Devi Rao, Fellow

Devi Rao is a Skadden Fellow for Educational and Employment Opportunities at the National Women's Law Center, where she focuses on using Title IX to promote safe school environments, including preventing gender-based bullying. Devi is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia Law School, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. Prior to joining NWLC, Devi served as a law clerk to the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. During law school, Devi was a staff member of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, served on the board of the Columbia Law Women's Society, and interned at Legal Momentum, a women's rights legal organization. In her summers, Devi interned with the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California in the White Collar Section, and worked as a summer associate at Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen & Dardarian, a civil rights law firm in Oakland, California. She is happy to be back in Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked after college.

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My Take

We Are All Amber Cole

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: October 26, 2011 at 03:59 pm

“Amber Cole,” has been been a trending topic on Twitter and much-discussed in the blogosphere after a video of a 14-year old girl engaging in oral sex with a male classmate, with another boy looking on, was posted online and immediately went viral a week and a half ago. (It turns out that her name is likely not actually Amber Cole; her real name has not been disclosed.) Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allowed the video to remain online for four days.

Amber quickly became the subject of online gender-based bullying on her Twitter page—people called her a “slut,” “ho” and other names and asked her for sexual favors. She had to change schools as a result of bullying and harassment. (Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, covers gender-based harassment and bullying, but it’s not clear how much of the bullying was done by classmates, as opposed to random jerks on the internet.)

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Tags: Bullying and Harassment, Sexual Assault, Abuse, and Harassment, Title IX, Sexual Harassment & Bullying | Add new comment

Congress Must Have Missed the Memo about Spirit Day

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: October 21, 2011 at 12:16 pm

Yesterday was Spirit Day, when millions of people around the world wear purple in a show of organized support for LGBT youth and against bullying. The White House joined a host of public figures and celebrities in participating. But somehow Congress missed the memo.

Yesterday the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee let down our nation's LGBT youth, with the omission of two crucial amendments to an education bill that would have helped create safe school environments for LGBT students and put a stop to bullying based on sexual orientation.

Last night, the HELP Committee voted the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization bill out of the committee, with a vote of 15 to 7. The bill lacked important protections for LGBT students, further disappointing an already-unhappy civil rights community.

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Tags: School Reform & Dropout Prevention, Education & Title IX | Add new comment

"We Cannot Support the Bill at this Time"

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: October 19, 2011 at 04:15 pm

This morning, the National Women’s Law Center joined 20 civil rights organizations, business groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, state education officials, and education advocates in stating that, as currently written, we cannot support the Senate HELP Committee’s proposal for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The statement highlights the bill’s lack of accountability measures to narrow achievement gaps for low-income students, students of color, English language learners, and students with disabilities, both boys and girls.

In addition, the Center wrote to Chairman Harkin and Ranking Member Enzi voicing disapproval of the bill, which "falls seriously short of ensuring that all children have access to a quality education that will prepare them for college and careers."

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Tags: Career & Technical Education, School Reform & Dropout Prevention, Education & Title IX | Add new comment

Tell Congress to Outlaw Discrimination for LGBT Students

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: October 11, 2011 at 12:18 pm

As Congress moves towards revising our nation's education laws, it is the perfect time to fix a loophole that allows discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students in public schools.

The Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee is scheduled to consider a bill to renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) on October 18, and a draft of the provisions in that bill should come out as early as this afternoon. It is essential that ESEA includes the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA), which would outlaw discrimination in public K-12 schools based on sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.

Bullying and harassment are all too common in our nation's schools, and students who are or are perceived to LGBT, are especially at risk for such treatment. According to a 2009 survey, 84% of LGBT youth were verbally harassed, 40% were physically harassed, and 18% were physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation.

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Tags: School Reform & Dropout Prevention, Education & Title IX | Add new comment

Pushed Out and Kept Down: Girls of Color and the School Pushout Crisis

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: September 28, 2011 at 04:28 pm

Here's a shocking fact: 1 million students who start high school this year won't finish. In many cases, though, students aren't just "dropping out"; they're being pushed out by overly-punitive disciplinary policies and unsafe school environments. Now is a great time to get involved in the issue — Saturday marks the beginning of the Dignity in Schools Campaign's the National Week of Action on School Pushout (October 1-8).

What's happening? Students who are suspended, expelled, or arrested in school are more likely to fall behind and drop out. In addition, students who attend schools in which they feel unsafe may experience declining academic performance, skip school, and end up not finishing. Unfortunately, these practices disproportionately affect students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBT students, who experience much higher rates of discipline than other students. For example, African American students, including African American girls, are 3 times as likely as their white peers to be suspended and 3.5 times as likely to be expelled.

And many girls, particularly girls of color, are punished severely for very minor infractions. Remember that crazy story from Alabama of high school student who was sent to an alternative school for "drug use" after taking Motrin to relieve menstrual cramps? And in New York, a middle school student was arrested for writing "okay" on her desk. You heard right — ARRESTED! And don't forget the teenage girl in the South who was suspended from school for wearing a prom dress that school officials deemed too revealing; unlike the other girls disciplined for this, she did not agree to be paddled (yes, paddled!) so she got suspended instead. One study looking at disciplinary practices among middle schools in 18 of the country's largest school districts in the 2006-2007 school year found that suspension rates for Black girls were the second highest overall consistently higher than the rates for other groups of girls and for Hispanic or White boys. And Black girls had the highest percentage point growth in suspension rates of any group.

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Tags: School Reform & Dropout Prevention, Education & Title IX | 1 comment