Notes I tried my best to compile and clean-up. Here’s a car: Case
Download 1.55 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- OCR and remedies fail – only alternatives are private suits which are inaccessible
- No spill up to broader perceptions of women which is the context of their impact authors
- Title IX expansion inevitably causes gender quotas and affirmative action that undermine any victories the aff secures
- Unwillingness to report undermines aff solvency
- Aff Unenforceable – OCR under Trump is significantly reduced
- New OCR appointments are unqualified
- OCR fails to accomplish effective aid
- Extend: Title IX Expansion Now
- Extend: Title IX Expansion Bad
- Title 9 fails to cover assault
- Extend: No Impact
Discrimination Advantage1NC – DiscriminationNo Trump rollback of Title IXWilson 17 (Robin, college reporter. “How a 20-Page Letter Chanegd the Way Higher Education Handles Sexual Assault”, 2/8/17. http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-20-Page-Letter-Changed/239141?key=7ic9HqqLp-NndEYj5GJLXtvvdFVuWPmmb_bdvJbUC11oT527QFVtv1OEQ6ZHGfzFUEFfX0hHRE9KbnpITVpFQWMtUVJmRU5BLW5nak80Z29RMW90V25CTXhhZw, 7/13/17)//JM Now that President Trump has taken office, many wonder whether the landscape will shift again. Will the federal government’s laser focus on enforcement dim or even burn out entirely now that President Barack Obama has left the White House? Even if it does, most higher-education observers agree that the Dear Colleague letter was a watershed moment. Whether they applaud or oppose the Obama administration’s efforts, experts say there’s no doubt that the document played a huge role in raising concern about the issue of campus sexual assault. Undoing its impact, they say, won't be quick or simple. OCR and remedies fail – only alternatives are private suits which are inaccessibleMason and Younger 14 ([Mary Ann, Professor of the Graduate School, The University of California Berkeley, and faculty co-director of the Berkeley Law Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy.], [Jaclyn, University of California, Hastings College of the Law, J.D. Candidate 2014], “Title IX and Pregnancy Discrimination in Higher Education: The New Frontier”, 2014, https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/bccj/Title_IX_Law_Review_Article_Final_5.29-3-5.pdf, accessed on: 7/27/17, Berkeley Law and NCBI, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26793820)//RJ OCR’s Complaint and Investigation Process230 Is Not Adequate for Victims of Pregnancy Discrimination. In a study spanning from 1993 to 1997, the American Association of University Women (“AAUW”) gave the OCR a fairly negative evaluation.231 The study was particularly critical of the way OCR handles complaints, such as its policy, that sex discrimination complaints are viable only if filed within 180 days of the alleged wrongdoing.232 With poor Title IX compliance and dissemination among educational institutions,233 some students will be adversely affected by this policy because they have little “sophistication in their understanding of the law and how it pertains to them.”234 Furthermore, OCR’s self-imposed statute of limitations allows the agency to refuse to investigate a large number of complaints.235 The study also criticized the time OCR takes to investigate and resolve complaints.236 Even though OCR’s latest reports indicate that it is resolving cases within six months, students, concerned with staying in their academic program want and need a speedier resolution.237 Another procedural flaw noted was OCR’s failure to detect recipients’ non-compliance with Title IX regulations because the agency focuses on complaint processes rather than compliance reviews.238 Additionally, the study found OCR spends a disproportionately small amount of resources on sex discrimination matters, relative to the number of complaints it receives.239 OCR is not likely to strongly enforce Title IX regulations, including the regulations prohibiting pregnancy discrimination.240 Although OCR can terminate an institution’s federal funding if it fails to comply with Title IX or its regulations, OCR has never used this remedy.241 OCR’s lack of initiative demonstrates the need for individuals to enforce Title IX themselves by pursuing a private action for monetary damages.242 Monetary Damages Provide Benefits for Victims of Pregnancy Discrimination. Private suits under Title IX meet the law’s purpose of protecting individuals from discrimination.243 The availability of monetary damages under a Title IX suit is a better alternative than equitable relief because victims will receive a tangible award regardless of where they stand in the academic pipeline at the end of the trial. For example, while engaged in trial, some student-plaintiffs will have dropped out, or switched programs because of discriminatory behavior and no longer benefit from equitable relief. Therefore, the availability of monetary damages increases the likelihood that students affected by pregnancy discrimination will bring private actions against their institutions.244 The legal benefits of a Title IX private action for monetary damages do not just apply to individual victims. The threat of monetary damages may encourage recipients to implement structural changes to their policies, benefitting all students. Indeed, this is precisely what happened when courts began awarding damages to plaintiffs alleging sexual harassment under Title IX; employers were prompted to disseminate information about legal rights regarding sexual harassment, implement trainings instructing employers and employees on what behaviors are prohibited, and develop policies and procedures for handling complaints.245 d. Other Remedies Under Title IX Are Not Sufficient for Victims of Pregnancy Discrimination. While the administrative fund-termination remedy may prevent the use of federal funds to support sex discrimination, OCR has never used this as a remedy.246 Moreover, the termination of federal funding is less effective in protecting individuals who want to continue their program or desire other protections against discriminatory practices.247 On the other hand, equitable relief, such as injunctive relief, is relatively easy for institutions to implement without the consequences of losing funding or paying compensatory damages to plaintiffs. But injunctive relief may have no practical value to students who decide to apply to a different educational institution, need additional pregnancy leave, or do not want to complete their research or education. 248 And because of prolonged litigation, students typically will leave or graduate by the time their case is resolved.249 In a similar vein, mootness is a concern for students if they bring a suit after they have left the offending institution.250 Furthermore, equitable relief only addresses the needs of the individual victim and, unlike the threat of monetary damages, does not encourage recipients to start reviewing and eliminating their discriminatory practices. No spill up to broader perceptions of women which is the context of their impact authorsSquo solves – massive expansion of title IX over the last decadesWilson 17 (Robin, college reporter. “How a 20-Page Letter Chanegd the Way Higher Education Handles Sexual Assault”, 2/8/17. http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-20-Page-Letter-Changed/239141?key=7ic9HqqLp-NndEYj5GJLXtvvdFVuWPmmb_bdvJbUC11oT527QFVtv1OEQ6ZHGfzFUEFfX0hHRE9KbnpITVpFQWMtUVJmRU5BLW5nak80Z29RMW90V25CTXhhZw, 7/13/17)//JM The centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s announcement, a 20-page letter released by the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, has since become legendary. Not only did the "Dear Colleague" letter, as it has come to be known, specify in fine detail how colleges should respond to reports of assault, but it also made clear the Obama administration cared deeply about the issue. The message to colleges was unmistakable: We’ll be watching you. The Dear Colleague letter marked the first time the department’s civil-rights office had issued detailed directions that clearly were meant for all colleges. The guidance pushed institutions to investigate alleged assaults on campus and off, promptly and fairly, whether or not a student had filed a complaint. Much of the letter’s power came from its central argument: that the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX required colleges to do everything within their reach to prevent assaults and punish the perpetrators. To Ms. Potter and many other scholars, victims, and advocates there in New Hampshire that day, the letter’s unveiling felt deeply validating. "For so many of us," says Ms. Potter, "we do our research, we work with victims, and it’s all under the radar. Finally, the vice president was saying, This issue is a problem." Vice President Biden was a key intellectual force behind the Dear Colleague letter, but he was just one of several players inside the Obama administration who came together to elevate sexual assault as a campus concern. "We had been engaged in enforcement work, school by school, over the years, but what we didn’t see was enough national attention to the issue," says Catherine E. Lhamon, who took over as assistant secretary of the civil-rights office two years after the Dear Colleague letter was issued, and who spearheaded the Education Department’s vigorous enforcement of its guidelines. "The Supreme Court had spoken on this issue, saying that students need to be made safe and that Title IX did cover sexual assault. But the message hadn’t sufficiently taken hold." All of that changed with the Dear Colleague letter. In the nearly six years since the letter was published, higher education has been locked in a costly and often controversial battle to police campus sexual assault. Universities have hired Title IX coordinators to oversee procedures for adjudicating assault reports, in many cases overhauling those policies, and bought online prevention programs for undergraduates. Some institutions have spent millions of dollars on those efforts, plus more on outside lawyers to help them deal with U.S. Education Department investigations of their procedures. The Dear Colleague letter helped spike the number of universities under investigation for mishandling reports of assault, to more than 300. Universities also have faced expensive lawsuits from both women who have reported assaults and the young men they have accused. Now that President Trump has taken office, many wonder whether the landscape will shift again. Will the federal government’s laser focus on enforcement dim or even burn out entirely now that President Barack Obama has left the White House? Even if it does, most higher-education observers agree that the Dear Colleague letter was a watershed moment. Whether they applaud or oppose the Obama administration’s efforts, experts say there’s no doubt that the document played a huge role in raising concern about the issue of campus sexual assault. Undoing its impact, they say, won't be quick or simple. Seeking Consistent Standards While the letter may have caught campuses by surprise, its roots reached back to two decades of court decisions and actions by the civil-rights office — actions that gradually morphed Title IX from a law that ensured equal opportunity in college sports to one used to police sexual assault. First, in a series of rulings in the 1980s and 1990s, the Supreme Court determined that sexual harassment — including assault — violated Title IX by denying women equal opportunity in education. Then, in the mid-’90s, the civil-rights office began resolving students’ complaints that their colleges had mishandled reports of harassment and assault by specifically instructing individual institutions that Title IX prohibited gender-based violence. The civil-rights office determined in 1995 that Evergreen College had violated Title IX by failing to both "promptly and equitably" resolve a student’s complaint of sexual harassment against a professor and by using a higher standard of proof than it should have to determine the professor’s responsibility. Both of those requirements — the need to resolve complaints promptly and fairly, and to use a lower standard of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt" — were highlighted for all colleges in the Dear Colleague letter. In 2003, after investigating the handling of a rape complaint at Georgetown University, the civil-rights office reiterated the standard of evidence it believed colleges should use in assault cases. The standard is called "preponderance of the evidence," and it requires colleges to find alleged perpetrators responsible if it is 50.1 percent likely that an assault occurred. Title IX expansion inevitably causes gender quotas and affirmative action that undermine any victories the aff securesLukas 8 (Carrie, VP for policy and economics at the Independent Women’s Forum. “Studying Women and Science: Why Women’s Lower Rate of Participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Courses isn’t a Problem for the Government to Solve”, May 2008. http://www.iwf.org/files/c8ad0624e431351222d2f7c7a21fc5af.pdf, 7/30/17)//JM Those who seek aggressive Title IX enforcement and who would argue that the only way to know that hidden biases have been compensated for is through the outcome in enrollment haven’t defined exactly what would constitute “changes in the representation of women and minorities in the student body”. Would colleges be protected from legal challenges only if the number in a target discipline (like STEM) mirrored the gender balance of the student body (as is the case in athletics)? That would require that on many campuses six of ten engineering students would have to be female. This reality—that women today greatly outnumber men on campus in general—also will present an uncomfortable challenge if we enter a government-monitored academic numbers game. Why would it make sense to have enrollment in each discipline reflect enrollment when enrollment numbers are unrepresentative of the population as a whole? The potential for costly litigation can quickly turn well-intentioned policy and a desire for diversity into a numbers game and unseemly quota system. If Title IX is aggressively applied to academia, schools may begin seeking ways to steer students to and away from disciplines in order to achieve a politically correct classroom mix. That’s hardly a step toward true fairness and equality, as schools and the government officials selectively focus on some cases and subject areas instead of others, and could be counterproductive in terms of encouraging greater efficiency and happiness. Responses by professors who have already been interviewed as part of a government review highlight some of the potential problems. One professor from Columbia University called her interview by government officials “a complete waste of time” and said that she wanted to tell her interviewer to “leave me alone, and let me get my work done.”60 Indeed, the money invested in these conferences and in examining departments for hidden bias is money that could have been used elsewhere. Some universities may think that there is a need for such an investment, but if this money is used solely to satisfy politically correct overseers, then it is surely an unfortunate misuse of limited funds. Another female professor from Florida State University responded to the article “Can Equality In Sports Be Repeated in the Lab?” by expressing her great concern about the potential of forcing universities to achieve a certain gender-balance or face punishment. She saw such an effort as undermining the legitimacy of the women who do focus on and excel at STEM disciplines. She writes: Science…requires a high intellect, interest, opportunity, and a solid education. Lack of the latter two [has] restrained females of past generations, but the gender gap in education and opportunity is closing. Affirmative action may serve to broaden the pool of female scientists, but it will also weaken it—lower requirements naturally mean lower quality. As a result, the old preconception of male intellectual superiority will be reinforced, the status of women in science be reduced, and we will be back to the system that we are apparently fighting. I speak for many satisfied and successful (and therefore quieter) female scientists when I say, “Don’t marginalize us!61 In addition to devaluing those women who truly are interested in and suited for study and careers in STEM fields, efforts to artificially encourage women to pursue this discipline would likely disserve many women. If women are not truly interested in STEM or if they desire an area of study or a career that provides a different environment, then they are unlikely to thrive or achieve as much in STEM as they would have in their area of greater interest. Unwillingness to report undermines aff solvencyMiller 17 (Claire, Staff Writer at The New York Times, graduate in journalism from Yale University, “It’s Not Just Fox: Why Women Don’t Report Sexual Harassment”, Th Upshot, 4/10/2017, Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/upshot/its-not-just-fox-why-women-dont-report-sexual-harassment.html, 7/28, DTS) Jane Park talked about experiencing all of this behavior in her career in business consulting and strategy. Never has she reported any of it to human resources or management. “It’s made into such a big deal that you have to make a decision: Do you want to ruin your career? Do you want this to be everything that you end up being about?” said Ms. Park, who is now chief executive of Julep, a beauty company she founded. “What you really want to happen is that it doesn’t happen again.” Her choice is more common than not, social science research shows. Employers, judges and juries often use women’s failure to report harassment as evidence that it was not a problem or that plaintiffs had other motives. But only a quarter to a third of people who have been harassed at work report it to a supervisor or union representative, and 2 percent to 13 percent file a formal complaint, according to a meta-analysis of studies by Lilia Cortina of the University of Michigan and Jennifer Berdahl of the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business. Mostly they fear retaliation, and with good reason, research shows. In response to a New York Times report this month of payouts to women who had accused the Fox news host Bill O’Reilly of sexual harassment, 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, said: “No current or former Fox News employee ever took advantage of the 21st Century Fox hotline to raise a concern about Bill O’Reilly, even anonymously.” In interviews, women who worked at Fox said they didn’t complain to human resources because they feared they would be fired. Some women who experience harassment confront the perpetrator or confide in friends or family, the meta-analysis found. But the most common response is to avoid the person, play down what happened or ignore the behavior. Some don’t report a problem because they don’t think their experience qualifies as illegal harassment. An analysis of 55 representative surveys found that about 25 percent of women report having experienced sexual harassment, but when they are asked about specific behaviors, like inappropriate touching or pressure for sexual favors, the share roughly doubles. Those numbers are broadly consistent with other survey findings. Many victims, who are most often women, fear they will face disbelief, inaction, blame or societal and professional retaliation. That could be hostility from supervisors, a bad reference to future employers or the loss of job opportunities. Their fears are grounded in reality, researchers have concluded. In one study of public-sector employees, two-thirds of workers who had complained about mistreatment described some form of retaliation in a follow-up survey. “They become troublemakers — nobody wants to hire them or work with them anymore,” Ms. Berdahl said. Paradoxically, official harassment policies and grievance procedures often end up creating obstacles to women’s ability to assert their rights, according to research by Anna-Maria Marshall, a sociologist at the University of Illinois. “That is in part because companies put them into place as mini litigation defense centers,” Ms. Marshall said. “The way employers deal with it is to prepare to show a court or jury that they did everything they could, rather than to protect women in the workplace.” Posing for a photo in front of a Bill O’Reilly poster on outside Fox News studio in New York on Friday. Mr. O’Reilly hosts Fox News’s top-rated show and has privately settled sexual harassment charges. Researchers say superstars at a company are often seen as invincible, which makes women less likely to formally report harassment. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times There are many ways that company cultures discourage people who are harassed from reporting it. Sometimes the harasser is a superstar — someone who makes the company so much money that he feels powerful and uninhibited in his behavior because the company has considerable incentive to look the other way. The more someone has a reputation for harassing, the less likely a woman is to complain, Ms. Berdahl said: “It’s natural to conclude that if he’s been getting away with this for a long time, then the organization tolerates it, so why become the problem yourself by going to H.R.?” Other times the human resources department has no interest in helping the employee — or there is no such department at all. This is common in Silicon Valley, where companies grow so fast — and where disdain for slow-moving bureaucracy runs so deep — that human resources officials often serve only to recruit employees. In February, a former Uber engineer, Susan Fowler, wrote that when she reported to the Uber human resources department that her manager had tried persuading her to have sex with him on her first official day on her new team, the department declined to take action. It said she could change teams or accept what would probably be a poor performance review from the manager. Uber has a new human resources executive and is doing an internal investigation. Ellen Pao, a venture capitalist, at a San Francisco courthouse in 2015 for a trial that she lost over sex discrimination charges against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins. The firm had no human resources department to handle such complaints. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, described an atmosphere of sexism and harassment at the venture capital firm — with little recourse. In fact, it had no human resources department. She sued and lost a high-profile trial. Organizations that are very hierarchical or masculine can breed more harassment, and less reporting of it, according to studies, because gendered power dynamics are a big driver. That’s one reason that harassment has been rampant — and underreported — in the military. Extend: No RollbackNo rollback – Devos has enforced minority protections in other educational areasGreen 17 (Eric L. Green, New York Times Columnist and Reporter. “De Vos's Hard Line on New Education Law Surprises States”, 7/17/17. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/us/politics/devos-federal-education-law-states.html?mcubz=0, 7/30/17)//JM Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who made a career of promoting local control of education, has signaled a surprisingly hard-line approach to carrying out an expansive new federal education law, issuing critical feedback that has rattled state school chiefs and conservative education experts alike. President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 as the less intrusive successor to the No Child Left Behind law, which was maligned by many in both political parties as punitive and prescriptive. But in the Education Department’s feedback to states about their plans to put the new law into effect, it applied strict interpretations of statutes, required extensive detail and even deemed some state education goals lackluster. In one case, the acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, Jason Botel, wrote to the State of Delaware that its long-term goals for student achievement were not “ambitious.” “It is mind-boggling that the department could decide that it’s going to challenge them on what’s ambitious,” said Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who worked in the Education Department under President George W. Bush. He called the letter “directly in opposition to the rhetoric and the promises of DeVos.” After more than a decade of strict federal education standards and standardized testing regimes, the Every Student Succeeds Act was to return latitude to the states to come up with plans to improve student achievement and hold schools accountable for student performance. It sought to relieve states from the federal pressures of its predecessor, which required that 100 percent of the students of every school reach proficiency on state tests or the school would face harsh penalties and aggressive interventions. Unlike No Child Left Behind, the new law does not set numerical achievement targets, nor does it mandate how a state should intervene if a school fails to reach them. The law does require that states set such benchmarks on their own. Proponents, especially congressional Republicans and conservative education advocates, believed that a new era of local control would flourish under Ms. DeVos, who pointed to the new law as illustrative of the state-level empowerment she champions. But her department’s feedback reflects a tension between ideology and legal responsibility: While she has said she would like to see her office’s role in running the nation’s public schools diminished, she has also said she will uphold the law. “All of the signals she has been sending is that she’s going to approve any plan that follows the law,” Mr. Petrilli said. “And when in doubt, she’s going to give the states the benefit of the doubt.” Mr. Botel defended the department’s feedback, saying it was measuring state plans against federal statutes — including a requirement that plans be ambitious. “Because the statute does not define the word ‘ambitious,’ the secretary has the responsibility of determining whether a state’s long-term goals are ambitious,” Mr. Botel said. In the department’s letter to Delaware — which incited the most outrage from conservative observers — Mr. Botel took aim at the state’s plan to halve the number of students not meeting proficiency rates in the next decade. Such a goal would have resulted in only one-half to two thirds of some groups of students achieving proficiency, he noted. The department deemed those long-term goals, as well as those for English-language learners, not ambitious, and directed the state to revise its plans to make them more so. So far, 16 states and the District of Columbia have submitted plans, and more states will present plans in the fall. Delaware, New Mexico and Nevada were the first three to be reviewed by Education Department staff and a panel of peer reviewers. State education officials in Delaware said they had spent a year engaging the community on their plan and would resubmit it with clarifications. But Atnre Alleyne, the executive director of DelawareCAN, an advocacy group that helped draft the plan, agreed with the department’s findings. He said that his group had challenged the state about accountability measures, such as setting firm goals and consequences for failing to meet them, and found that “there was a lot of fear about being bold or aggressive” after No Child Left Behind. “Ultimately this has to be about every student succeeding, so to say that one-third are going to be proficient in 10 years, the department is right to call that into question,” Mr. Alleyne said. “A lot of people thought it was just going to be a breeze. I was glad to see it was a push.” Since Ms. DeVos was confirmed, civil rights and education advocates have expressed concern that state plans would get assembly-line approval and states would be allowed to skirt responsibility for low-performing and historically underserved students. For all of its flaws, the No Child Left Behind Act was praised for holding schools accountable for performance data. Under the law, a school was considered failing if all of its student groups, including all racial and ethnic groups, English-language learners and students with disabilities, did not meet annual achievement targets. By the end of the law, more than half of the nation’s schools were considered failures. But even after the first round of feedback, the advocates would like the department to be more aggressive and reject any state plan that lacks specifics on how they will account for the performance of historically underperforming and underserved student populations. “Pushback and feedback in and of themselves are of no interest and of no value,” said Liz King, the director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Chad Aldeman, a principal at Bellwether Education Partners, who led an independent examination of state plans, said that some states, like Louisiana, New Mexico and Tennessee, had innovative plans to improve student achievement. But Mr. Aldeman agreed that many state plans reflected “process without specificity” when it came to the two most important parts of the new law — identifying how schools will account for the performance of all students, and how states plan to intervene in low-performing schools. And Ms. DeVos and Republican lawmakers were partly to blame. “The administration has signaled that they’re willing to take plans that are half-baked, and we’re seeing plans that aren’t finished and are not complete,” Mr. Aldeman said. Christopher Ruszkowski, the acting secretary for the New Mexico Public Education Department, said the idea that the new law would yield total state control was merely “rhetoric from the Beltway.” “I think a lot of the euphoria over return to local control was an overpromise,” he said. “What this signals is that U.S.D.E. will continue to play the role they’ve always played in the years ahead.” In feedback for five more states — Connecticut, Louisiana, New Jersey, Oregon and Tennessee — the Education Department avoided criticizing the ambitions of the state plans. But it did maintain its scrutiny. For example, the department noted that Tennessee neglected to identify, as the law requires, languages other than English spoken among its student population because it considers itself “an English-only state.” According to the state’s population profile, nearly 50,000 students speak English as a second language. And in Connecticut’s plan, the department pointed out that the state discussed ways to identify schools that had “consistently underperforming” student groups, but did not actually define what that meant. The state was also criticized for its use of an alternative system for measuring academic performance instead of more standard “proficiency” measurements on state tests, as the law requires. Such feedback signaled that the department “appears to be resorting to very traditional and narrow ways of interpreting student and school performance,” said Laura Stefon, chief of staff for the Connecticut State Department of Education. Connecticut was also among a handful of states faulted for including science as a subject for measuring achievement, even though the law allows the use only of reading and math. This feedback was widely criticized by academic groups, including the National Science Teachers Association, who said the department was interpreting the law too literally. State leaders said they believed they were all but promised their plans would be approved. Instead, Chris Minnich, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said some aspects of the Education Department’s feedback were “overzealous” and could undermine community involvement. “It’s going to be really hard for a state to go back and say, ‘I know I told you we were doing all of this, but we’re going to change it because the federal government told us not to,’” Mr. Minnich said. Extend: OCR FailsAff Unenforceable – OCR under Trump is significantly reducedMurphy 17 (James, Director of National Outreach at The Princeton Review, Doctor of Philosophy, English Literature, University of California, Berkeley, “The Office for Civil Rights's Volatile Power”, The Atlantic, 3/13/2017, Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/the-office-for-civil-rights-volatile-power/519072/, 7/20, DTS) Here is a question nobody asked Betsy DeVos at her confirmation hearing to become the eleventh secretary of education: Is the U.S. Department of Education a civil-rights agency? The last secretary, John King, thinks so. Over 600 education scholars who protested the nomination of DeVos think so, too. In a letter to the Senate, they recalled that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which created the federal role in American schools, is “at its heart a civil-rights law.” While much of the controversy over the new secretary has focused on school choice and the privatization of public education, the reality is that DeVos will have little power to enact major changes on those fronts because control lies with the state. When it comes to civil rights, however, DeVos and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) still possess immense power and responsibility. During her hearing, DeVos was evasive about how she would wield both, promising only to review OCR’s policies should she be confirmed. In a recent interview, she acknowledged that “anti-discrimination issues” require “a federal role,” but, she went on, “I also think there is an opportunity to streamline and simplify a lot of the engagement and involvement the department has had around some of these issues.” In another interview, DeVos talked about “when we had segregated schools and when we had a time when, you know, girls weren't allowed to have the same kind of sports teams—I mean, there have been important inflection points for the federal government to get involved.” There is strong evidence that school segregation is worse now than it has been for more than 30 years. The Obama administration tackled desegregation; campus sexual violence; harassment against transgender students; and disparities in discipline that made African American students and students with disabilities much more likely to be restrained, secluded, arrested, suspended, or expelled. There was a sense of urgency in the OCR during the Obama years. DeVos sees things differently. Asked if there any remaining issues where the federal government should intervene, DeVos said “I can't think of any now.” Given this milquetoast response, it was surprising to learn that DeVos raised an objection to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Trump’s decision to rescind the Department of Education’s protections of transgender students’ rights. DeVos’s push-back was overridden, and though she could have refused to go along with the administration, in the end, she capitulated, and the acting assistant secretary of civil rights in the Department of Education signed off on the the new guidance. Speaking to an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference a day later, she called the Title IX guidance “a very huge example of the Obama administration’s overreach.” None of this was unexpected—at least, not to anyone familiar with the history of the OCR. Republicans have accused the office of overreach, overregulation, and intimidation. Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education-policy research center, suggested that the OCR under Trump would be “more humble in its goals.” He said it would likely return to the “traditional role of responding to complaints,” as previous Republican administrations have, rather than using the power of the office “more proactively to launch complaints.” President Obama and his two secretaries of education, King and Arne Duncan, certainly put much more emphasis on students’ civil rights than their predecessors did, likely because school seems to play such a large role in their visions of both citizenship and progress. Education appears to play a smaller role in Trump’s worldview, however. During his campaign and his inauguration speech, education served as just another example of American decline (“an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge”). What follows from such a view, or from DeVos’s remark that traditional public schools are a “dead-end,” is not nearly so clear. Because the OCR has long been subject to pendulum swings between Republican and Democratic administrations, history provides the best guide to what is likely to happen to the office in the next four years. * * * The OCR bears the primary responsibility to enforce laws that “prohibit discrimination … on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age.” Although the office has always worked with institutions to resolve complaints filed against them, its ultimate enforcement tools are to withhold federal funds or to refer a complaint to the Department of Justice for prosecution. In an interview, Catherine Lhamon, the second assistant secretary of Civil Rights for the Department of Education under Obama, said, “Happily, we almost never need to initiate [either] process.” Lhamon was appointed to a six-year term as chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in the last weeks of the Obama presidency. People who work in schools, she pointed out, are there because they want to help students, so they typically work with the OCR to satisfy the law. Republican critics of the OCR do not see things in such a warm light. They have accused the office of overreach, overregulation, and intimidation during President Obama’s administration and have promised change. Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina and the new chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, wants “to see the [entire] department scaled back.” At a recent post-election event, David Cleary, the chief of staff for Senator Lamar Alexander—a former secretary of education himself and the current chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee—predicted a weaker role for the office: “Certainly we think that the Office [for] Civil Rights has overreached ... and, there will be a very natural shrinking of the expansive interpretations of Title IX and civil-rights laws.” What some see as a “natural” correction to an office that has come under a great deal of criticism (and not just from conservatives) other see as a profound threat. When the Department of Education hosted an event this past December intended to mark all that the Office for Civil Rights had accomplished during the Obama administration, it felt equal parts funeral and rally. Liz King, a senior policy analyst and the director of education policy at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told me after the event, “People are actually worried that historic civil-rights laws may not be enforced.” The OCR is unlikely to be abolished in the next four years. That would require legislative cooperation across the aisle. It will, however, almost certainly be diminished in scale and ambition, which some might argue is tantamount to its elimination. Curt Decker, the executive director of the National Disability Rights Network, said “There has to be a very robust enforcement system to make sure any federal legislation has the impact it is intended to have.” A law without enforcement amounts to little more than theater. Civil-rights laws cannot be easily reversed, but they can go unenforced. New OCR appointments are unqualifiedCharles Ornstein 17 - Charles Ornstein is a senior reporter for ProPublica covering health care and the pharmaceutical industry, 17 ("Heritage Foundation Alum Critical of Transgender Rights to Lead HHS Civil Rights Office", ProPublica, 3-24-2017, Available Online from https://www.propublica.org/article/heritage-foundation-critical-transgender-rights-HHS-civil-rights-office, Accessed on 7-20-2017 AIN) The Trump administration has quietly appointed a Heritage Foundation staffer who has railed against civil rights protections for transgender patients as director of the federal agency charged with protecting the civil rights of all patients. Though the administration did not issue a formal announcement, Roger Severino is now listed on the website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as director of the Office for Civil Rights. His prior position was as director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, where he focused on “religious liberty, marriage and life issues.” (The DeVos Center is named for the in-laws of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.) The civil rights office is in charge of enforcing patient privacy protections and ensuring that patients’ civil rights are protected, that they are free from discrimination and that they have access to services such as interpreters. Asked for comment, HHS forwarded a link to Severino’s title and biography. In a statement, Heritage spokeswoman Marguerite Bowling said, “Roger Severino has a distinguished record of fighting for the civil rights and freedoms of all Americans. We have no doubt that Roger in his new role at HHS will protect the civil rights of all Americans.” Severino’s position does not require Senate confirmation. Based on his prior writings, Severino will likely take the agency in a different direction than it had under the Obama administration. Last year, the agency issued rules banning discrimination against transgender patients, carrying out provisions of the Affordable Care Act. (A federal judge put those rules on hold on Dec. 31, siding with a Catholic hospital system, other religious health providers and five states that challenged them. The Trump administration has not sought to overturn the injunction.) When those rules were proposed, Severino and a Heritage colleague wrote a scathing critique, saying they jeopardized the religious liberty and freedom of conscience of health care providers. OCR fails to accomplish effective aidEditorial Board 16 - Editorial Board is composed of 16 journalists with wide-ranging areas of expertise. Their primary responsibility is to write The Times’s editorials, which represent the voice of the board, its editor and the publisher, 16 ("Opinion", New York Times, 7-7-2016, Available Online from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/opinion/the-epas-civil-rights-problem.html, Accessed on 7-18-2017 AIN) The E.P.A.’s Office of Civil Rights is supposed to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race by any recipient of federal money. So when state or local regulatory agencies that get federal assistance allow refineries, landfills or other facilities to disproportionately affect the health or safety of minority communities, those communities have a right to turn to the Office of Civil Rights for help. Under the rules, the E.P.A. is supposed to decide within 20 days of a complaint whether to investigate, and to issue a preliminary finding within 180 days. But in practice, the agency takes an average of 350 days just to determine whether it will investigate, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, and a number of investigations by the agency have been open for years. The office has dismissed or rejected more than 90 percent of the complaints it has received and has never made a formal finding of discrimination. Extend: Title IX Expansion NowTitle 9 power expanding and will continue to expandBarnes 17- Katie Barnes is a Sports & Culture writer for ESPN. 17 ("How Title IX expanded to protect LGBT students", ABCNews, 1-17-2017, Available Online from http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/title-ix-expanded-protect-lgbt-students/story?id=44832919, Accessed on 7-24-2017 AIN) The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the division of the federal government that enforces laws making it illegal to discriminate against an employee because of their sex, race, age, etc, decides that the Civil Rights Act protects transgender individuals. The EEOC's ruling reads: "The term 'gender' encompasses not only a person's biological sex but also the cultural and social aspects associated with masculinity and femininity." While this particular ruling doesn't directly affect Title IX, it builds a philosophy that paves the way for future expansions Title IX protections. The OCR released guidance?for its 2011 Dear Colleague Letter. The document's language mirrors the wording laid out in the EEOC's 2012 decision to protect transgender individuals. The OCR wrote: "Title IX's sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity and OCR accepts such complaints for investigation." The move expanded the reach of Title IX protections, making sex discrimination based on gender identity a violation of the law. The new parameters regarding gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation are included in the updated Title IX Resource Guide published by OCR, thus requiring colleges to provide equal access to LGBT students. With expanded Title IX protection has come push-back and consequences. Some religious institutions have requested Title IX waivers from OCR to avoid punishment for not providing certain accommodations (such as gender-inclusive housing and restrooms) to the LGBT community. The Department of Education has announced plans to create searchable database that reveals the names of colleges and universities who have been granted religious exemptions from federal civil rights protections. And while the executive branch has expanded the reach of Title IX enforcement, the power of the law ultimately rests with the courts. Lawsuits involving these Title IX issues have already begun and could decide the weight of the new rules. Extend: Title IX Expansion BadTitle IX expansion makes courts less likely to enforce itNew 16 - Jake New is a reporter, covers student life and athletics for Inside Higher Ed. He joined the publication in June 2014 after writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education and covering education technology for eCampus News. He was awarded the David W. Miller Award for Young Journalists. His work has also appeared in the Bloomington Herald-Times, Indianapolis Monthly, Slate, PBS, Times Higher Education and the Australian., 16 ("Several students win recent lawsuits against colleges that punished them for sexual assault", Inside Higher Education, 4-14-2016, Available Online from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/14/several-students-win-recent-lawsuits-against-colleges-punished-them-sexual-assault, Accessed on 7-28-2017 AIN) Colleges are indeed under pressure, from both the Department of Education and activists, to more aggressively investigate and adjudicate cases of campus sexual assault. Several of the recent court opinions note that the botched hearings occurred soon after a university received criticism for failing to protect a sexual assault victim in a separate case, or after the Department of Education began investigating an institution for violating Title IX. Pavela said while Title IX is not to blame for these colleges cutting corners in their disciplinary processes, the Department of Education has failed to emphasize due process when enforcing its policies. "Colleges and universities are escalating and criminalizing the prosecution of sexual misconduct cases, while eliminating basic due process for the accused," Pavela said. "Title IX does not require this approach and courts are unlikely to allow it. Silence on procedural fairness, however, sends the subliminal message that due process is an impediment to more 'convictions.' We're seeing the fruits of OCR's due process silence now. University sexual misconduct policies are losing legitimacy in the eyes of the courts. That's a disaster for Title IX enforcement. And OCR shares ample responsibility for it." Erin Buzuvis, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at Western New England University, said it would be premature to argue the Education Department has used Title IX to “force the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction.” While one judge did note his concern about using preponderance of evidence as a standard for determining guilt, the recent victories for accused students have not been based on Title IX claims, and in the case against George Mason, the judge actually dismissed the accused student's Title IX claim. “No court has expressly held something that’s required by the Department of Education and its Dear Colleague letters as violating due process,” Buzuvis said. “What these cases show is that in some cases, colleges are going beyond what Title IX requires and in ways that are infringing on the rights of disciplined students. The line is being established as to what kinds of protections students can expect and rely on, and going forward universities should do a better job of making sure their responses take both Title IX and procedural fairness into account. There’s no reason yet to believe the two can’t coexist.” Extend: Title IX FailsTitle 9 fails to cover assaultSibley 14 – Robert Shibley is an attorney, is Senior Vice President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) ,14 ("Time to Call the Cops: Title IX Has Failed Campus Sexual Assault", Time, 5-30-2014, Available Online from http://time.com/3612667/campus-sexual-assault-uva-rape-title-ix/, Accessed on 7-28-2017 AIN) A recent article in Rolling Stone has related a horrifying account of an on-campus gang rape allegedly committed by University of Virginia students in 2012. Third-year student “Jackie” told her story of how, as a freshman, she was brutally raped for three hours by seven men in a darkened, upstairs room at a fraternity party after being lured there by “Drew,” an upperclassman. Jackie’s account of her subsequent run-ins with Drew only add to the chilling nature of the crime: Weeks and months after the incident, Drew acted as though nothing unusual had happened, even thanking her for the “great time” he’d had. This is criminal, predatory, and sociopathic behavior. If Jackie’s account is accurate, the perpetrators deserve lengthy prison sentences. Yet they reportedly graduated from UVA and remain at large. Why? Did police and prosecutors drop the ball? No. Nobody ever even called the police. UVA handled the case internally, which is entirely normal on today’s college campuses. For everyone’s sake, this must stop—and the sooner the better. The cause and extent of the problem of sexual assault on campus is hotly debated. But there’s no dispute that the broken way colleges handle these cases is a result of the federal government’s current interpretation of Title IX, the civil rights law that bans sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs (including nearly all colleges, public or private). Regulations from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights encourage schools to allow victims to decide how and whether to go to police, while demanding that schools conduct what amount to rape trials in campus kangaroo courts, even if the crime is never reported to law enforcement. This has proved to be a mistake. The motivation for this “police optional” approach is based in compassion. Advocates argue that law enforcement is skeptical or dismissive of accusers’ claims, that a police investigation will “revictimize” those who have already been through a traumatic experience they’d rather not revisit, and that the evidentiary standards maintained by the criminal justice system means that it’s likely their attackers will go free. Yet the huge costs of this approach are too often ignored. Foremost is the fact that many campus sex crimes are never subjected to professional forensic investigation, leaving perpetrators unpunished and free to commit further crimes. Part of the horror of Jackie’s story is the sense that this was not the perpetrators’ first crime—and probably not their last. One oft-cited study suggests that serial predators commit around 90% of campus rapes, with an average of nearly six rapes per perpetrator. If this number is anywhere near accurate, each rape not reported to law enforcement is a missed opportunity to protect future victims from harm. No rape victim, on campus or off, should be required to report what happened to them to the police or to anyone else. But designing a system that encourages silence or the avoidance of law enforcement is unconscionable. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick writes, “How can a felony offense be kept out of the police’s hands, and how can victims be presented with a menu of choices that includes, and even encourages, doing nothing? We cannot reduce the incidence of rape by giving up on the only system that can actually remove dangerous people from society. If police have retained outmoded or simply uninformed attitudes towards victims of sexual violence, the solution is to educate and train them to properly handle victims and investigate these crimes, not to outsource the job to self-interested, underqualified campus administrators. For those concerned with issues of class and privilege, this should be an especially high priority. Nothing we do on campus can help people who don’t and won’t attend college—a cohort disproportionately composed of the poor and minorities. Improving police response to sexual crimes is the only way to help victims universally. Campuses have a role to play when their students are victimized. They can separate accusers and the accused, provide counseling and protective services, and help guide them to the resources they need, including resources to navigate and cope with the police and legal process. They can also maintain clear memoranda of understanding with local police departments that facilitate the quick, thorough, and professional investigation of all felony crimes committed on campus. Neither accusers nor the accused will get justice if Title IX continues to be interpreted to force colleges to investigate and adjudicate these crimes themselves. That system has failed. As the Rape, Incest, and Abuse National Network wrote in a letter to the White House last February, “It would never occur to anyone to leave the adjudication of a murder in the hands of a school’s internal judicial process. Why, then, is it not only common, but expected, for them to do so when it comes to sexual assault?” Extend: No ImpactDirectory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.55 Mb. Share with your friends:
|