On March 3, 2004, the U.S. Department of Education published recommended changes to Title IX to provide more flexibility for educators to establish single-sex classes and schools at the elementary and secondary levels. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate is not equal in education, this administration will implement new policies allowing gender discrimination in public schools. The new Title IX regulations would throw out the basic legal standards prohibiting sex discrimination in education and authorize the most generaland even admittedly unprovenassertions as adequate justification for sex-segregated schools and classes. With these changes, schools could create and parents could demand separate programs to which only boys or only girls may apply, based on an untested belief that the segregation would bring some sort of educational benefit.
More specifically, AAUW is concerned because the proposed regulations
1) Divert attention from real education problems: lack of funding, shortage of teachers, overcrowded classrooms, inadequate facilities, and poor technology in the classroom.
This administration should be implementing sound, proven strategies to solve those problems. The need for choicebe it single-sex education or school vouchershas become a red herring for the fact that the No Child Left Behind Act has resulted in a broken promise. The president recently proposed funding for the act at $9.4 billion below authorized levels, making the act nothing short of an unfunded mandate. Sufficient funding is fundamental to educational improvement. Meaningful school reformfor girls and boysbegins with fulfilling our existing promises to children and their parents.
2) Lack accountability requirements consistent with the No Child Left Behind Act.
Although the act places a premium on implementing strategies that are based in sound science, the proposed regulations break from this standard. Schools are not required to demonstrate that a significant education problem needs to be fixed or that single-sex classes or schools will fix such a problem. Schools will have the authority to tinker with gender equity without providing grounds that such actions are necessary. Furthermore, while the regulations suggest that schools evaluate single-sex practices periodically, school internal evaluations need not be submitted to the Office of Civil Rights or be scientifically valid or reliable.
3) Prove unnecessary.
Title IX already allows flexibility to establish single-sex schools and classrooms in certain commonsense situations, as long as comparable education opportunities are created for the excluded sex. In fact, 24 single-sex public schools exist in the United States. Under current law, single-sex classes and schools can be created (1) to remedy past discrimination to allow girls and women to overcome historical barriers to equal education and (2) for competitive athletics, human sexuality classes, and choirs. Thus, there is no need to gut one of this country's most successful civil rights laws.
4) Undermine the standard that separate is inherently unequal.
Although the regulations require substantially equal opportunities for both sexes, they do not require equal opportunities class by class or even subject by subject. Schools are only required to offer substantially equal coeducational classes for the excluded sex. Under this test, a single-sex school or classroom could be established for boys, but as long as the existing co-educational school was substantially equal to the boys school, no single-sex school or classroom need be established for girls. By making the case that single-sex classes or schools are better in certain situations, schools would create unequal learning environments that benefit just one sex.
