High Court Leaves Biden’s Title IX Rule Blocked in 26 States
The Biden administration has lost another legal battle over the implementation of its new Title IX rule.
In an unsigned opinion in August, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively allowed 26 states—plus some schools in others—to continue blocking the rule in its entirety. The administration had sought to separate the three challenged provisions that newly define sex discrimination to cover sexual orientation and gender identity from the rule’s unchallenged provisions.
“On this limited record and in its emergency applications, the government has not provided this court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts’ interim conclusions that the three provisions found likely to be unlawful are intertwined with and affect other provisions of the rule,” the court said.
All nine members agreed that the states and other challengers of the regulation were at least procedurally entitled to preliminary injunctions blocking the three key provisions, which include a definition of sex discrimination that includes gender identity.
However, four members of the court dissented over blocking the entire rule.
“By blocking the government from enforcing scores of regulations that [states and others] never challenged and that bear no apparent relationship to [challengers’] alleged injuries, the lower courts went beyond their authority to remedy the discrete harms alleged here,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.
The court’s Aug. 16 action still leaves a confusing and disjointed map where the regulation is in effect.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar in July asked the high court to allow most of the rule to take effect on Aug. 1, even as the administration went along with pausing some challenged provisions that touch on gender-identity discrimination.
The regulation clarifies for the first time that Title IX protects students based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also expands protections for pregnant and postpartum students, offers stronger language about retaliation, and sets out new grievance and due process procedures.
“Most of the rule does not address gender identity,” Prelogar said, citing the other provisions.
Challengers of the new regulation argued that the new definition pervades the entire new regulation and provisions could not be easily separated into what could take effect and what could not.
NEA Reaches Agreement With Staff Union, Ending Strike That Hampered Political Efforts
The nation’s largest teachers’ union and the union that represents its staff ratified a contract agreement in August after the National Education Association locked out staff members without pay for more than a month, an extraordinary move that complicated its run-up to the 2024 election cycle.
Staff will return to the office Sept. 3. Details of the agreement between the NEA and the National Education Association Staff Organization have yet to be released. Bargaining disputes hinged on such issues as health benefits, telework, and wages.
NEA management locked nearly 300 staff members out of its Washington headquarters on July 7, after staff members walked out of the union’s Philadelphia convention over the July 4th weekend—effectively ending the group’s largest event of the year three days early and disrupting the union’s political activities ramping up for this year’s campaign season.
President Joe Biden, originally scheduled to give a speech to delegates at the NEA convention, canceled in solidarity with the staff union—and to avoid crossing the picket line.
Now that the strike has been settled, “it’s going to help Kamala Harris that she is soon able to better interface with the NEA again, without crossing picket lines,” said Bradley Marianno, an associate professor at the University of Nevada who studies teachers’ union engagement in politics.
The GOP has made efforts to court more labor union support in the 2024 elections, but teachers’ unions historically have proved critical for Democrat funding and turnout.
According to a federal campaign-finance tracker, teachers’ unions, including the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, have upped political contributions in the past 20 years, with 94 percent of contributions going to Democrats.
While disputes at NEA headquarters have had little effect on grassroots organizing outside the nation’s capital, they did spur protest from some local affiliates, such as in Delaware and Washington state.
(The Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents eligible staff of Education Week, previously issued a statement of support for the NEA staff union. Education Week is an independent, nonpartisan media organization whose newsroom managers retain editorial control over the content of articles.)
A Majority of Americans Oppose Book Restrictions, Have Confidence in Schools’ Choices
Based on the haste with which conservative lawmakers pursued book bans in schools in the past couple years, you’d think they might have done so to appease their constituents. Turns out, many are unlikely to be on the same page as members of the public.
A new national poll shows that 65 percent of Americans oppose efforts to restrict books in public schools, and 62 percent oppose state laws on unacceptable content.
What’s more, the majority of respondents, 78 percent, said they are very or somewhat confident that their local public schools select appropriate books for students.
The results show that the public “sees a bigger risk in depriving students of access to books with educational value than in giving them access to books that are inappropriate,” says the Knight Foundation report on the findings, released in August. “Fears about a chilling effect in book selection are substantial. Yet there are complexities in these views.”
Sixty-five percent of respondents said they oppose or lean toward opposing restrictions. Those most likely to support restrictions identified themselves as conservatives, white evangelical Protestants, and private school parents. Those least likely to support restrictions identified as liberals and LGBTQ+ adults.
Most respondents, 61 percent, said concerns about age-appropriateness are a legitimate reason to consider book restrictions. Far fewer, however, thought contradictions of parents’ moral values, religious beliefs, or political beliefs were legitimate concerns.
Respondents were most likely to support restrictions for books that portray racism, sexual intercourse, and sexual orientation for children at the elementary level and far more likely to support access to such books for students in older grades.
Asked who they trusted to determine which books are age-appropriate for students, respondents were most likely to say librarians, teachers, and principals. They were least likely to say they trusted their state government, adults in their community who are not parents, and their local school boards.
Activism to stem the book bans or push for them was minimal. Just 2 percent of respondents said they’d tried to help maintain student access to contested books, and 1 percent said they’d sought to restrict access.
New Research Lab Aims to Help School Boards
A divisive political climate for school boards has led to packed meetings, bursts of misinformation about complicated decisions, and even threats of violence against the elected officials who have traditionally occupied a lower-profile corner of local politics.
As school board members search for strategies to counter those dynamics and win public trust, they often come up empty-handed, said Jonathan E. Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
To help provide solutions and paint a clearer picture of how the most of those bodies operate, Collins launched a new research lab. The School Board and Youth Engagement Lab, or S-BYE, plans to assemble a national data set on factors such as how boards are elected and how they interact with the public. It also will partner with local boards to pilot new communications tools.
Many boards are looking for ways to build democratic processes and encourage parents and members of the public to weigh in on more routine issues, like strategic plans and how schools spend grant funds, Collins said.
The new lab plans to test whether those strategies are effective. And researchers plan to work with an advisory panel of school board members to hone an online platform that allows boards to seek written and verbal public comment, divide virtual meeting attendees into video breakout groups to discuss suggestions, and conduct polls. A pilot version of the platform includes an AI feature that summarizes input and allows boards to communicate with participants about how their input was used in resulting decisions, Collins said.
“If we make participation more accessible, and we also make the focal point of participation something to where their perceived stake in the outcome is very clear, then we should see some of the participation imbalances [between very vocal community members and those who are less likely to participate in meetings] start to flatten,” he said.
Biden Administration Hikes Pay for Head Start Workers
Should an anti-poverty program pay employees wages that more or less keep them out of poverty? The Biden administration thinks so. It’s hiking pay for Head Start educators as part of an effort to retain current employees and attract new ones.
New rules, published this month, will require large operators to put their employees on a path to earn what their counterparts in local school districts make by 2031. Large operators also will have to provide health care. Operators serving fewer than 200 families are exempt but must show they are making progress in raising pay.
“We can’t expect to find and hire quality teachers who can make this a career if they’re not going to get a decent wage,” said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Many operators have been forced to cut the number of children and families they serve for lack of staff. A quarter of Head Start teachers left in 2022, some lured away by higher wages in the retail and food-service sector. Some operators have shut down centers.
Head Start teachers, a majority of whom have bachelor’s degrees, earn on average less than $40,000 a year. Workers in support roles—as assistant teachers or classroom aides—make less.
Head Start, created in the 1960s as part of the War on Poverty, serves the nation’s neediest families, offering preschool for children and support for their parents and caregivers.
U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the House education committee, said the administration was overfunding the program. “The effort smells like an attempt to form Head Start educators into a unionized political bloc. Political patronage should never take precedent over children’s lives,” she said.
The program has generally enjoyed bipartisan support, and this year Congress hiked its funding to provide Head Start employees with a cost-of-living increase.
The requirements, while costly, do not come with additional funding, which has led to fears that operators might have to more cut slots.
