My response to a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial was published last week by that paper in its “Correspondent of the Day” feature, and I thought I would make the issues it discusses the focus of this week’s email.
My response was titled “Undisciplined students hurt the entire class,” and here it is:
You made two points in your recent editorial “Political Correctness” that were spot on. Both issues involved the Obama administration’s Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. In each instance, the administration has indeed “fixated on leftist identity politics.”
In the first instance, the department has reacted to the serious issue of sexual assaults on campuses with decidedly unserious guidance for universities, urging them to stack the deck against alleged violators who may not have been violators at all. The second matter is even more absurd. The administration is creating a strong presumption that any school system in which discipline policies have a disproportionate statistical result for this or that racial or ethnic group is illegally discriminatory.
But the fact is that there can be wide variations in a school district among different groups when it comes to misbehavior. The title of a recent article in the Journal of Criminal Justice neatly sums this up: “Prior problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in school suspensions.”
The Obama administration’s insistence on de facto racial quotas is what is really illegal. What’s more, it is bad policy. If students who should be disciplined are not disciplined, this penalizes their classmates who will be trying to learn in unruly classrooms. Those students are themselves likely to be African-Americans from poor backgrounds.
Somehow, those enamored of leftist identity politics always forget about the interests of the law-abiding members of poor communities, even though they are in the majority.
My discussion prompted a lot of comment from readers, both positive and negative. Hans Bader — who is an expert on these issues and works at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a frequent ally of the Center for Equal Opportunity — kindly helped answer some of the critics. He noted:
The above letter was written by former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general Roger Clegg, a civil-rights expert. He carefully read the Education Department “Dear Colleague” letter he is criticizing in his letter to the editor. Links to the study he mentions in his letter can be found in my 2014 column in the Daily Caller, which supports everything Clegg says in his letter. Clegg is arguing that colorblind school discipline rules should not be overridden by “disparate impact” rules being interpreted to require racial quotas in school discipline, which violate the federal appeals court decision in People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education (1997).
Hans then added:
The Department of Education, where I used to work as a lawyer, is wrongly pressuring schools to adopt racial quotas in school suspensions, ignoring research showing that black students have higher misbehavior rates because they are more likely to come from broken homes. As Katherine Kersten noted this year in the Star-Tribune, black students’ “discipline rate is higher than other students’ because, on average, they misbehave more.” …
Many thanks, Hans!
I’ll add that my analysis of the DoEd guidance when it first came out was published by National Review Onlinehere.
Finally, I should say that the original editorial by the Richmond Times-Dispatch is itself well worth reading:
The Education Department’s double standard on school discipline
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and on the issue of political correctness Donald Trump has a point. For evidence, just look at the Education Department’s ridiculous double standard on school discipline.
In 2011, in response to perfectly legitimate and reasonable concerns about the prevalence of sexual misconduct on campuses across the country, the department sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter with an unreasonable demand. It instructed colleges and universities to lower the standard of proof in cases of alleged sexual assault. Instead of requiring “clear and convincing” evidence, the department said, schools should require only a “preponderance of the evidence,” the better to find students guilty.
Law professors across the country have condemned that standard for violating the rights of the accused — and it’s not hard to see why. Colorado State University-Pueblo recently expelled a student-athlete for sexual assault even though the woman in question said their relationship was consensual, told investigators “I’m fine and I wasn’t raped,” and the two had sex again later.
The Education Department is now investigating 192 colleges and universities for not prosecuting sexual misconduct cases more aggressively. And yet for grades K-12, the Education Department has been hammering schools for being too aggressive on school discipline, especially when it comes to suspensions, because of their alleged “disparate impact” on minorities.
Two years ago the department issued guidance warning schools that they “violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies” if those policies affect minority students more than non-minority students. Under that standard, a school that metes out exactly the same punishment to every student who breaks the rules is not discriminating if black students commit fewer infractions per capita — but it is discriminating if they happen to commit more.
Since schools cannot punish white students who have done nothing wrong, at certain times the only way to avoid this dilemma, and hence the wrath of federal officials, will be to refrain from punishing minority students in cases where the students are at fault.
In short, an Education Department fixated on leftist identity politics has incentivized colleges and universities to convict some students who might be innocent — and incentivized K-12 schools not to convict some students who might be guilty. For liberals trying to unpack the mystery of Donald Trump’s appeal, this would be a good place to start.
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Just a few words on the recent party conventions: Hated to see Ivanka Trump cite the phony “women-get-paid-78-cents-on-the-dollar” figure in the speech introducing her father. Amused at the decision to have the Rolling Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” playing as the balloons dropped for Donald Trump. Irritated to see Tim Kaine going back and forth between English and Spanish in his acceptance speech. Really irritated to see Hillary Clinton decrying America’s supposed “systemic racism” and, therefore, calling for the “reform our criminal justice system from end to end” in hers.
