With the presidential administration having changed hands and the likelihood of the chief enforcer of the “Dear Colleague Letter” Catherine Lhamon returning to the head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the time could not be better for us to relaunch our OCR Resolutions Database. This database systematically tracks OCR’s Title IX investigations in both higher and lower ed and provides a suite of interactive tools – visual reports, files, tables, maps, search engines, and more – to assist Title IX professionals, advocates, reporters, students who are victims of gender bias and their families, and researchers.

The OCR Resolutions Database is now available here, along with a full preview of features you can interact with and try out for yourself.

Key Functions of the OCR Resolutions Database

You can use this database to do the following:

• Learn what makes complaints successful, what causes schools to run afoul of OCR, and what OCR requires for schools to come into compliance. Common complaints include sexual harassment, unfair discipline, sexual violence, discrimination in academic programs, unequal athletics opportunities, discrimination in admissions, and retaliation. Often, Title IX investigations also spark investigations into other areas (and vice versa), such as disability, race, and age discrimination.
• Compare and monitor key similarities and differences in OCR’s Title IX enforcement among presidential administrations using extensive datasets and unique interactive reports.
• Discover which schools have a poor history of compliance and the nature of the complaints made against them.
• Identify which demographics of students need more support, what support they need, and where.
• “Watch the watchers”: compare and monitor the general effectiveness of OCR’s regional offices by evaluating the experience, diversity, and investigation outcomes of OCR personnel on both a broad and granular level.

Previously called the OCR Database, this was a resource we offered from September 2019 until it was discontinued in July 2020. We have reimagined, rebuilt from scratch, re-researched, and radically expanded it for this relaunch.

We believe this database will serve an important purpose in holding academic and government institutions accountable, empowering victims and their families, supporting professionals and advocates, and raising the level of informed discourse in Title IX matters. You will find there is no other resource quite like it.

Thank you for reading. The OCR Resolutions Database is available here.