The Department of Education is seeking to remove a question from its 2021-2022 Civil Rights Data Collection that asked school districts to report the number of teacher-student sexual assaults that occurred.
The question was added to the Office for Civil Rights’s annual report during the Trump administration, and the proposal to remove it prompted a tidal wave of critics, including former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who called the move “sickening.”
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“There is no rational way to justify sweeping teachers sexually assaulting students under the rug,” DeVos said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The only explanation is that the Biden Administration is a wholly owned subsidiary of the teacher union bosses, who have long tried to cover up teachers behaving badly.”
The proposal says the Office of Civil Rights “will continue to collect data on the number of documented incidents of offenses that occur at the school, including the number of documented incidents of sexual assault committed by students and staff.”
The question was added to the 2020-2021 data collection after the previous report that concluded in 2018 discovered nearly 15,000 sexual assaults had occurred in schools in the 2017-2018 school year, but it did not differentiate between assaults between students and assaults between teachers and students, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Without asking for the difference in sexual assault perpetrators, the report will no longer be able to differentiate between student-student assaults and teacher-student assaults. An education department spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon the move was meant to “reduce burden and duplication of data.”
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“If you wonder why American families have lost all faith in the education system, this is another example as to why,” DeVos said.
