CEC Condemns Advancement of GOP Bills Undermining Title IX’s Protections, Data Collection

CEC Chair Rep. Mark Takano: “These bills do nothing to make students’ lives better, protect parents’ rights, or improve public education”

Washington, DC — After the Republican-controlled House Education and Workforce Committee advanced two bills on Tuesday—H.R. 8781 and H.R. 4986—out of committee, Rep. Mark Takano, Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, released the following statement:

“Just days before the House is set to leave on a five-week recess, Republicans aren’t using this body’s time to make life more affordable for Americans—instead, they’re working to undermine Title IX,” said Rep. Mark Takano, Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus and Senior Member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “They want to empower bullies and make it more difficult to hold schools accountable when LGBTQ+ students are discriminated against. In addition, the party that constantly decries federal overreach is handing down new paperwork mandates to parents and local school districts because they want to make it harder to collect data on the mental health of students and the experiences of LGBTQ+ students. These bills do nothing to make students’ lives better, protect parents’ rights, or improve public education—they simply undermine students’ rights and create burdensome bureaucratic requirements. I’m going to keep working alongside my colleagues in the Equality Caucus to prevent them from becoming law.”


BACKGROUND
H.R. 8781, the so-called “Title IX Clarification Act,” would define sex under Title IX to refer “to an individual’s biologically determined sex, as either male or female.” It would also add in definitions of female and male that define each term based on an individual’s reproductive system. The bill sponsor’s press release announcing the introduction of the bill makes clear his goal is to prevent “future administrations from reinterpreting the law to include gender identity or sexual orientation without congressional approval.” This bill would undermine Title IX’s protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and would also undermine Title IX’s protections for all students, including from sexual harassment and discrimination based on sex stereotypes.

H.R. 4986, the so-called “Parents Opt-in Protection Act,” would, among other provisions, prohibit local education agencies from administering surveys relating to certain issues unless the student’s parent provides written consent beforehand for each survey. Current law ALREADY requires schools to let parents opt-out of these surveys, but the bill sponsor has said they want to make this change to undermine LGBTQ+ data collection & mental health screenings. The CDC estimates that using an opt-in as opposed to an opt-out model would reduce student response rates by about 50 percent unless schools take a variety of additional actions. Because parents already have the option to opt their child out of surveys, this bill will increase burdens on parents and schools without making any significant change in parents’ rights.