Out of nearly 9,000 discrimination complaints filed with the Department of Education in the past 11 years, none ended with the DOE pulling federal funding from a school, newly public data show. The absence of that punishment—called enforcement—helps illustrate the DOE's power to compel schools to handle complaints before they get that far. Among the cases the DOE declined to enforce were 118 cases of alleged sexual violence and more than 1,000 involving other forms of sexual harassment, including insults, slurs, physical harassment, and gender stereotyping.
That’s according to documents published by news website Muckrock last week, after it received a 302-page list of Title IX complaints from the DOE in response to a federal Freedom of Information Act request. Title IX is the 1972 federal law banning sexual discrimination in any education program that receives federal funding.
