Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
The Obama administration in 2014 sent “guidance” letters to government school districts essentially warning them that if the keep suspending or expelling black students at higher rates than white students, they could face civil rights investigations and loss of federal funding.
Thanks to the invidious doctrine of “disparate impact,” even if a policy is race-neutral on its face, it is discriminatory if it disproportionately ensnares black students. One could argue that black students display more discipline-worthy behaviors. We can debate this until the world ends. It won’t change the fact that schools should suspend or expel students who deserve it.
President Donald Trump is trying to stop the chaos. He recently issued an executive order — Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies — warning schools to return to race-neutral discipline policies.
“The Federal Government will no longer tolerate known risks to children’s safety and well-being in the classroom that result from the application of school discipline based on discriminatory and unlawful ‘equity’ ideology,” the executive order reads.
The executive order quotes a 2018 report from the Federal Commission on School Safety, which found that the consequences of the Obama administration’s slack school discipline policies “harmed students and schools,” and these schools “ignored or covered up — rather than disciplined — student misconduct in order to avoid any purported racial disparity in discipline numbers that might catch the eye of the federal government.”
Honest teachers would admit that school discipline policies under Obama and Biden made their jobs unbearable, especially female teachers. Trouble-making students rule the classroom, and no one learns anything other than how to get away with disruption.
Photo credit: San Mateo (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved
