Biden's school manifesto won't confront this very real danger in our kids' schools

Any White House hoping to escape public attention about a damaging issue drops harmful documents just before a long holiday weekend. A modest tweet announcing the release of the White House Gender Policy Council’s (GPC) National Plan to End Gender-Based Discrimination: Strategies for Action just before the recent Memorial Day holiday thus drew our attention.  

Given that President Joe Biden’s supporters simmer in a constant stew of social grievances, one would have expected a communications plan better designed to boost public attention for a document that declares "a public safety and public health crisis" in the United States arising from "gender-based violence." 

Whatever the White House’s public relations strategy, the GPC’s plan has some gaping holes. Oddly absent is any discussion of sexual abuse of K–12 students by teachers and staff in public schools — a startlingly frequent phenomenon.  

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Approximately 10% of students have suffered sexual abuse by school employees, according to a 2004 U.S. Department of Education study. Research published in 2018 shows school districts allow sexually abusive school employees, on average, to work in three school districts, harming scores of victims throughout their careers — a practice known as "passing the trash." 

From 2010 to 2019, the number of complaints of sexual violence against K–12 schools filed with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) more than tripled. OCR’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), a nationwide survey of over 17,000 school districts taken every two years, echoes this alarming shift.  

The 2017–18 CRDC (the most recent of these surveys from which OCR has published data) registered 13,799 reported incidents of sexual violence, including 685 instances of rape or attempted rape — an increase of 43% and 74%, respectively, over the number of these incidents reported in the 2015–16 CRDC.  

Although the 149-page plan takes great pains to scrutinize nearly every aspect of American life for "gender-based violence," it makes only fleeting references to schools and Title IX, which prohibits sexual misconduct in education programs and activities receiving federal funds.  

The GPC plan doesn’t even reference the CRDC data about sexual misconduct in public K–12 schools. This omission demonstrates that the administration doesn’t want to hold accountable the heavily unionized government bureaucracy responsible for public education.  

In recent history, the department’s leadership held school districts accountable for sexual misconduct in their schools.   

In 2018, then-secretary Betsy DeVos took the exceptional step of withholding millions of dollars in grants from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) because the school district failed to investigate complaints of sexual abuse as mandated by Title IX.  

In 2019, the Department and CPS reached a groundbreaking agreement requiring across-the-board reforms of CPS policies regarding sexual harassment complaints, including the appointment of a Title IX Coordinator to respond to allegations and oversee investigations.  

Not content with action only against CPS, DeVos announced a new initiative in 2020 that charged OCR with aggressively enforcing Title IX with respect to sexual harassment, including sexual assault, in K–12.  

The Department also published new Title IX regulations that, for the first time in history, expressly require schools receiving federal funding to address sexual harassment and sexual assault within their programs and activities. 

The Biden Education Department is dead set on reversing these enforcement efforts. The DeVos-era initiative to prompt school districts to address sexual abuse has vanished from the agency’s website.  

Last year, Biden’s political appointees in OCR proposed removing from the CRDC questions relating to sexual abuse of students by employees until a public outcry forced the agency to back down and keep the questions.  

In 2022, the Sexual Assault Unit of the Chicago Board of Education’s Office of Inspector General reported that it had substantiated allegations of sexual misconduct in 302 investigations, resulting in at least 16 criminal charges against adults affiliated with CPS. 

Yet, the Biden administration has not reopened its enforcement action against CPS and has allowed federal funds to flow uninterrupted to that faltering public school system. 

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Flying beneath the public’s radar is Biden’s gift to the teacher unions: a proposed Education Department rule gutting the prior administration’s Title IX reforms that mandated that schools use the same standard of proof for students, faculty, and staff in proceedings to determine responsibility for sexual misconduct.  

The Biden administration wants to allow school districts to use a stricter standard of proof for allegations against teachers, thus making it more difficult for administrators to hold a teacher or staffer responsible for sexual assault than a student.  

This is only one of the many ways that the Biden administration’s proposed regulations seek to weaponize Title IX to serve the interests of the president’s supporters.   

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Approximately 10% of students have suffered sexual abuse by school employees, according to a 2004 U.S. Department of Education study. Research published in 2018 shows school districts allow sexually abusive school employees, on average, to work in three school districts, harming scores of victims throughout their careers — a practice known as "passing the trash." 

As our organization’s recent report on these issues explains, Title IX authorizes the department to take measures to push school systems to protect students from sexual abuse.  

Despite the politically inconvenient questions that this crisis raises for Biden’s teacher union bedfellows, the department must get off the sidelines and force public school bureaucracies to stamp out sexual abuse and support survivors or risk losing federal funds. A woke manifesto that only serves the president’s favored constituencies isn’t enough. 

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Paul Zimmerman is Policy Counsel for The Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies.