Title IX, the 1972 United States federal law forbidding sex discrimination in education, has a rarely-talked-about but surprisingly tenuous history which illustrates how discourses of equality come to mean political powerlessness for diverse girls and women in school. Unfortunately, "sexual" debates such as women's sports and sexual harassment often overshadow discussion of gendered curriculum and the classroom. These debates also illustrate a pattern of discourse that neutralizes women's differences, whether innate or learned, in an equality model over which they have no control without first considering the effects women's differences will have on their ability to achieve equitably. Even after tracing 26 years of Title IX, it does not take much time or effort to discover that educators, even feminists, are not doing enough for girls in their classrooms, that schools of education are not teaching educators how to recognize, appreciate, and teach in increasingly, not decreasingly, diverse classrooms, that school systems spend more energy and resources on avoiding controversy than on imagining better ways to do schooling. What will take time, effort, and commitment is demanding change. (Contains a figure of a time line of selected civil rights law changes affecting females in education, and 42 references.) (BT)