Title IX

This guest-post was written by Dominique Dawes and is cross-posted from on Fitness.gov.

Dominique Dawes

Today is National Girls and Women in Sports Day! Each year, this observance provides us with a tremendous opportunity to help get more girls in the game, and make a significant investment in the future of our Nation. I am proud to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition and sound the alarm about the importance of ensuring equitable physical activity opportunities for all Americans.

Throughout my life, I have been transformed and inspired by sports. Since the first time I tumbled into a gymnasium at six years old to becoming an Olympic gold medalist, I was motivated and excited by the opportunities presented to me as an athlete and a coach. I owe my participation and success in gymnastics (and so much more) to the passage of Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, which has transformed the lives of millions of girls by granting them greater access to participate in sports.

One amazing example of making this investment is in Daly City, California with the Benjamin Franklin Middle School girls’ basketball team. Their coach is 28-year-old Sarah Egan, who in addition to teaching social studies also teaches how to dribble, make layups, and block. The school has mostly low-income students from immigrant families, and Sarah faces significant challenges with her athletes. Read more »

This guest-post was written by Sarah Egan and featured on Fitness.gov.

When I started teaching in 2009, I watched life unfold on the asphalt. During recess and before and after school, the boys took center stage on all four basketball courts — dribbling, pivoting, guarding, pushing, blocking, faking, jumping, dunking, high fiving and taunting each other. They were agile and fast. The girls talked to each other and watched the boys from the perimeter of the tarmac. My instinct had always been to jump right into the action! Why weren't these girls playing on the blacktop? Why didn't they join the boys or take control of a court themselves?

I teach U.S. and world history to 200 7th & 8th graders in Daly City, California, just south of San Francisco. It's a low-income school and close to 80 percent of the students are new immigrants — from Central and South America, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries. It's tough coming up with a lesson that connects to such a diverse audience. Recently I compared the Declaration of Independence to a break-up letter between a girlfriend and boyfriend. The colonialists listed all the reasons for breaking up with the King of England. This approach totally worked and the kids were hooked!

Three months into the job, the athletic director asked if I'd coach one of the girls' basketball teams — in addition to teaching social studies. Frankly, I was overwhelmed. I hadn't anticipated how difficult teaching would be — especially at a school where kids show up in the morning stressed out. Read more »

Tomorrow, Wednesday, February 6th, is National Girls & Women in Sports Day, which has people singing the praises of Title IX from soccer fields, softball diamonds, tracks, pools and countless other sporting venues – and for good reason! Title IX is an enormously important law for female athletes – no other law has done more to open doors for women and girls in athletics. While there is still work to be done, the progress we have made thanks to Title IX is tremendous.

But what many people don’t know is that the benefits and protections of Title IX aren’t limited to athletics. Here are four other ways Title IX is there for young women (and men, too):

1. Equal Opportunities in career and technical programs in traditionally male-dominated fields

Title IX requires that girls and boys be given equal opportunities in career and technical education programs, particularly in traditionally male-dominated fields. Getting more women in these fields may be the key to closing the gender wage gap, since predominantly female occupations pay lower wages than predominantly male ones. Women still face barriers and a lack of encouragement in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (often referred to as STEM), but Title IX has broadened opportunities for a number of women and girls. Read more »

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) just released much-anticipated guidance (available here) on the inclusion of students with disabilities in extracurricular activities – which includes club, intramural, and interscholastic athletic programs.

The guidance provides information to schools on their obligations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in federally funded programs. Section 504 requires schools (traditional and charter) to provide a qualified student with a disability an opportunity to benefit from the school district’s program equal to that of students without disabilities. Under Section 504, a disability is any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one of more major life activities (students who receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) qualify as students with disabilities under Section 504). Read more »

In this week’s round of “are you sure that’s not from The Onion?”: a school in Missouri has told the mother of a middle school student that she should consider a breast reduction to escape sexual harassment.  

After her thirteen-year-old daughter faced bullying and harassment due to her large breast size, Tammie Jackson called the school to ask for help. The school official she spoke with suggested that her daughter could transfer to a different school, then stated that in her opinion, her daughter would face the same sexual harassment at any school due to her physique.

This classic victim-blaming rhetoric puts the blame on Jackson’s daughter, rather than on the students who are sexually harassing her. It tells a thirteen-year-old girl that the problem is her body, rather than the attitudes and actions of others. Furthermore, under Title IX, a response like this could be against the law. Read more »

NASA launched the MissionSTEM website to assist NASA grantees in meeting their compliance obligations under the federal civil rights laws and to find ways to “creatively address issues such as attracting and retaining diverse students in STEM,” as NASA’s Administrator, Charles F. Bolden, Jr. stated in a video introducing the new website. In his video remarks and corresponding blog post, Mr. Bolden references the “Moon Speech” given by President Kennedy at Rice University in 1962 (video/text), in which the President announced plans to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade – even when many of the things that were necessary to make that happen had not even been invented yet.

The President acknowledged that the rapid pace of change in our world created new and more challenges – “new ignorance, new problems, new dangers.” However, he proclaimed that “the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward.” Read more »

People, you just canNOT make this stuff up. Last Friday, I brought you the absurd story of the student who was bullied during at TV interview ON BULLYING.

Then today I find this gem: a school district appointed a hate group to its anti-bullying task force. Yep. You read that correctly.

Back in March, the Anoka-Hennepin School District just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice filed a landmark consent decree to resolve plaintiffs’ claims that middle and high schools in the district failed to address pervasive bullying and harassment of LGBT students (and those perceived as LGBT). The students had alleged violations of a number of laws, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination—including harassment of students for gender non-conformity—in schools that receive federal funding. Read more »

After refusing to voluntarily do the right thing for well over a decade, Franklin County High School has finally filed an agreement in court (PDF) to schedule its girls’ basketball team equally in primetime slots (Friday and Saturday games). Unfortunately, it took a Title IX lawsuit to convince the school that scheduling almost all of the boys’ games on weekends and only about half of the girls’ games on weekends was unfair. Nevermind that the United States Department of Education sent a letter to Indiana high schools expressing concern over their scheduling practice of reserving primetime slots for boys’ games – in 1997! Read more »

Happy National Coming Out Day, everyone! In honor of this day, in which we celebrate coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) or as an ally, I wanted to take a minute to highlight our resources on existing federal protections for LGBT students. Plus, I’ll give shout-outs to a couple of important laws that the National Women’s Law Center is working hard to get passed, along with our allies at the Human Rights Campaign, GLSEN, the ACLU, and others.

Before I do that, though, take just a second to review a few of the latest stats showing the extent to which bullying and harassment of LGBT students in schools is a serious problem.

• More than 8 out of 10 LGBT students had experienced verbal harassment (being called names or threatened) in the past year because of their sexual orientation.
• LGBT youth are twice as likely as their non-LGBT peers to say that they have been verbally harassed and called names at school.
• Youth who are out at school are more likely than students who are not out to have been called names involving anti-gay slurs, and to experience verbal harassment at school “frequently.”

In some cases, this conduct is more than just “bullying,” it’s sex-based harassment that’s prohibited by Title IX. Read more »

Today, Constitution Day, is a moment to take stock of the document that has served as the bedrock of our country for more than 220 years and the importance of constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court for women. This past Supreme Court term was a constitutional blockbuster, dealing with cases from preemption of immigration laws to the right to lie under the First Amendment. Of particular import to women was the decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

Most ACA supporters think of the decision in the health care cases as an unmitigated victory for uninsured Americans. However, on a 7-2 basis, the Court found that the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, which required states to expand Medicaid coverage to all adults under 133 percent of the poverty level as a condition of continuing to receive Medicaid funding, was unconstitutionally coercive, because a noncomplying state could lose all of its Medicaid funding. A majority of the Court remedied the violation by holding that the federal government could not condition all of a state’s Medicaid funding on the state’s expansion of eligibility, but only the additional Medicaid funding provided by the ACA. Many Supreme Court watchers posit there will be a wave of follow-up litigation to test the limits of other laws that are, like Medicaid, based on Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause to place conditions on federal funding to states. Read more »