Jeb Bush’s full-throated acceptance of Common Core, the unpopular national education standards, is already a major drawback for his campaign. But the broader trend toward centralized control of education has also been a factor in pressuring colleges to adopt problematic policies on campus sexual assault.
George Will, writing about Common Core as one of Bush’s major hang-ups, specifically noted Title IX — the gender equality section of the 1972 Education Amendments — and how it has been used by the federal government to take control over aspects of education.
Will points to 31 specific words in the Title IX clause, which state that no person in the U.S. “shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
To Will, those words have “stripped colleges and universities of a crucial component of self-government.”
“Using ludicrous statistics based on flimsy social science to manufacture hysteria about a ‘rape epidemic’ on campuses, the federal government is mandating the overthrow of due process in adjudicating accusations of sexual assault,” Will wrote. “Title IX’s 31 words beget hundreds of pages of minute stipulations and mandates.”
To understand how those 31 words could be a harbinger for the Common Core standards Bush supports, one must look at the history of Title IX.
Adopted as part of the 1972 Education Amendments, Title IX was mainly used to give female college students more opportunities in sports, although the wording of the clause opened the door for an expanded use. David Wilezol has a great history of Title IX over at Minding the Campus.
In 1997, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued new guidance for applying Title IX, which included sexual harassment. This guidance included expanded liability for schools if they knew or should have known about sexual harassment between students and did not take “immediate and appropriate corrective action.”
In 2001, following major Supreme Court cases defining how schools could be held liable under Title IX, OCR revised its 1997 guidance to further broaden liability. Now, schools could be held liable even if no one at the school with the authority to actually ameliorate the situation was notified.
Basically, after the 1997 guidance, schools could not be held liable for facilitating a hostile environment if someone other than those involved with Title IX or sexual harassment knew about the issue. The point being that a school couldn’t be liable for not taking action just because an employee of the school may have known about sexual harassment but didn’t report it to the Title IX coordinator.
After the 2001 guidance, the school would be held liable, even though it had no chance to do anything about the sexual harassment because the people who dealt with harassment didn’t know what was going on.
Jump ahead to 2011’s “ Dear Colleague” letter, and suddenly, a provision that was originally used to ensure women had access to sports now mandated that universities create their own legal system for adjudicating the felony of sexual assault.
This could lead to problems for Bush because any time the issue of federal control of education is in the news, it will remind primary voters of his support for Common Core. As Will noted, Bush doesn’t seem to believe that Common Core standards will result in a national school board. Bush said that “standards are different than curriculum” and that he “would be concerned if we had a national curriculum influenced by the federal government.”
The thing is, Common Core standards have already influenced curriculum, and given the federal government’s ability to take limited guidance and expand it greatly beyond the original scope (see: Title IX), it’s hard to believe Common Core won’t effectively lead to a national school board.
That kind of government control will not play well for Bush among limited-government conservatives.
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