School Discipline is Racist – President Obama Official Higher Rate Of School Suspensions For Blacks, Males “Potential Violation Of Civil Rights Laws”…

"Don’t you think that Jesse just wants it to be a race card? That has worked so well for them generally, I don’t think he really cares whether or not it actually IS the race card. He’s playing the card that pays". MC

This insanity actually started last April - Jesse Jackson: Trayvon Martin Would Not Have Been Killed If He Wasn’t Suspended From School – ergo Suspensions are RACIST – No More Black Suspensions…

It Advanced In August - With President Obama issuing an “executive order”  establishing the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans.  Effectively placing “quotas” on school discipline based on race.
It continues today……

(CNSNews.com) – “Students of color, students with disabilities and male students” are suspended at a disproportionate rate than their peers, in “potential violation of civil rights laws,” an Education Department
official said Wednesday at the first ever congressional hearing on the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

“We are alarmed by the disparities in disciplinary sanctions, particularly for students of color, students with disabilities, and male students,” said Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the Education Department. In written testimony, she said such disparities are a “potential violation of civil rights laws.”
“When African-American students are more than 3 ½ times as likely to be suspended or expelled as their

White peers, or students with disabilities are more than twice as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions as their non-disabled peers, as they are today – it raises substantial concerns,” Delisle told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Of course all of this actually ignores BEHAVIOR….

The Urban League looks at it this way:

The executive order was announced during the president’s recent speech to the National Urban League’s annual conference in New Orleans, and will coordinate efforts to harmonize programs for African-American students.
The executive order will also identify evidence-based practices to improve students’ achievement in school and college and develop a national network of individuals, organizations and communities that will share and implement these practices. The initiative also will create a new President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African-Americans and a federal interagency working group on educational excellence.
“Expanding educational opportunities, and ensuring equity and excellence at scale for our students is a shared goal of the National Urban League and the new White House initiative,” Morial added. “We look forward to partnering with the Administration and Congress to expand policies that will help close the achievement gap for African-American students and prepare them for 21^st century jobs.”
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics underscore the growing disparity between minority and white academic achievement, and the urgency for action. Black and Hispanic students trailed their white peers by an average of more than 20 points on the NAEP math and reading assessments at 4th and 8th grades, a difference of about two grade levels. These gaps persisted even though the score differentials between black and white students narrowed between 1992 and 2007 in 4th grade math and reading and 8th grade math (NCES, 2009, 2011).

When we read the surrounding articles, it reminded us of a very particular comment that seemed “unusual” at the time, because it was made by Jesse Jackson during a speech about Trayvon Martin in Sanford Florida back in early April.
At the time it just seemed odd and somewhat out-of-place, but now things are coming together:

[...] Jackson also said Martin’s case illustrated the high number of black students who are suspended from school. A report issued by the U.S. Department of Education last month found that black students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended or expelled. Martin had been suspended from school for having a baggie that contained marijuana residue shortly before he was killed.
“We must stop suspending our children,” Jackson said, asking the crowd to repeat: “Invest in them. Educate them.” 

Knowing how nothing with the Jackson / Sharpton / Jealous Team ever happens in a vacuum, we wanted to dig a little because this had the surroundings of a bigger story. Alas, time was devoted to the Zimmerman case and we could not expound. But we did now. And lookie what is right there from 2010:
The Department Of Justice – Civil Rights and School Discipline October 21st 2010

In recent years, many school districts across the country have begun to adopt strict zero-tolerance discipline policies that impose increasingly harsher punishments for seemingly minor infractions. These disciplinary measures – in-school or out-of-school suspensions, alternative school placements, expulsions, and referrals to police departments and juvenile authorities – disrupt a student’s education and diminish their chances for success.

For too many students, these school-imposed sanctions lead to the criminal justice system, a pathway commonly referred to as the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Regrettably, studies have shown that children of color are disproportionately affected by zero-tolerance policies, a trend that increases already significant disparities.

In other words: if you enforce rules, or punish bad behavior, the black students are going to be punished more because they are predominantly the worst behaved.
See where this is headed?……. and so the government (DOJ and DOE) set about in 2010 to develop a plan, an actual government based plan, to create an enforcement mechanism to deliver parity to school discipline based on race. And subsequently force the schools not to discipline black children with bad behavior. Not kidding. Read on…..

To examine this issue and discuss strategies for addressing it, on Sept. 27 – Sept. 28, 2010, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office jointly hosted a conference entitled, “Civil Rights and School Discipline: Addressing Disparities to Ensure Educational Opportunity.” Academic and policy leaders, lawyers and law enforcement officers, investigators and educators, advocates and researchers discussed and developed strategies to ensure that all children can access a pathway to success, not to prison.

During the [invitation only] conference, Attorney General Eric Holder, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Thomas E. Perez discussed this pervasive problem, the need for collaboration to tackle it and the administration’s commitment to addressing it:

ERIC HOLDER - Never before have our two agencies come together in this way – or brought together such a large and diverse group of partners – to discuss the best ways to ensure that civil rights and educational opportunities are protected for every student, at every level, and in every community…But it is just the beginning of what I know – and I pledge – will be an ongoing conversation about how we can better understand the causes, and most effectively remedy the consequences, of disparities in student discipline. I want to assure all of you that for me, for Secretary Duncan, for the agencies we lead, and for the administration – this work is a top priority.
US DOJ October 2010

Whiskey – Tango – Foxtrot ! The Department of Justice and the Department of Education are going to team up to insure that discipline in school behavior is now held to the same standards of equality in statistics? What the, huh,…. you’ve gotta be kidding me.?

“Disparate Impact” Defined – Adverse effect of a practice or standard that is neutral and non-discriminatory; but nonetheless, disproportionately affects individuals belonging to a particular group based on their race, age, ethnicity, or sex.

For every black child disciplined there needs to be a white child disciplined based on the percentage of black to white, or minority, student populations in the school?
No way. That would have to be a joke right?….
No joke…. unfortunately.
Reported 3 days ago in the National Examiner – Maryland Board of Education – Racial Quotas in School Discipline:

Disproportionate/Discrepant Impact. It is contained in the July 2012 Report of the Maryland Board of Education: School Discipline and Academic Success: Related Parts of Maryland’s Education Reform. (According to the Washington Post, there is a 30-day period for additional public comment before the rule can be adopted.)

This proposed rule violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution by pressuring schools to discipline students based on their race, rather than their individual conduct and the content of their character. That is at odds with court rulings like the federal appeals court ruling in People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (7th Cir. 1997), which forbid both racial-balancing, and quotas, in school discipline.

The proposed rule, COMAR 13A.08.01.21, is found on page 25 of the Report of the Maryland Board of Education: School Discipline and Academic Success: Related Parts of Maryland’s Education Reform. It reads as follows:

A. The Department shall develop a method to analyze local school system data to determine whether there is a disproportionate impact on minority students. B. The Department may use the discrepancy model to assess the impact of discipline on special education students. C. If the Department identifies a school’s discipline process as having a disproportionate impact on minority students or a discrepant impact on special education students, the school system shall prepare and present to the State Board a plan to reduce the impact within 1 year and eliminate it within 3 years. [boldface added]

Thus, the Board seeks to ban “disproportionate impact” – the term for something not motivated by racism that nevertheless unintentionally affects or weeds out more minorities than whites – in school discipline. But it has done so without the qualifications and limitations to that concept that apply in court. The Supreme Court has allowed minority employees to sue over such “disparate impact” in limited circumstances, but it has refused to allow minority students to sue over it. Its ruling in Alexander v. Sandoval, 532 U.S. 275 (2001), said that individuals could not sue under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act for “disparate impact,” only intentional discrimination. Title VI is the federal law that covers racial discrimination in schools and other institutions that receive federal funds. (The Board’s proposed rule is not needed to prevent racism or deliberate discrimination, since there are already several laws banning discriminatory treatment of anyone based on their race, as opposed to disparate impact, that students victimized by racial discrimination can already sue under, like 42 U.S.C. 1981, and Title VI).  

The fact that a higher percentage of black students are suspended than whites in most schools is not, for the most part, the product of racism by school officials, but rather reflects greater infraction rates tied to lamentable factors like poverty and single-parent households. As a scholar at the Brookings Institution points out, “children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed.” As the National Center for Health Statistics notes, while most whites and Asians are born to two-parent families, most blacks and Hispanics are not. See National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 60, No.2: Births: Preliminary Data for 2010 (Nov. 17, 2011).
Since infraction rates are typically higher among such minority groups, their discipline and suspension rates are naturally higher as well, even if that is bureaucratically defined as “disproportionate impact.” This is a reflection of unpleasant realities, not school officials’ racism. Preventing such discipline will only cause more disorder and violence in the schools, especially in predominantly black schools, thus harming the very disadvantaged people the Board of Education seeks to help.
Students are commonly victimized by members of their own race and peers of the same ethnicity. So watering down discipline for members of a racial group does not help that group. The fact that black students have been shortchanged by the larger society is not a reason to add insult to injury by depriving them of an orderly school environment and effective school discipline, or subjecting them to the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Pressure to discipline minorities and whites in numbers proportional to their percentage of the student body may also lead to other forms of racial discrimination in discipline, such as suspensions of white and Asian students for technicalities that would result in nothing more than a warning for a black student.
This is the natural outcome for government attempting to legislate behavior based on racial statistics as models for equality.
Think of another example of how this thought process would carry out, only this time in the Criminal Justice World:

If you apply this same methodology now being implemented by President Obama and Eric Holder to the criminal justice system, if blacks make up 17% of the population then blacks can only receive 17% of the incarcerations. If blacks commit 40% of the crime under their proposal then 23% of black criminals would be allowed to engage in crime, unless the police arrested more white people to offset the disparity.

So to convict and incarcerate a black male of murderer, the police will “have to” arrest a white male. Perhaps a white guy speeding down the street gets thrown in jail, because a black guy just murdered someone and they need the parity.

This is the ideology of our President.