Wednesday, May 07, 2014

What counts in Dept of Ed's new list

An article HuffPo raises the issue of what counts when it comes to the Department of Education's newly published list of schools under investigation for Title IX violations based on the handling of sexual assault cases.
Title IX, of course, covers other aspects of gender discrimination including, for example, retaliation taken against someone who complains about the mishandling of a sexual assault case. But if such a complaint were made and is being investigated, that school would only appear on the list if there was also a complaint related to the actual handling of a sexual assault case. And so, based on information HuffPo received from the Department of Education, there are over 30 more schools under investigation for something that could be related to the ways in which schools handle reports of sexual assault including the lack of a designated title IX coordinator (which obviously has effects beyond sexual assault) and the lack of published grievance procedures.
In short, the list published last week has a more narrow scope.
What this seems to indicate is that--like seemingly everything related to Title IX (as last week's many pages of information also illustrated--everything needs a little clarification.