Joe Biden’s Department of Education is seeking to roll back a Trump-era effort to collect data on teacher-on-student sex crimes.
“The department’s Office for Civil Rights will not ask school districts questions regarding teacher-on-student sexual assault allegations as part of its 2021-2022 Civil Rights Data Collection, proposed Thursday,” reports the Washington Free Beacon. According to an Education Department spokesman, the change is designed to “reduce burden and duplication of data,” but not everyone is buying that explanation.
“This is the ultimate act of bowing to the teachers’ unions,” Kimberly Richey, the former acting assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights under Trump, told the Free Beacon. “Through this proposal, the Biden administration is actively helping schools cover up these incidents, which we were intentionally shining a light on.”
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Districts will still be asked to document cases of rape and sexual assault to the Department of Education, but not pending cases or allegations that resulted in the resignation, reassignment, or retirement of the accused teacher.
“Teachers’ unions have a structural interest in protecting all of their members—including alleged pedophiles,” Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Free Beacon. “Data suggesting systemic nonchalance about child sexual abuse in public schools would be quite politically inconvenient for teachers’ unions. Now the data won’t be collected.”
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