Education Law

Discrimination hurts

Posted on April 02, 2008
And the hurt is going to be felt most acutely by the Michigan High School Athletic Association which was recently ordered to pay the legal fees associated with its decade plus-long battle against a group of parents who, among other things, asked that girls' sports be played in their correct seasons...

More Coverage of Sexual Harassment in College Sports

Posted on March 31, 2008
Athletic Business, a trade journal for the sports and recreation industry, examines sexual harassment in college sports in this month's issue. The article suggests that Title IX is increasingly becoming the vehicle not only for equal opportunity claims, but sexual harassment claims as well...

ESPN2 Airs Title IX Special This Weekend

Posted on March 28, 2008
"License to Thrive: Title IX at 35" is an independently-produced, one-hour special that "examines the unique history and impact of the Title IX legislation and celebrates the achievements, in numerous areas, of women and girls over the past 35 years. "This Sunday, March 30, it will air on ESPN2 at 1PM EST.

Georgia County Backs Off Single-Sex Education Plan, For Now

Posted on March 28, 2008
Last month we posted about Greene County, Georgia, and its plans to convert all of its public schools to a single-sex model.Recently, however, the County changed its mind, and will formally withdraw those plans at an upcoming meeting. According to the AP, the County faced "a groundswell of opposition from parents who were outraged that they weren't consulted ahead of time...

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NY Times Profiles School Bullies' Victim

Posted on March 27, 2008
In Monday's New York Times, columnist Dan Barry published this profile of Billy Wolfe, an Arkansas tenth-grader who is constantly bullied by his classmates. He's been knocked out in shop class, decked in Spanish class, prank-called, presented with a list of 20 potential assailants, encountered anti-Billy graffiti scrawled in his textbooks, and was once the subject of a Facebook page called ?Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe...

New book on women and science

Posted on March 27, 2008
Published at the end of last year, Who's Afraid of Marie Curie?: The Challenges Facing Women in Science and Technology, written by science writer Linley Erin Hall, addresses the many challenges women face in the field. Hall's book is aimed at a general audience and includes interviews with nearly 100 women who do or have worked in science, mathematics, technology, engineering, and medicine; studies about the "differences" in men's and women's abilities in the field, and, of course, the sociocultural pressures and barriers unique to women...

More on New Cheerleading Book

Posted on March 26, 2008
Following up on our post last week on the new book, "Cheer!" that follows three college teams vying for cheerleading's national championship, here's an interview by Salon.com with author Kate Torgovnick, where she discusses her views on cheerleading as a competitive sport and the gender stereotypes that are often attached to male and female cheerleaders...

Outside the Lines on Negative Recruiting

Posted on March 25, 2008
This week's episode of ESPN's Outside the Lines addresses negative recruiting in women's sports. In particular, the show covered how coaches exploit parents' homophobia to lure recruits away from teams coached by women who, especially when single, are vulnerable to the lesbian "stigma...

Movie Review: Kick Like a Girl

Posted on March 24, 2008
We received our copy of the new documentary, Kick Like a Girl, last week and popped in the DVD player right away. It was quite good. The star was definitely the daughter of filmmaker Jenny Mackenzie. She was quite precocious and very informed about issues of gender, as were many of the other girls on the team...

Softball field facelifts in Maryland

Posted on March 21, 2008
Though things may not be moving much on the softball fields in Charleston, farther north in Prince George's County, Maryland 17 of the county's 22 softball fields have undergone improvements in the past couple of years. The over $1 million spent on the fields is the result of the scrutiny the county received in 2006 over Title IX compliance related to facilities...

For my future source collection

Posted on March 20, 2008
Someday I'm going to write an article about competitive cheer. Meanwhile, I'll add this book to my future source collection: "College cheerleaders are extreme athletes who fly thirty feet in the air, build pyramids in which a single slip can send ten people crashing to the ground, and compete in National Championships that are won by hundredths of a point...

Increasingly, College Housing Offers Gender Neutral Option

Posted on March 18, 2008
The Baltimore Sun reported yesterday on the increasing number of gender-neutral housing options being offered by colleges and universities. The article focuses on pilot programs underway and in the works at Goucher College, UMBC, and University of Maryland College Park, while noting that around 25 colleges (UConn among them, we've previously noted) offer students a coed living experience...

Elsewhere in the blogosphere

Posted on March 17, 2008
David Cohen posts at Feminist Law Profs about Cal Poly's efforts to evade Title IX by sponsoring men-only engineering classes in Saudi Arabia.-and-At Womenstake.org, Neena Chaudhry of the National Women's Law Coalition reflects on the three-year anniversary of the Department of Education's 2005 Clarification, which allows schools with grossly inequitable particpation opportunities to satisfy Title IX using the results of a web-based survey of female students' interests and abilities.

Retention still a problem at FGCU

Posted on March 17, 2008
There has not been any news out of Florida about the pending lawsuits against Florida Gulf Coast University by former female coaches. We suspect news is forthcoming, however.There was an interesting development a few weeks ago, though, regarding the brand new golf coach...

University of Charleston Softball Field Draws Complaint

Posted on March 16, 2008
An alumna and former softball player at the University of Charleston (West Virginia) has complained to OCR about the University's lack of progress toward improved playing conditions for the softball team.In 2002, the University converted its softball field into a football field and moved softball to a city-owned park...

Wrestling at Washington community college saved--for now

Posted on March 15, 2008
Last month the board of trustees at Yakima Valley Community College delayed a vote on the potential elimination of the school's wrestling team. At that time, wrestling coach Mike Schmitt asked the board to consider adding a women's wrestling team to help move the college toward proportionality (currently the athletic opportunities for female student-athletes do not come near their 64% representation in the undergraduate population and YVCC apparently has a history with compliance that they are still trying to resolve)...

New documentary on mixed gender competition

Posted on March 14, 2008
A Utah woman who began coaching her daughter's soccer team several year ago has made a movie about her experiences. Kick Like a Girl was done by Jenny Mackenzie who, when her young daughter's team went unbeaten in her first season as coach, sought out teams that would provide a greater challenge: boys' teams...

Some Thoughts on Competitive Cheer

Posted on March 13, 2008
As we have written about in the past, the sport of competitive cheerleading exists at both the college and high school level. To be clear, "competitive cheer" is not the same as sideline cheer, which is, for Title IX purposes, a form of publicity and promotion...

Hogshead-Makar to help CU

Posted on March 11, 2008
As part of its multimillion dollar sexual harassment settlement last fall the University of Colorado agreed to hire a Title IX adviser and they filled that position recently with Title IX expert, author, law professor, and Olympic gold medalist Nancy Hogshead-Makar...

Milutinovich is Woman of the Year

Posted on March 10, 2008
Former Fresno State associate athletic director Diane Milutinovich will be honored today by the California State Senate as Woman of the Year for the 16th district, the Fresno Bee reported. State Senator Dean Florez nominated Milutinovich for "her many contributions to women's athletics and her unwavering fight for gender equity in higher education...

Professor Brake on Title IX as "Pragmatic Feminism"

Posted on March 09, 2008
When not starring in award-winning ESPN reports, Professor Deborah Brake from Pitt writes law review articles about Title IX. Her most recent is called Title IX: A Pragmatic Feminism. It is available on SSRN. I'll let the abstract speak for itself:This paper uses Title IX as a vehicle for exploring the potential benefits of pragmatism for feminist legal theory...

Former UNR Coach's Whistleblower Complaint Dismissed

Posted on March 08, 2008
The Nevada state personnel board conducted a hearing last month to determine whether University of Nevada-Reno violated whistleblower protection laws when it fired the women's soccer coach Terri Patraw last summer. On Thursday, the hearing officer dismissed Patraw's suit, finding insufficient evidence that she was fired for reporting NCAA violations that are currently under investigation by the NCAA...

Perhaps this is the beginning of a trend?

Posted on March 08, 2008
Last week we posted about a female baseball player in Indiana winning the right to try out for baseball even though her high school has a softball team. Now, via the awesome Women's Sports Blog, we learn of a similar development in Nebraska, where the interscholastic athletic association recently voted to change its past practice of treating baseball and softball as equivalent sports...

Long Beach gymnasts win back their space

Posted on March 07, 2008
A federal judge has ruled that the folks at Wilson High School who moved the the gymnastics team and their equipment out of a dedicated facility at the high school to make room for aerobics equipment (for PE classes) and weights (to be used primarily by boys' sports teams--though why only boys are using weights is questionable but alas a post for another time) violated Title IX...

Harvard Tests Out Women-Only Gym Hours

Posted on March 07, 2008
In response to a request from several Muslim women students, Harvard is testing out having "women-only" hours at one of its campus gyms, the AP reports. The women making the request, with support from the campus women's center, sought the women-only hours (six hours a week, at the least used gym on campus) due to Islamic dress codes that encourage a level of modesty in dress while around men; the dress code would make it difficult or impossible to exercise at the gym in a co-ed environment...

Phys Ed Shown to Improve Academic Success

Posted on March 06, 2008
An article in USA Today reports on a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which shows that an increase in physical education classes in grade school can boost academic success, particularly for girls. This is interesting news given the trend in public schools to cut back on gym class to make the academic curriculum more rigorous for students...

Student Note Criticizes EADA

Posted on March 05, 2008
In 1994, Congress passed the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, which requires colleges and universities subject to Title IX to report information about the number of athletic opportunities it provides to both sexes as well as certain information about athletic department expenditures (and revenues) for men's and women's programs...

Conference of interest

Posted on March 04, 2008
The Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University will be holding a conference on sport and social justice in June. The Power of Sports Summit is open to scholars, activists, and those working in sport and for social justice (everyone from coaches to program coordinators/administrators) and will be held at NEU June 14 and 15...

Documentary on 6-on-6 b-ball

Posted on March 03, 2008
Attention readers in Iowa: Iowa Public Television is airing what looks to be a very interesting documentary on girls' six-on-six basketball in the state. The first airing of More Than a Game was last night but it will be rebroadcast at 8:15 p.m. March 7 and on March 16 time TBA...

New York Times on Single-Sex Education

Posted on March 02, 2008
The New York Times Magazine's cover story today is all about single-sex education. The article highlights the sharp growth in single-sex classrooms in public schools (one estimate in the article is that there were approximately 12 public schools offering single-sex programs in 2002, compared with approximately 360 today), citing a number of factors: the Department of Education's 2006 decision to promulgate regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms without running afoul of Title IX; scientific research showing that males and females have different patterns of brain development, which some argue implicates a different learning style based on sex; the need for a more supportive environment for girls to become stronger leaders; and the sense that public schools are not doing enough to address the problem of boys failing out of school, and that perhaps single-sex education is worth a shot to see if boys' achievement improves...

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