In her Oscar acceptance speech Sunday night, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand endorsed “inclusion riders.” I’m not an entertainment-law specialist, but apparently this is a proviso that top actors and actresses are being urged to stick into their contracts which demand “diversity” in the hiring of other employees by the employer.
Putting aside whether this is a good idea artistically and morally, I want to point out here that there can be legal problems with it. The devil is in the details, but just to give you the idea: Suppose that a top salesman for a company said that he’ll continue to work there only if no African Americans are hired. The employer agreeing to such condition would clearly be in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination by private employers.
And suppose that an actress says that she’ll do a picture only if the company making it agrees to hire according to racial, ethnic, and gender quotas. Well, if such quotas are illegal — and they are — then such an inclusion rider would be illegal, too.
On the other hand, if the inclusion rider demanded that the employer hire only those individuals best qualified, without regard to race, ethnicity, or sex, then there would be no legal problem. And that’s all anyone really wants, right? No?
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Deft DeVos Delay – Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has announced a delay in the implementation of an Obama-era rule involving minority students and special education. The Left is unhappy with this, but the delay and request for further comments is well-advised.
Among other problems, the proposed rule is designed to pressure schools into achieving a politically correct racial and ethnic balance in the students in special-education programs, but such quotas are both unconstitutional and bad policy. And the bad policy includes the fact, noted by experts on both sides of the aisle, that minority students who ought to be in special-education programs and would benefit from them will not be admitted because “too many” students with their skin color or national origin are in them in a particular school system.
The delay is an outgrowth, by the way, of the Trump administration’s willingness to reconsider dubious regulations generally. Good job.
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Rampant Teacher Racism in Minnesota, of All Places? – Along the same lines, there’s a recent MinnPost news story on an investigation that the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) has under way, aimed at school districts and charters that have statistical racial disparities in their discipline rates. You know immediately that it’s going to be a slanted article, since it asserts at the outset that the “investigation comes at a time when federal officials are taking a step back from enforcing equitable access to public education for marginalized student groups,” and so the state needs to “fill the void in oversight.”
The basis for this assertion is not explained. Perhaps the reporter is speculating that the Trump administration is rethinking the Obama administration’s dubious “Dear Colleague” letter that threatened school districts with an aggressive use of the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement in the context of school discipline. But, as I’ve explained before, such rethinking is to be welcomed, not lamented.
The MinnPost article goes on to say that “MDHR chose to focus on subjective incidents” such as “bullying, disruptive/disorderly conduct, verbal abuse, other [sic], attendance, threats and intimidation.” But of course such “subjective incidents” vary enormously in severity (talking out of turn and throwing a punch might both be “disruptive/disorderly conduct”); thus, you have to control for a lot of variables before it can be asserted that a disparity is evidence of discrimination. When the article reports that “one of the best predictors of whether a kid will get suspended is if he or she has previously been suspended,” that’s no surprise. Nor should it be a surprise to anyone that “suspensions are also associated with poor performance on tests.”
Being a non-educator and, what’s worse, a Southerner of a certain age myself, I’ll let others decide whether MDHR is correct in concluding that your typical Minnesota educator in 2018 is likely to hold “unconscious attitudes about race” and thus needs to be subjected to “rigorous implicit bias training.”
The problem is that racial disparities in discipline rates likely reflect racial disparities in discipline violations. To impose quotas on schools (what’s sought here are described delicately as “agreements with [MDHR] to work toward reducing discipline disparities that disproportionately impact students of color”) would be unconstitutional. It would also be bad policy, since if students who should be disciplined aren’t, it does them no favors in the long run, and of course immediately harms the learning environment of their classmates, who are themselves likely to be “students of color,” and may in addition put them and their teachers at physical risk.
So there might be something for the Trump administration to investigate here, all right, but it might be MDHR itself.
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Pacific versus Pathetic – Pacific Legal Foundation, our frequently litigation ally, has filed an excellent lawsuit against the city of Hartford, Conn., on behalf of seven families. The city runs a magnet-school system and insists on the schools having a politically correct racial and ethnic makeup. That’s bad enough, but on top of that, it will refuse admission to African-American and Latino students if there are not enough white and Asian-American students in the schools even if as a result those slots remain unfilled.
As PLF concludes, “Black and Hispanic students are therefore denied the same opportunity to attend the City’s magnet schools only because of their race.” And this, of course, is a violation of the Constitution and federal civil-rights laws.
Once again, liberals are perfectly happy to sacrifice individuals of any color on the altar of political correctness. Read all about it here.
