Feds dismissing civil rights complaints

May 2, 2018
DeVos OCR Office for Civil Rights Title IX
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civil rights, DeVos, OCR, Office for Civil Rights, Title IX

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) says it gets too many complaints about discrimination, creating an “unreasonable burden” on the Office. It recently changed procedures to make it harder for people to file complaints and is now disregarding hundreds already received. It also scrapped the option to appeal decisions made by OCR in cases that it does take on. Civil rights advocates are not happy, to say the least. As the late, great Yogi Berra might say, it’s like déjà vu all over again. This isn’t the first time that OCR has tried systematically ignoring many of […]

New Knot in Civil Rights Tug-of-War

August 2, 2017
Office for Civil Rights Uncategorized
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DeVos, OCR, Office for Civil Rights, Title IX, Weinberger

The U.S. Department of Education recently inverted a strategy it tried in 1975 to cut back on its work enforcing civil rights laws, including Title IX. Public outcry from organizations for minorities, women, and the disabled — plus a supportive court ruling — forced federal officials to back off in 1975. Will it today? Historically, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has used two approaches to enforce civil rights — investigating individual complaints of discrimination, and broader “compliance reviews” of an educational institution as a whole. Compliance reviews may be scheduled any time, or can arise from complaints. In […]

Framing Title IX controversies: New or old?

February 23, 2017
Office for Civil Rights rape sexual assault sexual harassment Uncategorized
Chronicle of Higher Education, Office for Civil Rights, Title IX

The media and anti-Title IX pundits are fond of framing controversies around campus sexual assaults as a relatively “new” phenomenon that started in 2011. Too often that leaves out the 45-year history of schools and colleges unfairly ignoring, obstinately defying, and only reluctantly complying with Title IX’s mandate to fight sex discrimination in education. A case in point: The Chronicle of Higher Education, which probably has the best and most extensive Title IX coverage of any media outlet over the years, published a lengthy and very interesting article (available to subscribers), “One Letter Changed Colleges’ Response to Rape Cases.” The article described events since the Office for Civil […]

Office for Civil Rights helped, hindered Title IX

July 1, 2016
Cindy Brown Office for Civil Rights Sports video
Cindy Brown, Deborah Ashford, Martin Gerry, OCR, Office for Civil Rights, sports, Title IX

Republican and Democratic Administrations have different track records for Office of Civil Rights enforcement of Title IX. (The OCR is part of the Executive Branch.) Three videos in this blog — with former OCR officials Martin Gerry, Cindy Brown, and Deborah Ashford — give a taste of that divide from the 1970s under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations. After Title IX became law in 1972, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) had to write regulations to implement the law. That’s standard procedure, usually accomplished in a matter of months for many laws, but the Nixon and Ford […]