Prominent figures on the right and on whatever the Democratic Party is right now
have very different priorities when it comes to education.
And as we cruise towards another presidential election,
it's important for you to understand how the choice of one side or
the other could influence the future outcomes for your children.
Take people like Ron DeSantis who could be the next president.
He's focusing on things like erasing black history from Florida schools, and
I assume that he would probably be interested in doing that nationwide.
There's no end to the different books that they wanna ban, scholars who they want to
hide, African American scholars, LGBTQ scholars, all of that.
Also he's doing things like seeking transgender university students'
healthcare information.
There was the whole thing with trying to get the teen athletes menstruation
information, which thankfully because of the public outcry, they
actually backed off of that for now, so victory to those who fought against that.
And it's not just him, he's an easy focus and he is very prominent.
But many red states have passed legislation to prevent trans youth from
participating in school sports, including the 18 that you can see on this map.
This is a nationwide thing, a focus of the right.
Now, on the other hand, you have Joe Biden, who is not gonna be some sort of
massive culture warrior on the other side or anything like that.
But he does have some things that him and his administration are working on,
particularly a long awaited ruling that changes Title IX.
This should have happened a year and a half ago, but here's what they wanna do.
It directs how federally funded schools and colleges handle sex and
gender discrimination.
It's gonna become public in May, and
it's unclear when it would actually take effect.
So you are still gonna have to wait and it could eventually be overruled or
overridden by a future president.
In any event, he pledged to change it during his presidential campaign.
And for the last five months, the Education Department has been reviewing
more than 238,000 public comments on the proposal, and I'm sure that they are very,
very rational.
Here is what is actually apparently going to be proposed to change in
the near future.
For the first time, it would include protections for transgender and
nonbinary students.
It would expand the definition of sexual harassment, decreasing the threshold for
what schools are required to investigate.
Because in many cases,
they can hide behind the fact that what is being alleged doesn't rise to the very
stringent requirements that are currently in Title IX.
It would add protections for pregnant and parenting students, ax a requirement for
live hearings in college and university cases involving sexual misconduct,
which some individuals might not wanna participate in because it's live in that
fashion.
And require schools to use a preponderance of evidence standard instead of a clear
and convincing evidence standard in determining the outcome of most
sexual assault cases.
A change which advocates believe would reduce how often what is alleged
by victims to be completely unjust outcomes would happen.
So I assume that you're gonna be hearing much more about this, not only when it
comes out, but when the right fearmongers surround it for literally months on end.
But Brett, what do you think about some of these changes that are being proposed?
>> Listen, I'm looking at all the things he did and
they seem pretty terrible, that Ron DeSantis did, I wanna start there.
I just think, yes, he has delivered for Floridians, but usually it seems like
according to new evidence, he's delivering Boone's Farm for Florida teenagers.
And then also with these transgender laws that he seems to
be like the bannerman for, or the lead, the flag guy.
>> Yeah. >> It seems like he really wants to see
kids' genitals before they go swimming, which is weird.
I think that's a hard one to say.
And until that evidence came forward that it seems like,
and since he just says stuff and now it becomes true for
his viewers because they hate someone, I hate Ron DeSantis.
I'm gonna say things that I believe to be true as though they are true,
as though they are actually happening, cuz that seems to be his standard.
So it looks like by that logic, Ron DeSantis, even though he's from
the Republicans who say they're anti-grooming, has been grooming teenagers
and their pedophiles who wanna see kids' junk before they get in the pool.
And I think that is more disturbing than going to a swim meet for
K through ten year olds and just being like, everybody race, I don't care,
everyone's getting a ribbon.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So that's it.
With the Title IX stuff, that's very nuanced, and
I'm not gonna be an expert on what's better or worse a process for
finding out exactly what happened in a sexual harassment case.
I don't feel like the need for there to be, if there is a live hearing or not,
you're supposed to be able to face your accuser and all of that stuff, and
those are central tenants of the legal system.
But do you need to face them in person or not?
Do you want justice or not?
I think those are things that I would wanna see some kind of,
are there those kinds of precedents in legal proceedings that protect people and
what are the outcomes?
What do the outcomes seem to be?
My gut is, I don't think everyone needs to be in a room together,
situation is necessary for us to find out what happened.
But I think it's bad, it looks bad politically for Republicans and
that whole group to say, you know what,
we don't wanna make it as easy as possible for justice to be served.
>> Yeah, yeah, under the banner, to continue your metaphor, of save
the children, we want it to be effectively impossible to prove sexual assault.
It is so bizarre that they are so hyper-focused on fictional made up,
whatever, grooming or whatever amongst second graders.
But then once you get to college, they could not care less about what happens to
you, and whether if something happens to you, there's any justice.
It's amazing how the standard changes.
It's political opportunism, that's what it is.
And by the way, there might be some follow-up questions about some of
the changes that we've talked about and said, well, what about,
like you had shown in the map, all that focus on the athletes, trans athletes?
This does not cover that.
They say that they're gonna have a separate rule on the topic of transgender
and nonbinary student participation on certain sports.
They're not saying exactly when that's gonna come.
It took a year and a half for them to, no, actually more than that,
slightly more than two years to finally make good on their campaign promises
to change Title IX to begin with.
So if this is coming later, maybe by the end of his first term, we'll see,
maybe in time for a President Trump to replace, we'll have to see.
[MUSIC]