
released soon.
Dive Insight:
A schism emerged after President Barack Obama's Education Department
published guidance in 2011 about how colleges should address Title IX
cases. Supporters of the Obama-era policies credited them with giving
sexual assault survivors unprecedented protections, while critics felt
they were unfair to students accused of misconduct, in some cases
depriving them of constitutional due process.
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos removed the Obama guidance in 2017
and published draft regulations that would create a courtroom-style
method of resolving campus sexual violence cases.
But DeVos did more than just introduce new Title IX rules, said Peter
Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and
Policy at Stetson University, in an interview with Education Dive. She
made clear early in her tenure that she would streamline resolution
processes, Lake said.
For instance, in 2017, the Education Department directed OCR officials
to stop looking into systemic issues at institutions when investigating
Title IX complaints — an element of the Obama administration's
enforcement. Prior to the coronavirus taking hold in the U.S., the
department was also trying to clear out a backlog of Title IX cases
through mediation.
The rapid-fire approach to closing cases is evident in OCR's annual
report. In it, Kenneth Marcus, assistant secretary for civil rights,
wrote that the office had "improved productivity and efficiency while
maintaining high-quality standards."
OCR received 7,138 Title IX complaints in fiscal years 2017 and 2018
combined, and it resolved 13,234 complaints during that period. The
report does not break out data on postsecondary institutions, so that
number also includes complaints in K-12 schools.
Most of the violations concerned potential sex discrimination in
athletics programs. OCR fielded 3,596 athletics-related complaints in
2017 and 2018, and it closed 10,622. The office accepted 1,745
complaints of sexual harassment and violence and resolved 1,822 cases.
The number of sexual violence cases that were closed during that time
and involved a college changing its policies skyrocketed. Colleges made
policy changes in 86 resolved sexual misconduct cases in fiscal 2018,
compared to 14 in 2017 and five in 2016. Since 2009, the most cases
resolved with changes in a single year was 17.
While DeVos hasn't carried out the same comprehensive Title IX
investigations as the Obama administration did, she has come down hard
on colleges in a few notable cases, Lake said.
The Ed Department fined Michigan State University a record $4.5 million
last year for how it handled complaints of sexual abuse by former
sports doctor Larry Nassar.
More recently, the department found that Penn State University didn't
properly respond to sexual violence complaints in the years following
the Jerry Sandusky scandal. It forced the institution to make
significant changes to its Title IX procedures.
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