Response to "Remarks prepared for Acting Secretary of Education, John King, for The National Action Network’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Breakfast."

https://medium.com/@usedgov/what-we-ought-to-be-2a7604398953#.km33kcexi

I welcome the work of the U.S. Department of Education to end racial discrimination and promote equality in educational institutions in the United States.

However, for every race and ethnicity, there is a boy’s crisis in education, and this speech once again demonstrates that the U.S. Department of Education remains in complete denial of their statutory and Constitutional obligations to effectively address it.

Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed for ADHD as girls:

Boys are dropping out of school in high numbers

Boys’ grades lag behind girls’

Boys have suicide rates four times higher than girls

The gap between the number of women and men on college campuses is widening

Millions of young men are trapped in “Guyland”

Boys are five times more likely to end up in juvenile detention

Boys are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime

Schools are taking steps to find solutions

Source: “9 Signs We Have a “Boy Crisis”” at collegestats dot org

http://collegestats.org/2012/08/9-signs-we-have-a-boy-crisis/

There has been no action to help boys by protecting them from discrimination, despite law requiring such action:

Title IX is a comprehensive federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity.

Source: United States Department of Justice at justice dot org

Rule-making for Title IX and other gender equality programs consistently focuses exclusively on discrimination faced by girls, and ignores discrimination faced by boys. This also violates the fourteenth amendment rights of boys to equal access to federally funded programs, including education and Title IX itself.

This is why I was saddened, but not surprised when the US Department of Education effectively refused to protect boys when members of the reddit mensrights subreddit, including me, asked them. These victims included:

  • A High School aged boy harassed after he reported being sexually assaulted by a female basketball and lacrosse coach

  • Children, mostly boys, being prescribed ADHD medications simply because they are the youngest in their class, and therefore naturally less mature.

  • Boys like 13 year old Peyton James, who committed suicide after his school ignored his pleas for help from gender based bullying

  • Illiterate male college athletes pushed to use fixers and denied equal access to tutors.

Source: “Action Opportunity: End the Appearance of Discrimination Against Raped, Drugged, Bullied, and Defrauded Boys and Men at US Department of Education” on reddit at http redd dot it slash 2sa0g2

https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/2sa0g2/action_opportunity_end_the_appearance_of/

But the Department of Education did have the time and energy to order a high school to tear down bleachers paid for by parents, because they were used primarily for boys' sports, and not girls'.

If the US Department of Education is serious about ending discrimination in education, then they need to end their own detestable practice of using differing weights and measures which weigh the needs of girl students vastly higher than those of boy students, and commit to honoring their duties to enforce the law Congress wrote, and not the one that they imagine exists.