By Jason L. Riley | The Wall Street Journal
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ends a policy that subordinated safety to political correctness.
A high-school student goes through a
metal detector at her school in Detroit, March 8. Photo: Carlos
Osorio/Associated Press
There are some interviews a journalist never forgets. I
remember the time a father in Harlem explained to me why he had pulled his son
out of the neighborhood public school and enrolled him in a nearby charter
school.
The father was tall and thin. He kept both hands in his
pockets as we stood talking, but he had a very expressive face. I thought he
was going to tell me that the charter school had smaller classes or better
graduation rates. Instead, he wanted to talk about something most parents take
for granted when they send Johnny and Susie off to school each morning:
physical safety.
He didn’t take it for granted. He told me the atmosphere
at the old school had been chaotic, that bullying was rampant, and that his
son, a sixth-grader at the time, had become terrified of the place. One day the
boy was attacked by other students in the school lavatory, and the father got a
call to pick him up from the hospital. It was the final straw. “I didn’t know
anything about charters,” said the father. “I was just looking for an escape.”
After the new school assured him his child would not have to worry each day
about being assaulted by his classmates, he was sold.
I thought about that family last week when news broke
that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was revoking an Obama-era policy on school
discipline.
In 2014 the Obama administration sent school districts “guidance”
letters that essentially threatened federal action if black suspension rates
weren’t reduced.
The letter stated that even if a school’s suspension policy
“is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention
race—and is administrated in an evenhanded manner,” the district could still
face a federal civil-rights investigation if the policy “has a disparate
impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a
particular race.”
Put another way, the administration was demanding racial
parity in school discipline, regardless of who was being disruptive, which is
as silly as demanding racial parity in police arrests, regardless of who’s
committing crimes.
The result is that more schools have been disciplining
fewer students in order to achieve racial balance in suspension rates and stay
out of trouble with the federal government.
Civil-rights lawsuits are
embarrassing—to be accused of racial discrimination is often tantamount to
being found guilty of it. They’re also expensive to fight, and the federal
government has far more resources than any school district.
The easier course
for schools is to pretend that students from different racial and ethnic groups
misbehave at similar rates. School safety becomes secondary.
In Oklahoma City, principals told teachers not to request
a suspension “unless there was blood.”
After school districts in Los Angeles
and Chicago softened their policies to curb suspensions, teachers reported more
disorder, and students reported feeling less safe.
Following a similar move in
Philadelphia, truancy increased and academic achievement fell.
Schools in
Wisconsin that followed the guidance also saw subsequent reductions in math and
reading proficiency.
Like other liberal advocates of school-discipline reform,
Arne Duncan, who was serving as President Obama’s education secretary when the
guidance was issued, insisted that blacks are suspended at higher rates than
other groups only because school officials are racially biased. “It’s not
caused by differences in children,” he said. “It is adult behavior that needs
to change.”
Yet many of the schools where these uneven discipline
rates persist have minority principals and no shortage of minority teachers and
administrators.
What would be their motive for singling out black and brown
kids for suspensions and expulsions, unless those students’ behavior warrants
it?
And why shouldn’t we expect to find varying rates of misbehavior among
racial and ethnic groups in school, when that is exactly what we find outside
school?
The bigger problem with these antisuspension crusades is
that they ultimately harm the groups they are supposed to help.
After New York
City made it more difficult to remove troublemakers from the classroom, schools
with the highest percentages of minority students were more likely to
experience an increase in fighting, gang activity and drug use.
A federal
report on school crime and safety released last year by the National Center for
Education Statistics found that 25% of black students nationwide reported being
bullied, the highest proportion of any racial or ethnic group.
Some kids go to school to learn, while others go to
generate disorder. If we want to narrow racial gaps in academic achievement,
policies ought to prioritize the needs of the former—and a school stripped of
its ability to effectively discipline students will be hard-pressed to
effectively teach them. Don’t believe me? I know a father in Harlem you should
talk to.
