http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/columnists/cs-0302020300feb02,1,3827486.column?coll=cs%2Dcolumnists Barry Temkin (Chicago Tribune) ON HIGH SCHOOLS Panel misses shot to improve Title IX February 2, 2003 It's tempting to say, with apologies to poet T.S. Eliot, that the Commission on Opportunity in Athletics completed its work Thursday not with a bang but with a whimper. The 15 sports professionals and educators assigned to study gender equity in sports did, after all, decline to pass recommendations that if adopted would likely have caused the most significant changes in how the Department of Education measures compliance with Title IX. But it's probably more fitting to say the commission ended in confusion. There was confusion regarding recommendations the members were voting on and what some of those proposals might mean. Most important, there was uncertainty about what Secretary of Education Rod Paige will do with the report he'll get from the commission late this month. Paige can implement any or none of the recommendations. He can't change the law, which Congress passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, but he can change the way compliance is measured. Anyone who found clarity in these proceedings must believe the Bears are set at quarterback. Even women's sports advocates differed on the meaning of the commission's work. Some were relieved that calls for sweeping change failed. Others worried that recommendations that did pass, taken together, still will erode the remarkable progress women have made in sports in the last three decades. Both views may be right. The commission rejected major changes to proportionality, one of three ways schools can comply with Title IX, but it did OK recommendations that would alter it. Under proportionality, a school must provide participation opportunities for male and female athletes in percentages that closely mirror those of men and women in its overall enrollment. One recommendation would count recruited walk-ons, or non-scholarship athletes, when assessing colleges' compliance, but not athletes who show up on their own, who are counted now. Men's teams typically have more walk-ons than do women's teams, so women's sports advocates fear the recommendation will cut female participation. Another recommendation would allow a school to count the numbers of opportunities each sex has to compete there rather than the number that actually do play. Most commission members did the best they could to serve the public, but they often lacked information they needed to fully understand how effectively Title IX has been working as well as government numbers spelling out the effects of some of the proposals they considered last week. The commission's work did nothing to narrow the gap dividing the two sides in the Title IX debate. On one side are advocates for change, who argue that the current enforcement practices, heavily reliant on the proportionality test, amount to a quota system they allege is unfair to men and has resulted in the termination of hundreds of college teams in such sports as wrestling, swimming and gymnastics. On the other are women's sports advocates, seemingly resistant to an iota of change other than for Title IX to be more strongly enforced. They contend colleges could preserve men's teams by trimming football and basketball budgets, something that would ease the problem but not solve it. Despite this, Paige could find a win-win formula in the commission's work. He can do it by very modestly tweaking proportionality, by making the compliance test that measures student interest in participation more effective and by vastly strengthening enforcement practices and sanctions. Women's advocates are correct, for example, in arguing that too heavy a reliance on interest can freeze in place the results of past discrimination. But using proportionality sometimes can lead to such results as those at Wisconsin, where 179, or 40 percent, of the school's 446 total female athletic participants last year were in women's crew, not even a high school sport in the state. After settling a dispute with the Department of Education, Wisconsin has reached compliance, with about 51 percent of its athletic opportunities going to women. Considering that about 58 percent of all NCAA athletes are men, it would appear many schools still have a way to go, even if they can be compliant without achieving proportionality. They get away with it in part because the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights virtually always investigates programs, college or high school, only after receiving a complaint. What's more, the only sanction on the books for Title IX violations is loss of federal funds. The sanction is so draconian that colleges or school districts always get around to complying, but also so draconian that OCR doesn't apply it when they drag their feet. The sanction, in fact, has never been used. One wonders how many female athletes have been shortchanged while some high school district or university finally does what's right. We hear cries of anguish when a university drops a team, and rightly so. It's awful to see a youngster work years to achieve a dream of competing in college and then have it yanked away. We could use more anguish about the fact that Title IX, wildly successful at age 31, still isn't what it should be. ---------- Copyright © 2003, The Chicago Tribune
