NWLC Marks Anniversary of Title IX by Calling on Biden Administration to Release Final Title IX Rule Before the School Year Begins

Washington, DC – To mark the 51st anniversary of Title IX, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex in education, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), along with Advocates for Youth, End Rape on Campus, It’s on Us, Know Your IX, and Equal Rights Advocates, led 75 groups in calling directly on President Joe Biden to reverse the administration’s decision to delay finalizing its Title IX rule changes from May 2023 to October 2023, and to release the final rule prior to the start of the upcoming school year.

If President Biden does not heed these calls, then students will begin the new school year under former President Donald Trump’s Title IX rule, which severely weakened civil right protections for students. 

“This is not merely a ‘right now’ issue,” wrote the groups. “Since the Trump rule has been in effect for three complete school years, there are students who have gone almost all of their secondary school or college experience under the Trump Title IX rule.”

The letter includes stories about student survivors who, due to changes made to the rule under the Trump administration, underwent traumatic experiences after reporting their assault.  

“After over 50 years of Title IX, we still have not actualized Title IX’s full potential. As tired as we are of repeating this, students are even more exhausted,” the groups wrote. “Students are speaking up about the absolutely demoralizing experience of losing out on their education because the federal government has not yet made good on its promise to protect them from sex discrimination at school.”

You can read the full letter to President Biden here.

The Hill today published an op-ed from Shiwali Patel, Director of Justice for Student Survivors and Senior Counsel at NWLC, about her experience working in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights as a Title IX policy attorney during the Trump administration, and the subsequent actions that led to the erosion of Title IX protections during that time.

Patel makes a compelling case about the dangers of keeping Trump’s sexist Title IX rule in place for the start of the 2023-2024 school year. In the piece, Patel calls the Biden administration’s decision to delay their final Title IX rule “devastating.”

You can read Patel’s op-ed, which was first published in The Hill, here.