U.S. Dept. of Education investigating California over gender identity privacy law
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The U.S. Department of Education is going after California over gender identity policies in schools.
The agency announced an investigation into California's Department of Education (CDE) Thursday, alleging the state violated the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act, or FERPA, the federal law that protects students' education records and gives parents the right to access and control them.
California's Assembly Bill 1955, which went into effect at the beginning of the year, prevents schools, districts, and similar educational offices from implementing or enforcing policies or rules that require employees to share information about a student's sexual orientation or gender identity and expression with any person, including parents, without the student's consent, with few exceptions.
The federal government said numerous educational districts and agencies across California are possibly violating FERPA "to socially transition children at school while hiding minors' 'gender identity' from parents."
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon says these actions violate FERPA because parents are reportedly not being informed about students' gender identities, which may be discussed during the school day.
Federal officials said they're concerned California's Department of Education is playing a role, either directly or indirectly, in these alleged violations because of the number of local education agencies allegedly violating FERPA.
What they're saying
"Teachers and school counselors should not be in the business of advising minors entrusted to their care on consequential decisions about their sexual identity and mental health. That responsibility and privilege lies with a parent or trusted loved one," McMahon said in a statement. "It is not only immoral but also potentially in contradiction with federal law for California schools to hide crucial information about a student's well-being from parents and guardians."
The other side
KTVU reached out to CDE officials about the investigation. While a response has yet to be received, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond has previously affirmed continued protections for students based on gender, gender expression, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
"In California, 'all' still means all. While the Trump Education Department announced that they will no longer protect all students from discrimination, California law is unaffected by recent changes to federal policy and continues to provide safeguards against discrimination and harassment based on gender, gender expression, gender identity, and sexual orientation," Thurmond said in response to a "Dear Colleague" letter, an open letter sent from a federal official to make statements on bills.
The letter was sent on Jan. 31 by the U.S. Department of Education. Thurmond said the federal government was taking a backward step on protections guaranteed by Title IX, a federal civil rights law that protects against discrimination based on sex.
"While federal guidance devolves, our commitment to safeguarding the rights of all students persists," Thurmond said.
The Source
U.S. Department of Education statement, Assembly Bill 1955, CA Superintendent Tony Thurmond's response to "Dear Colleague" letter
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
Major student loan changes just came one step closer to becoming law
Major student loan changes just came one step closer to becoming law A 71-page bill released by Senate Republicans would cut down on repayment plans and deem certain college programs ineligible for federal financial aid. Show Caption Hide Caption Senators grill Education Secretary Linda McMahon over proposed cuts Education Secretary Linda McMahon testified to Congress over proposed budget cuts. WASHINGTON – Congress is closer than it's been in a long time to massively reforming college financial aid. On June 10, GOP lawmakers in the U.S. Senate proposed their version of the higher education section of President Trump's tax and spending megabill. The 71-page portion of the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" would set new caps on student loan borrowing while drastically cutting the number of repayment plans. Read more: Republicans propose massive overhaul of student loans, Pell Grants The Senate's version of the legislation is less aggressive than the bill that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced in late April. While it will likely be further watered down due to congressional budget rules, the scope of the legislation indicates big changes will be enacted soon to how Americans pay for college. Student loan caps proposed When President Donald Trump asked Republicans to find billions of dollars in federal spending cuts, GOP lawmakers in the House drew up measures to eliminate or dramatically curb many student loan programs. In April, they proposed cutting subsidized loans altogether for undergraduates. When students take out a federal direct subsidized loan, the government pays the interest while they're in school (and for a short grace period after the students complete their studies). That idea didn't survive in the Senate version of the bill, which was expected to be slightly more moderate than the House proposal. Read more: Could Trump fail on tax bill? Why going 'big' doesn't always work out as planned Other elements of the House version remain, however. Like the House bill, the Senate measure proposes cutting the number of student loan repayment plans to just two. That change would kill President Joe Biden's Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, program, which former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona repeatedly called the "most affordable repayment plan ever." SAVE has been stalled in court for months, placing roughly 8 million people in forbearance. The Senate bill would also dramatically curb lending for graduate students and parents (though at lower caps than House Republicans wanted). Ben Cecil, a senior education policy advisor at Third Way, a center-left think tank, said he was pleased to see the bill appeared to make compromises. "These loan limits are much more reasonable," he said. Melanie Storey, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said she was "relieved" some of the "most harmful" provisions of the House bill had been nixed. "Still, there are several concerning aspects of this bill that would ultimately make college less affordable for students," she said, including changes that "may drive borrowers to riskier private loans, which are not available to all borrowers." Less concern over Pell Grants One of college access groups' biggest criticisms of the initial bill was a significant change to Pell Grants, federal subsidies that help lower-income students pay for college. House Republicans wanted to increase the number of credits students would need to take each semester to be eligible for Pell Grants. The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, estimated that two out of three Pell recipients could've lost their grants or received smaller ones if that requirement were enacted. The Senate version takes a softer approach, codifying a provision to more fully exclude higher-income students qualify for Pell funds. At the same time, the bill expands Pell Grants in ways that could waste money, according to critics such as Sameer Gadkaree, president of The Institute for College Access & Success, a college affordability group. 'While the Senate nixed most of the House's proposed cuts to the Pell Grant program and averts a looming funding shortfall, it regrettably threatens the program's long-term stability by extending Pell eligibility to unaccredited programs that are unlikely to pay off for students," Gadkaree said in a statement. New accountability rules One of the biggest distinctions between the House and Senate versions of the bill is that they lay out two entirely different sets of new accountability rules for colleges. The House proposal would fine colleges for leaving students on the hook for unpaid student loan debt. The Senate's framework suggests taking federal financial aid away from college programs if they can't prove that students who graduate are earning more than they would have without a degree. Mike Itzkowitz, who served in the Education Department under President Barack Obama, said that concept has bipartisan support. "I don't know anyone who would be willing to fork over their time to take on loans to earn less than a high school graduate," he said. But it's possible that particular provision won't survive special Senate rules. To avoid needing the support of Democrats, Republicans are trying to pass Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" using the budget process. That strategy comes with challenges. However, the bill must only make changes that spend money or save money. Significant reforms to college oversight might go too far, said Jon Fansmith, the senior vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, the main association for colleges and universities. "This process isn't designed to do complicated policymaking," he said. "I really do worry about rushing something through without understanding what we're doing." Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@ Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @
New York Times
4 hours ago
- New York Times
Appeal alleges House v. NCAA settlement ‘deliberately ignored' Title IX in back pay plans
Eight female athletes filed an appeal of the House v. NCAA settlement Wednesday in a California federal court, arguing that the landmark agreement violates Title IX. The appeal only addresses the back damages portion of the settlement, not the portion that establishes the system of direct revenue sharing with athletes. Advertisement The watershed settlement, approved late Friday night by federal judge Claudia Wilken, has been years in the making. Last October Wilken granted the settlement preliminary approval, then waded through hundreds of objections filed over the ensuing eight months. Many of those objections were related to Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education and requires schools to offer equitable opportunities to women, including in sports. Wilken was unmoved by those objections, repeatedly saying the antitrust case had nothing to do with Title IX. But she did leave the door open for future lawsuits based on Title IX targeting how future payments from schools to athletes will be made. The appeal will not impact revenue sharing — slated to start July 1 for all schools that have opted in — but will pause the back-pay damages portion of the settlement. John Clune, the attorney who represents the eight women filing the appeal, said he also filed an objection during the settlement adjudication process but that nothing came of it. 'We felt like we were standing on the table waving our arms that somebody had to address this issue, but none of the parties involved wanted to address it, and the courts didn't want to address it,' Clune told The Athletic, saying Title IX was 'deliberately ignored.' 'This was the only option.' The NCAA and lawyers for the plaintiffs in House v. NCAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The eight women represented in the lawsuit are Kacie Breeding Vanderbilt; Lexi Drumm, Emma Appleman, Emmie Wannemacher, Riley Hass, Savannah Baron and Elizabeth Arnold from the College of Charleston; and Kate Johnson from the University of Virginia. The appeal argues that the $2.8 billion in damages set to be distributed to former athletes who couldn't earn NIL (name, image and likeness) money before 2021 violates Title IX because female athletes will be paid less than football and men's basketball players. Advertisement Clune said the settlement suggests 'schools would have paid male athletes over 90 percent of their revenue over the past six years as though Title IX didn't apply. If Nike wants to do that, that is their choice. If the school, or a conference acting on the school's behalf tries to do that, they are violating the law.' 'They can either pay the athletes proportionately, or they can return all of their federal funds,' he said. 'But they can't do both.' Clune said his clients 'support a settlement of the case, just not an inaccurate one that violates federal law. The calculation of damages is based on an error to the tune of $1.1 billion. Paying out the money as proposed would be a massive error … Congress has expressly rejected efforts to prioritize benefits to football and basketball from Title IX's requirements.' Clune said the Title IX implications for future payouts are still to be determined. In the meantime, the appeal process is a 'slow burn,' with a briefing schedule and oral arguments likely to be set in the next nine to 12 months. 'It wouldn't surprise me if we see lawsuits against schools for those (rev share) payouts at some point,' he said.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Federal Prosecutors Are Starting To Sound Like Campus Activists About Sex and Consent
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is now embracing ideas about coercion and consent that rose to prominence on college campuses during the Barack Obama administration. That's the implication of the OneTaste case, in which a jury has returned a guilty verdict against Rachel Cherwitz and Nicole Daedone, who stood accused of a conspiracy to commit forced labor during their time with the sexual and spiritual self-help organization. I have written many words about this case already, and I'm going to try to refrain from rehashing all of the details in today's newsletter. (If you're new to the case and want to dive deep, here you go. If you want a couple of overviews of how the trial played out, see here and here.) What I want to focus on right now is the larger implications of this case. They're not pretty. If these ideas about coercion and consent didn't start on the college campuses of the 2010s, that's at least when they became fully institutionalized —adopted as not just the framework favored by activist students and women's studies professors but by college administrators and the Title IX offices they were beholden to. There was affirmative consent, sure, but also a broader suspicion of consent as a worthwhile standard, or at least a willingness to dismiss it for more arcane ideas about sexual permissibility. Suddenly it wasn't enough to say no and it wasn't even enough to say yes—one had to consider a complex set of power dynamics, alcohol consumption levels, subtle nonverbal cues, and so on, to determine if consent counted. It stopped just short of taking astrological signs into account. We went from a reasonable corrective (acknowledging that sexual assault needn't necessarily involve force or violence) to women getting support for claims of sexual coercion and violation even when they seemed to willingly go along with sexual activity at the time but later said that they weren't enthusiastic enough about it and a partner should have known that and stopped. Basically, it was only consensual if a woman felt deep down in her heart, during and after, that everything had been OK. We saw this idea migrate from campus newspapers and Title IX offices to the broader world during the #MeToo movement. It's perhaps best exemplified by a story about the actor Aziz Ansari. A young woman went to dinner with him, then back to his house, and later excoriated him in Babe magazine for not reading her cues about not wanting to fool around and allegedly pressuring her to do so. The piece called it sexual misconduct and a violation. But when the woman explicitly told Ansari no, he stopped, per her account of things. And when she wanted to go, she left. The Babe article provoked a huge debate about whether this sort of thing—which in another era we might have just called a bad date or caddish behavior—was a form of sexual assault and where responsibility lies here. Are sexual partners supposed to be mind readers? Do women have any responsibility for explicitly making their wishes known? Obviously, not all or even most campus sexual misconduct or #MeToo stories were like the Aziz Ansari story. But there were enough that it was clearly not an isolated idea or belief system. It was a new paradigm—and one sold, perversely, as empowering to women. That was a lie. Broadening the parameters of nonconsensual sex like this does women a disservice, portraying us as somehow having less agency and less moral culpability than male peers (which could have consequences far beyond the bedroom) while also telling women that it's normal—desirable even—to just shut up and go along with unwanted or uncomfortable activity in the moment and then object afterward. Rather than encourage women to be bold and unflinching in expressing what they want and don't want, it encourages putting out with a promise that later they can get their vengeance in public opinion or in court. We're uncomfortable as a culture with "assigning women complete sexual responsibility, even though we want them to have complete sexual liberty," said Kat Rosenfield on a recent episode of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Rosenfield and her co-host were talking about the murky way we sometimes talk about women's actions when allegations of sexual misconduct are concerned. People can do a lot of "squirming around to try and make a choice that was made [into] not actually a choice," said Rosenfield. And once you're in that mode, you end up with some real mental shenanigans around consent. The OneTaste trial shows that these ideas have now crossed over from college values or cultural vibes to legal standards adopted by federal prosecutors with the power to help put people in prison. In the OneTaste trial, prosecutors elicited testimony after testimony from "victims" who admit they consented to various sexual activities, from orgasmic meditation (a core activity in OneTaste courses and communes) to random hook-ups to relationships with OneTaste community members, investors, and students. They not only did not say no, they affirmatively agreed to these encounters or even initiated them. The repercussions they now claimed to have feared if they didn't do these things—many of which were core parts of the intentional communities and/or classes they chose to partake in, applied for, paid for—were things like social disapproval or missing out on opportunities to move up in the OneTaste ranks. Some were not even employees when the activities in question took place, and even among those who were, much of the action they talked about took place in contexts outside their employment. Prosecutors argued that Daedone's ideas (like daily orgasmic meditation being good for you, orgasm as a way to clear out bad energy, and the importance of being open to sexual encounters that might be out of your comfort zone) and Cherwitz's encouragement or shunning amounted to a form of coercion that rendered these women's seeming consent invalid. We're supposed to ignore the fact that these women admittedly never told Daedone or Cherwitz, let alone their sexual partners, that they were uncomfortable or didn't want to do these things. We're supposed to ignore the fact that contemporaneous accounts of these acts—emails, texts, journal entries, social media posts—often showed sunny feelings about what was going on. And we're supposed to ignore the fact that these women didn't report any crimes or labor violations at the time and are only testifying after being approached by FBI agents a decade or two later. The defendants are being held accountable for how these women feel—or at least told FBI agents who were making promises and extolling their victimhood that they feel—about 10- and 15-year-old sexual activity that everyone seems to have been perfectly fine with at the time. We're looking at campus kangaroo courts come to a federal courthouse, with U.S. attorneys fully embracing ideas about consent that were weird and radical just a decade or two ago. I'm sure this will be cheered by some people. I find the prospect offensive and dangerous. It's a total affront to due process, giving people little notice about how to avoid liability (since consent in the moment clearly doesn't matter). And unlike on college campuses, the arbiters of these disputes now have the power to help put people in prison for long stretches. It creates a dangerous situation not only for people who engaged in sex acts with someone claiming, decades later, that their consent was invalid but also for anyone who might be said to have "conspired" to have encouraged these sexual encounters or to have "participated in a venture" that received any benefit from them. It opens the gate to forced labor or sex trafficking prosecutions based on sexual regret. It's also one more step in the total infantilization of women, negating the gains in sexual and social autonomy that we've won. This situation where we expect all the rights of adulthood but none of the responsibility can't last. We're going to start seeing—we are seeing—rights chipped away at, too. At a time when many are keen to use sexual "harms" to justify everything from online censorship to limiting LGBTQ expression, curtailing reproductive rights, and encouraging women to give up on college and just have babies, no feminist, friend of women, or woman who cares about her own bodily autonomy and ability to consent should be cheering this safe space–ification of the DOJ. • The slippery slope of age-verification laws for adult content is on full display in France, where the "government is considering designating X as a porn platform — a move that will likely have the platform implementing strict age verification requirements," per Politico. It's not hard to imagine the same thing happening in the U.S., rendering laws aimed at carding people who visit porn websites as a backdoor to either require age verification for social media, too, or make social media websites ban sexually oriented content and accounts of any kind. • President Donald Trump is expected to once again extend the deadline for TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the company or be banned. "Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that 'emergency' keeps getting 75-day extensions," Techdirt Editor Mike Masnick writes. That "should tell you everything about how 'urgent' this national security threat actually was." • "It would help immensely if the critiques of porn, did not confuse 'sex' with 'porn.' The push to be 'sexy' and sexism are not rooted in one form of media," comments Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, in response to a New Yorker review of the new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. "But linking both evangelicals and anti-SW feminists is the idea that sexist evil can be traced to one tantalizing source. To do that, in these sexual monotheories, porn has to be a monolith. That it presents women one way (submissive) and with one look (skinny, with big tits). Antiporn texts depend on a charicature [sic] of porn, a flattening of sexual speech, in order to establish a clear directional effect on culture." As to the idea that focusing on consent in porn is somehow insufficient, Stabile posts: says: "We focus on 'consent'…because it's how we restrain the urge to police other people's fantasies and sexualities. Because saying 'your articulation of sexuality' is damaging to ME, is the same impulse that underlies anti-LGBTQ censorship." The post Federal Prosecutors Are Starting To Sound Like Campus Activists About Sex and Consent appeared first on
