CLOSE At George Mason University’s Law School in Arlington, Va. Time 
 
 Education Secretary Betsy DeVos after a series of listening sessions about campus sexual violence in Washington, D.C., on July 13, 2017. (Photo: Alex Brandon, AP) 
 
 Saying the Obama administration “weaponized” the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to work against students and schools, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday said she would replace the current approach to addressing sexual misconduct on college campuses with “a workable, effective and fair system” that more explicitly takes into account the rights of the accused. 
 
 DeVos said the Trump administration would roll back Obama’s “failed” Title IX guidance on sexual assault and harassment. 
 
 Educators, she said, have complained that the current system amounts in many cases to “kangaroo courts,” in which the rights of the accused are given short shrift unless they can afford to hire legal representation to pursue complaints. 
 
 “No student should be forced to sue their way to due process,” she said. 
 
 The speech, delivered at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, was livestreamed on the department's Facebook page. 
 
 DeVos gave a measure of credit to the Obama administration, saying it “helped elevate this issue in American public life — they listened to survivors, who have brought this issue out of the back rooms of student life offices and into the light of day.” 
 
 The Obama administration's 2011 "Dear Colleague" Letter threatened to pull funding from schools that didn't take sexual assault and harassment seriously. 
 
 But the 2014 guidance that resulted from Obama's efforts has applied an ambiguous and overly broad definition of sexual assault and harassment, DeVos said, leading to "intimidation and coercion of schools" and, in a few cases, strange results: In one case, she said, a school opened a Title IX investigation after a male student who couldn't remember the name of a female instructor filled in a form with the name "Sarah Jackson," a lingerie and swimsuit model. 
 
 “Any perceived offense can become a full-blown Title IX investigation," DeVos said. "But if everything is harassment, nothing is.” 
 
 In a statement, National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García said educators nationwide "are appalled that the Department of Education has decided to weaken protections for students who survive campus sexual assault or harassment. This decision offends our collective conscience and conflicts with the basic values of equality, safety, and respect that we teach our students every day." 
 
 Eskelsen García called the proposed change "another example of a Trump-DeVos agenda that scorns respect for survivors, including Secretary DeVos’s own recent meeting with radical anti-woman activists and the president’s own recorded sexual assault confession during the campaign.” 
 
 Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, said DeVos' announcement suggested "that she would prefer to take America back to a time when it was more difficult for survivors of sexual assault to receive justice. For the LGBTQ community, which faces disproportionate levels of sexual assault and violence, this decision sends a strong signal that the U.S. Department of Education will not use its full power to protect them from harm." 
 
 Philadelphia attorneys Gina Maisto Smith and Leslie Gomez have said universities understand Title IX's high-level mandates but are getting tripped up on the mechanics. Schools lack the resources and the tools, including subpoena power — that can harm students on both sides of an investigation. 
 
 The pair have proposed universities utilize a network of regional centers, formed through partnerships between schools and law enforcement, that "could be a significant resource for resolving reports of misconduct that violate both Title IX and state criminal law." 
 
 Maisto Smith and Gomez, former career prosecutors who spent decades advocating for survivors — and whose damning investigation in 2016 into sexual assault allegations at Baylor University led to the ouster of former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr as president — said both universities and law enforcement face challenges responding to sexual violence. 
 
 "Unless we engage in meaningful cultural and process changes, these challenges will persist," Smith said. 
 
 Brett Sokolow, executive director of the Association of Title IX Administrators, a professional association that helps schools ensure Title IX compliance, said DeVos' announcement doesn’t mean most universities won’t continue to address sexual violence on campus. 
 
 "The response will occur mostly at the margins, Sokolow said. "There are 20% of colleges that weren't all that committed to Title IX to begin with, and this is going to give them the excuse to pull back. But for 80% of the colleges out there that aren't at the margins, this is a cultural shift that's already taken place, and they're smart enough to understand that a rollback of sub-regulatory guidance doesn't change the fundamentals of Title IX that have been in place for 45 years." 
 
 DeVos has made a priority of revamping Title IX guidance, saying last July that the department should more equally weigh the claims of assault victims and the due-process rights of the accused. 
 
 But her department's efforts have also brought unwanted notoriety. In an interview last July, Candice Jackson, DeVos’ assistant secretary for civil rights, said 90% of campus sexual assault claims “fall into the category of, 'We were both drunk, we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.'" 
 
 Jackson later apologized for the remark, calling it "flippant." 
 
 Last June, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights voted to open a two-year investigation of the Trump administration's civil rights enforcement, particularly related to the education department under DeVos. The commission's chair is Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw civil rights under Obama's education department. 
 
 Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo; Follow Alia E. Dastagir on Twitter: @alia_e 
 
 Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2vPt6uT ||||| Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said the Trump administration will revamp the guidance through a rule-making process that likely will take months. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP DeVos to scrap Obama-era school sexual assault policy 
 
 Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Thursday that she will rescind an Obama-era schools directive on sexual assault and develop a replacement that she said would do a better job of balancing the rights of victims and the accused. 
 
 "The truth is that the system established by the prior administration has failed too many students," DeVos said during a half-hour speech at George Mason University where she took no questions. "Survivors, victims of a lack of due process and campus administrators have all told me that the current approach does a disservice to everyone involved." 
 
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 But the announcement drew strong objections from womens' groups, victims advocates and leading Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who said the changes were a step in the wrong direction. 
 
 "Any change that weakens Title IX protections will be devastating," wrote Biden, who drove the Obama administration's efforts to crack down on campus sexual assault, in a statement posted on his Facebook page. 
 
 "I'm asking everyone who has a stake in this fight to step up," Biden said. "Students, parents, faculty, alumni. Don't just sit and watch. Speak up. Any rollback of Title IX protections will hurt your classmates, your students, your friends, your sisters." 
 
 The 2011 Obama guidance for the first time pushed school district, college and university leaders to combat sexual harassment, including sexual violence, saying the institutions were required to do so under Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination. Women's groups hailed that as a crucial step in cracking down on sexual violence on campuses. But critics said it trampled the rights of the accused. 
 
 The Trump administration will revamp the guidance through a rulemaking process that likely will take months, DeVos said, blasting the guidance for having "weaponized the Office of Civil Rights to work against schools and against students." She said the administration will give all sides a chance to offer opinions on how it should move forward. 
 
 "We will seek public feedback and combine institutional knowledge, professional expertise and the experiences of students to replace the current approach with a workable, effective and fair system," DeVos said. "This is not about letting institutions off the hook. They still have important work to do." 
 
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 DeVos said after the speech that she intends to revoke the Obama guidance."The process is an extended one," she told CBS News. "But it is the intention to revoke or rescind the previous guidance around this." 
 
 The Education Department will issue temporary Title IX guidelines for school districts, colleges and universities as it works on a permanent replacement for Obama-era guidelines, said agency spokeswoman Liz Hill. 
 
 The far-reaching 2011 Obama-era guidance, issued in the form of a Dear Colleague Letter, was controversial from the start. It threatened a loss of funding to schools that failed to do enough to make students safe from sexual harassment, assault and rape. Critics said it pushed colleges to trample the rights of the accused. Among other things, the guidance pushed a lower standard of proof in campus disciplinary hearings than is used in criminal trials. 
 
 Many of those critics hailed DeVos' announcement as "a really positive development." 
 
 “I think it was a strong signal from the department that the current approach is unworkable and needs to be changed,” said Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil rights group that brought a court challenge to the 2011 guidance. 
 
 Chris Perry, deputy executive director of the group, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, which represents people accused of sexual assault, said DeVos' remarks show “the secretary is listening to folks." 
 
 The decision to launch a notice-and-comment process was long expected. DeVos said in July — after a series of meetings with sexual assault survivors, students accused of assault and college officials — that she would overhaul the policy. She told reporters at the time that “it’s clear that there are failings in this process. A system without due process protections ultimately serves no one in the end.” 
 
 Advocacy groups — including those representing both sexual assault survivors and students accused of assault — were not invited to attend Thursday's announcement in person, despite meeting with DeVos on the subject in July. 
 
 Instead, DeVos delivered the announcement during a tightly controlled half-hour event at the university's Arlington, Va., campus, sponsored by the university law school chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative group. Shouts from protesters outside could be heard as she spoke. 
 
 Advocates for survivors of sexual assault said they felt they were given short shrift and noted that research has shown false claims of rape are rare. They said DeVos had indicated she would hold similar listening sessions in other parts of the country before making a decision. 
 
 Giving them just one meeting with the secretary "feels a little bit like paying lip service to the importance of having survivors in the room," said Jess Davidson, managing director of End Rape on Campus. 
 
 "I think there’s been a really concerning false equivalence of the concerns of survivors and the accused throughout this entire process with the Department of Education," Davidson said. 
 
 Sexual assault survivors rallied outside the university ahead of the announcement, urging DeVos to keep what they see as crucial protections in place. 
 
 "It's really telling us that we don't matter, that our pain is not relevant to people in power," said Chessy Prout, 18, who said she was assaulted as a high school freshman and subsequently had to change schools. 
 
 Advocates slammed the speech afterward. “Don’t be duped by today’s announcement," said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center. "What seems procedural is a blunt attack on survivors of sexual assault. It will discourage schools from taking steps to comply with the law — just at the moment when they are finally working to get it right. And it sends a frightening message to all students: Your government does not have your back if your rights are violated. This misguided approach signals a green light to sweep sexual assault further under the rug.” 
 
 Complicating the issue for DeVos are comments made by her civil rights chief, Candice Jackson, who told The New York Times this summer that 90 percent of sexual assault claims stem from drunken and regretted sex. Another complication is President Donald Trump's boast about groping women in the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape. 
 
 “Secretary DeVos decided today to continue a pattern of undermining survivors’ rights, once again showing a clear lack of understanding or empathy for the millions of students who have experienced sexual violence on campus," Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat and ranking member of the Senate education committee, said in a statement. 
 
 But her announcement drew praise from at least one Republican lawmaker. 
 
 "The Department of Education is taking a positive first step in soliciting comments from stakeholders to get a better understanding of ways to better address the problem,” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said. "However, this is an issue where Congress must give the Department of Education clear statutory authority to properly regulate." 
 
 Despite the administration's plan to rewrite rules on Title IX, it's unlikely that schools will immediately change policies that they spent the last six years writing — and sometimes rewriting — to remain in compliance with federal law. 
 
 "No school is going to go back to doing what they were doing before the 2011 guidance," said Terry Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education. 
 
 Mel Leonor contributed to this story.
– The Trump administration will do away with the Obama administration's guidance on sexual assault and harassment in schools because, according to Betsy DeVos, it's unfair to students accused of such actions, Politico reports. “Every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined," the Washington Post quotes the education secretary as saying during a speech Thursday at George Mason University. The guidance issued in 2011 threatened schools with loss of funding under Title IX if they didn't do enough to protect their students from harassment, assault, and rape. But DeVos says the new policy "weaponized the Office for Civil Rights" against schools and students. She says she wants it replaced with a "fair system," USA Today reports. DeVos said the Obama-era guidance created "kangaroo courts," relied on a lower standard of proof than criminal courts, and used an "overly broad definition of sexual assault and harassment." "If everything is harassment, nothing is," she said. It's unclear what the Trump administration will replace the guidance with, though the process is expected to take months and the results to anger advocates for victims of sexual assault. Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, says repealing the Obama-era guidance is a "blunt attack on survivors of sexual assault." "It sends a frightening message to all students: Your government does not have your back if your rights are violated," she tells Politico.