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Beyond the Briefs

GLBT students win with DOE nominee

by Robert DeKoven

Published Thursday, 25-Dec-2008 in issue 1096

While gay leaders denounce President-elect Obama’s choice of inauguration speakers, namely right-wing evangelist Rick Warren, few seem to grasp that Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is good news.

Duncan, the chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools, is the champion of a proposal in Chicago to open a Social Justice High School Pride Campus. He supported the idea, noting that national studies show GLBT youth are at greater risk of suicide, dropping out, and abuse and harassment from classmates. The (now postponed) plan was to base the school on the Harvey Milk High School in New York, which serves 99 gay and straight students and has an unparalleled 92 percent graduation rate. It would not have served GLBT students exclusively, but would instead specifically cater to GLBT students’ needs.

Having an ally heading the Department of Education (DOE) will mean GLBT students will be safer. The DOE is extremely powerful: The nation’s 15,000 public school districts and 5,000 public and private colleges depend upon federal funding, and the DOE stipulates that school districts that refuse to protect GLBT students can lose it. Simply defending an investigation by the Department’s Office of Civil Rights can cost a small fortune and ruin the careers of education professionals found to have acted wrongfully.

To date, no schools have lost funding due to having harassment charges brought against them. However, pressure to abide by the rules will increase once Duncan gets in.

Duncan will continue the legacy of William C. Riley, who headed the DOE during the Clinton Administration. Riley was a critical ally. He led an initiative to make schools safe for GLBT students by issuing directives to school authorities regarding how to protect and respond to abuse, bullying and harassment perpetrated by students on their peers. He also supported establishing student clubs like the Gay-Straight Alliances that now flourish in about 1,500 schools.

Unfortunately, Riley did not make such guidelines law. But the measures he instituted have paid off for students and for the GLBT community in other ways. For instance, our chief voting allies on gay rights are voters between18-35. In the Proposition 8 battle in California, 60 percent of voters between those ages voted against the measure; they are largely the product of schools where tolerance and respect for GLBT students have become the norm.

During the Bush years, neither Education Secretaries Rod Page nor Margaret Spellings showed disdain for the rights of GLBT students. Nor did they advance them or lead inquiries against schools charged with GLBT bias.

That has to change, and that’s where Duncan and his staff will play a key role.

His first move should be to appoint as general counsel California Assemblymember Sheila Kuehl, who championed GLBT students’ rights in the California Legislature. Next, he needs to issue regulations that inform schools of what they must do to meet minimum standards of tolerance and respect for all students, including GLBT students. He also needs to create procedures on the DOE’s website that enable GLBT students and their parents to complain about harassment incidents to the Office for Civil Rights.

Such measures are crucial given that only 11 states have laws protecting GLBT students and given continuing high rates of GLBT harassment in schools. For example, GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, in October, released what it calls “the most comprehensive report ever on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students,” the 2007 National School Climate Survey. The report contains the results of a survey of 6,209 middle and high school students. It finds that nearly nine out of 10 GLBT students (86.2 percent) experienced harassment at school in 2007, three-fifths (60.8 percent) felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation and about a third (32.7 percent) skipped a day of school in the month prior to the survey because they felt unsafe.

Robert DeKoven is a professor at California Western School of Law.

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Comments

andrew says:

Barack Obama is a long, long way from proving that he is a friend to the gay community.

In fact, there are significant signs that he is not.

He is against gay marriage, he has said that he will not unilaterally end discrimination against open gays in the military (the way Harry Truman unilaterally ended discrimination against blacks in the military by going behind Congress's back and issuing an executive order), and now he is having the anti-gay Rick Warren speak at his inauguration.

Stop bending over backwards to give Obama a pass.

Blacks telling us we need to "stay at the back of the bus" is not acceptable, and it's time for us to pull our heads out of the politically correct sand and demand support from a black straight community that the gay community has always supported.

The least Obama can do is to try to get widespread Congressional support for ENDA (the bill to end discrimination against gays in employment.)

Doing so will send a signal that Obama (and the Democrats in Congress) aren't taking our support for granted.

Dec 24, 2008 5:43 PM

james says:

people say that marriage is for a man and woman......then why in biblical times was marriage mostly for the joining of two families rather than the two people??...yes that is true...
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Dec 25, 2008 6:46 PM

Bob Z. says:

You may be correct - but Obama has never indicated that he will be a true friend to gays, although that it was gays want to believe.
True, Obama chose his friend Duncan for Education, but Duncan also pulled the rug out from under the gay Pride Campus after he met with rabid anti-gay, homphobic preachers, led by Wilfredo DeJesus, in a closed-door meeting. Duncan also presided over one of the most homophobic school systems in the nation, where gay students are vilified, administrators are openly biased against GLBT people, and gay-affirming student organizations never were allowed to operate. Further, Duncan supports abstinence education is public schools.
As for Obama, he openly opposes gay marriage, has flip-flopped on DADT, and has never been a friend of gays.
When he took over the Harvard Law Review, his friends expected one thing and got something completely different.

Dec 26, 2008 1:33 PM

Bill says:

Chicago Public schools have the reputation of being the worst in the nation. A 'stupider' nation is not what we need.

Dec 27, 2008 8:46 AM

Eric says:

Andrew, you've got it wrong when you say he's showing signs that he's not a friend to us. All you have to do is listen to Obama's debates with Alan Keyes for his 04 state senate seat, and in particular how he calls Keyes out for his ignorance of the GLBT community to know that he is a friend to us. Bless his soul, Obama is doing what most of us only talk about doing when we talk about having dialogue.

Dec 29, 2008 8:06 PM

andrew says:

Eric:

Nice words are not enough. I want specific commitments and follow through. When Obama supports gay marriage and uses his executive pen to end the prohibition against open gays in the military, then I will be impressed.

Note that until about 1968, blacks couldn't marry whites in at least one state in this country.

Harry Truman went behind Congress's back to integrate blacks into the military during or soon after WW II.

Let's see Obama demonstrate the same courage that people like Truman demonstrated.

Or do you like being taken for granted by the Democrats?

We've certainly gotten used to that in the gay community, haven't we?

Dec 29, 2008 11:07 PM

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