The new Title IX rule, which goes into effect Aug. 1, requires districts to promptly investigate complaints, even if they occur off school grounds, and to extend those protections to LGBTQ students. Districts must also train school employees about their obligations to address sex discrimination.

”These regulations make crystal clear that everyone can access schools that are safe, welcoming and that respect their rights,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. “Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination includes all forms of sex discrimination. No one should have to give up their dreams of attending or finishing school because they’re pregnant. No one should face bullying or discrimination just because of who they are or who they love.”

Left unresolved, however, is a second, and more controversial, rule that applies to transgender students’ participation in school sports, which some observers speculate the administration is until after the election.

That did not dampen partisan objections to what they did include, which is expected to fuel a new wave of litigation. Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House education committee, questioned the inclusion of transgender students under Title IX and said the rewrite rolls back protections for women.

“This final rule dumps kerosene on the already raging fire that is Democrats’ contemptuous culture war that aims to radically redefine sex and gender,” she said in a statement. “The rule also undermines existing due process rights, placing students and institutions in legal jeopardy and again undermining the protections Title IX is intended to provide.”

President Joe Biden pledged to overhaul Title IX even before he won the 2020 election, when he said that prevents discrimination against LGBTQ employees on the job guarantees students the same protections at school. But it took over two years for the department to release an initial draft describing its new approach. A proposed rule concerning trans students’ participation in sports followed in early 2023, but has yet to be sent to the White House for final review.

Officials have attributed the delays on both rules to the hundreds of thousands of comments it received from the public. But there’s also been intense backlash from Republicans, who say allowing transgender women to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity upends the original goal of Title IX. 

Advocates and in Congress argued the delay left victims at risk and discouraged some students from reporting incidents because they thought schools wouldn’t respond.

“For many students, a weakened Title IX harassment rule is all they’ve known through their college and high school experience,” said Shiwali Patel, a senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “Extremist politicians have increasingly attacked the rights of LGBTQI+ students, especially, transgender, nonbinary, and intersex students, attempting to codify discrimination through legislation and other policies.”  

On Friday, advocates welcomed the end of this first phase. Even so, many school districts might not be prepared to take the proactive approach that the rule requires. 

“It’s jaw-dropping to see things are still lax and so backwards,” said Sandra Hodgin, founder and CEO of Title IX Consulting Group, a Los Angeles-based firm. Some districts, she said, have outdated policies or don’t inform students how to file a grievance. 

Districts will have to act fast, she said, to ensure they have a Title IX coordinator who is up to speed on the new requirements and can “help them navigate all of it.” She noted a that found Liberty University, a Christian college, discouraged students from reporting sexual violence. “K-12 systems are going to be looking at things like that and hopefully say to themselves, ‘We don’t want to be that example.’ ”

In addition to requiring districts to promptly investigate any “sex-based hostile environment” in education programs both in and outside of school, the revised rule also removes the requirement for live hearings with cross-examination for sexual misconduct investigations. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos added to protect the due process rights of male students who argued they’d been unfairly accused of harassment or misconduct. 

Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, dismissively noted the 2020 rule required schools to be “no more than not deliberately indifferent” to harassment.

The Biden administration has expected districts to comply with its applying Title IX protections to LGBTQ students even as Republican states filed litigation challenging that interpretation. Twenty-two states sued in 2022 over guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school nutrition, stating that programs receiving federal funds must follow or risk being reported to the Department of Justice. 

Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he expects “lawsuits from state attorneys general within days, or at longest weeks.” Some, he said, will challenge the administration’s decision to extend Title IX’s protections to include gender identity.  the rule could violate free speech if an offensive comment or a teacher’s refusal to use a preferred pronoun, for example, is perceived as discrimination. In a Thursday call with reporters, a senior administration official said if such a situation “limits or denies [a student’s] access to education,” the person’s behavior could create a hostile environment.

Sasha Buchert, a senior attorney for Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, however, said fear of litigation shouldn’t prevent school officials from following the law.

“If I was their council, I would remind them that they’re on the wrong side of the law if they decide to discriminate against LGBTQ students,” she said. “If you want to protect your school against liability, the smart thing to do would be to not choose to discriminate.” 

In a decision this week, a federal appeals court agreed with the Biden administration’s interpretation that Title IX protections for LGBTQ students can apply to athletics. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit blocked West Virginia’s law banning trans students from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.

focuses on Becky Pepper Jackson, a 13-year-old transgender girl and middle school track athlete, who has identified as a girl since third grade. 

Last year, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrissey asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the state’s Save Women’s Sports Act to go into effect, but the court put it on hold. Buchert said she wouldn’t be surprised if Morrissey appeals the Fourth Circuit ruling as well.

In its Title IX draft for sports, the education department attempted to carve out a compromise, avoiding an across-the-board inclusion of trans students on teams consistent with their gender identity. But it didn’t also didn’t ban such policies outright. The draft states that schools and colleges could limit transgender students’ participation in specific sports — particularly at the more competitive high school and college levels. But in the elementary grades, and likely into middle school, most students would be able to play sports consistent with their gender identity.

Buckert said advocates hope the department will “issue a strong rule that provides clarity about where the department stands on those issues.”

, the Republican presidential nominee, has said he won’t “allow men in women’s sports.” If he wins, some observers wouldn’t be surprised to see him rescind any attempt by the Biden administration to allow trans students to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. 

“We’re looking at a very polarized Title IX conversation,” she said.

The Education Writers Association on Tuesday. From student journalists to national beat reporters, 17 winners were announced across numerous categories, and for publications of varying newsroom size. Another 34 journalistic projects were named finalists for the top prizes.

Four different projects that published at The 74 in 2020 were among the honorees:

An Education System, Divided: How Internet Inequity Persisted Through 4 Presidents and Left Schools Unprepared for the Pandemic

2020 Finalist for Best Feature Article: When the COVID-19 pandemic spread into American communities in spring of 2020, schools adapted by switching to online classes. But millions of families with no or limited home internet couldn’t manage that transition, drastically diminishing educational opportunities for the students who need them most. Local leaders have embraced creative solutions, loaning out thousands of devices and dispatching Wi-Fi-equipped school buses into low-connectivity neighborhoods. But the question remains: Three decades after the internet’s emergence as a boundary-breaking technology, how are vast swaths of the United States still walled off from the social, economic and educational blessings that the internet provides? The answer, told to The 74 by experts and policymakers who have worked around communications access since the birth of the internet, implicate both the public and private sectors in a prolonged failure to extend the benefits of modern technology to countless Americans. “I think the large-scale tolerance for inequity in this country gave rise to an inequitable telecommunications system,” said one. Read Kevin Mahnken’s cover story.

—Related: 12 months after pandemic closed schools, 12 million students still lack reliable internet (Read the full story)

DeVos on the Docket: With 455 Lawsuits Against Her Department and Counting, Education Secretary is Left to Defend Much of Her Agenda in Court

2020 Finalist for Investigative Reporting: No education secretary has ever been sued as much as Betsy DeVos. In four years, over 455 lawsuits have been filed against either DeVos or the U.S. Department of Education, according to The 74’s analysis of court filings and opinions. That’s the equivalent of being sued once every three days. Many of the cases, involving multiple states and advocacy organizations, were filed in response to Trump administration moves to reverse Obama-era rules in the areas of civil rights and protections for student loan borrowers. DeVos has always been outspoken about lightening Washington’s footprint in education. But in her department’s effort to grab what one education attorney called “quick political wins,” judges — even Trump appointees — are finding flaws in its approach. One exception might be the revised Title IX policy, which has already sparked four lawsuits, but might be hard for a future administration to tear down. Read Linda Jacobson’s investigation.

—Related: With DeVos out, movement for private school choice shifts to state legislatures (Read the full story)

A Border School for Asylum Seekers Goes Virtual

2020 Finalist for Best Feature Article: For some 2,500 asylum seekers in the tent city in Matamoros, Mexico in June of 2020, life had gone from hardship to hardship. They had escaped gangs and oppressive regimes only to face the regular threat of floods, kidnapping and a strict “remain in Mexico” policy set by the Trump administration. Until 2019, the camp’s children had few options but to pass their days near the foot of the Gateway International Bridge, playing with rocks and dirt or sitting idly through what should have been a day inside a classroom. That changed when two American volunteers opened The Sidewalk School, just 3 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. By last summer, the school had grown to a staff of 11 teachers, with 235 students ranging in age from 1 to 16. Now it was facing a new challenge: educating during a pandemic. With $20,000 in its coffers, the school bought tablets and decided to go virtual. But it also maintained a presence inside the camp, implementing health and safety guidelines that schools around the world were only just developing. “I don’t think people understand what an encampment is, how small it is, how people live in the woods, one on top of the other,” said school co-founder Felicia Rangel-Samponaro. “Social distancing cannot happen.” Contributor Jo Napolitano has the story.

—Related: Influx of unaccompanied minors along southern border could pose test for schools (Read the full story)

Making It Work: A Day in the Life of Families Living Through a Summer Like No Other

2020 Finalist For Visual Storytelling: For parents, summer vacation is both a curse and a blessing. The pressure of remote lessons is now mostly gone, replaced with the challenge of finding enough activities to keep their children busy and active. The days and weeks are filled with monotony and uncertainty, punctuated by attempts to create fun, lightness, a sense of routine and to simply pass the time. In the early days of 2020’s summer season, The 74’s Taylor Swaak, Bekah McNeel and Patrick O’Donnell each spent a day with families in Washington, D.C., Cleveland and San Antonio, and witnessed their struggles to get by. But they also observed that within the monotony is something vital: a strong core of care for one another that ties the days — somehow both endless and too short — together. Because of COVID-19, schools, jobs and most activities are not as reliable as they once were, leaving families to lean heavily on each other for a daily itinerary. See our profiles of each family, as well as our special interactive timeline of a day in the life of these families fighting to persevere.

“These grants will help supplement state-based efforts to give students access to more options for their education,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a release. “Charter schools are now part of the fabric of American education, and I look forward to seeing how we can continue to work with states to help ensure more students can learn in an environment that works for them.”

Charter management organizations that won replication grants are a who’s who of the charter world, including the latest two winners of the Broad Prize for public charter schools, IDEA Public Schools in Texas and Success Academy in New York.

(Read The Alumni, The 74’s multimedia series on how top charter networks are supporting students through college graduation)

Increased funding for the federal charter school program has been the one Trump administration school choice program that has found traction in recent budget debates. House lawmakers voted to give the program $370 million in their recently passed budget proposal, while a Senate committee approved $367 million. The administration had requested $500 million.

“While these grants are critical, they fall far short of the need. We urge the administration and Congress to work together to boost the amount of [charter school] funding available to meet the demand for more and better public school options,” Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a release.

Other charter management winners are: Ascend Learning (New York), Brooke Charter School (Massachusetts), Eagle Academy (Washington, D.C.), East Harlem Tutorial Program (New York), Environmental Charter Schools (California), Family Life Academy Charter Schools (New York), Fortune Schools of Education (California), Freedom Preparatory Academy (Tennessee), Great Oaks Foundation (New York), Hiawatha Academies (Minnesota), New Paradigm for Education (Michigan), Rocketship Education (California), Freedom and Democracy Schools Foundation (Maryland), University Prep (Colorado), and Voices College-Bound Language Academies (California).

The CMOs will get a total of about $52 million, though the department said they should receive about $127 million, if Congress appropriates additional money.

The state funding went to Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, and Wisconsin. The state agencies will get a total of about $145 million, though the agency recommended they should get about $332 million.

Funds to help startup charter schools raise the capital needed to open buildings went to organizations in Washington, D.C., California, Maryland, North Carolina, Mississippi, California, Massachusetts, and Arizona. They’ll share about $57 million.

Disclosure: Campbell Brown, The 74’s co-founder, sits on Success Academy’s board of directors.