Nationally, black junior high and high school students are suspended at a rate more than three times as often as their white peers, twice as often as their Latino peers and more than 10 times as often as their Asian peers.
According to
former Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the "huge disparity
is not caused by differences in children; it's caused by differences in
training, professional development, and discipline policies. It is adult
behavior that needs to change."
In other words, the Education Department
sees no difference between the behavior of black students and white, Latino and
Asian students. It's just that black students are singled out for
discriminatory discipline.
Driven by Obama administration pressures, school
districts revised their discipline procedures by cutting the number of black
student suspensions.
Max Eden, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has
written a report, "School Discipline Reform and Disorder: Evidence from
New York City Public Schools, 2012-16."
The new discipline imposed on
public schools is called restorative justice.
Rather than punish a student
through exclusion (suspension), restorative justice encourages the student who
has misbehaved to reflect on his behavior, take responsibility and resolve to
behave better in the future.
The results of this new policy are: increased
violence, drug use and gang activity.
Max Eden examines the NYC School Survey
of teachers and students and finds that violence increased in 50 percent of
schools and decreased in 14 percent. Gang activity increased in 39 percent of
schools and decreased in 11 percent.
For drug and alcohol use, there was a 37
percent increase while only 7 percent of schools improved.
It's not just New York City where discipline is worse
under the Obama administration's policy.
Max Eden reports: "One Chicago
teacher told the Chicago Tribune that her district's new discipline policy led
to 'a totally lawless few months' at her school.
One Denver teacher told
Chalkbeat that, under the new discipline policy, students had threatened to
harm or kill teachers, 'with no meaningful consequences.' ...
After Oklahoma
City Public Schools revised its discipline policies in response to federal
pressure, one teacher told the Oklahoman that '[w]e were told that referrals
would not require suspension unless there was blood.'"
Max Eden reports that in Oklahoma City a teacher said
that: "Students are yelling, cursing, hitting and screaming at teachers
and nothing is being done but teachers are being told to teach and ignore the
behaviors. These students know there is nothing a teacher can do. Good students
are now suffering because of the abuse and issues plaguing these
classrooms."
In Buffalo, a teacher who was kicked in the head by a student
said: "We have fights here almost every day. The kids walk around and say,
'We can't get suspended -- we don't care what you say.'"
Ramsey County
attorney John Choi of St. Paul, Minnesota, described how the number of assaults
against teachers doubled from 2014 to 2015 and called the situation a
"public health crisis."
Testifying before the U.S. Commission on
Civil Rights, a former Philadelphia teacher said that a student told him,
"I'm going to torture you. I'm doing this because I can't be removed."
Eden's report cites similar school horror stories in other cities.
Since most of the school violence and discipline problems
rest with black students, there are a few questions that black parents,
politicians, academics and civil rights advocates should ponder.
Is academic
achievement among blacks so high that black people can afford to allow
miscreants and thugs to sabotage the education process?
For those pushing the
Obama administration's harebrained restorative justice policy, can blacks
afford for anything to interfere with the acquisition of academic excellence?
Finally, how does the Obama restorative justice policy differ from a Ku Klux
Klan policy that would seek to sabotage black education by making it impossible
for schools to rid themselves of students who make education impossible for
everyone else?
