As bad as the Obama administration was on public school discipline policy, the Biden administration is shaping up to be even worse.
In his continuing effort to appease the far left, President Biden is looking at re-implementing race-based school discipline policies from the Obama administration. Based on the assumption that differences in suspension and expulsion rates along racial lines must indicate racism, the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance that led schools to implement discipline quotas based on the color of a student’s skin.
As a result of this guidance, suspension rates fell across the country. This policy was reversed under President Trump, but the current administration is ready to bring them back.
To claim differences in suspension rates by racial group are wholly the result of racism is based on shaky evidence at best. As has been pointed out by Heather MacDonald, once prior student behavior is accounted for, the effect of race on suspensions largely disappears, according to research published in the Journal of Criminal Justice.
Research that has compared student referrals to the principal’s office with eventual suspension rates has found no racial disparities. Such policies assuredly fit the Biden administration’s embrace of critical race theory in seeing racism in every disparate outcome. But these policies can have meaningful, negative effects on America’s kids.
A 2017 analysis by the Manhattan Institute compared student reports of safety before and after interventions that mandated reductions in suspensions. Naturally, students reported a decrease in safety and an increase in violence and drug use. Declining discipline can have spillover effects into other aspects of education.
In 2018, my employer conducted a deep dive into the effect of politically correct discipline policies on achievement in Wisconsin schools. Following the guidance from the Obama administration, school districts across Wisconsin began implementing a discipline program known as Positive Behavioral Supports and Interventions (PBIS). --->READ MORE HERE
 |
| Photo: Hans Gutknecht/Zuma Press |
Going easy on bad behavior makes life difficult for those students who are in school to get an education.
What should take priority in K-12 education, the physical safety of students or racial balance in school suspension rates? Barack Obama and Donald Trump had different answers to that question, and it probably won’t surprise you where President Biden comes down.
In 2012, the Education Department released a study showing that black students were more likely than their white peers to be suspended and expelled from school. This disparity was taken as evidence of racial bias, and two years later the department issued threatening “guidance” letters to school districts across the country. The letters essentially warned that schools would face federal civil-rights investigations if black suspension rates didn’t come down. Schools were pressured to discipline students, or not, based on race rather than behavior, and many administrators and teachers obliged.
In New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—the nation’s three largest school systems—reductions in suspensions and expulsions were followed by an uptick in bullying and other disruptive behavior. Students and teachers alike have reported feeling less safe. Fighting, gang activity and drug use have increased. A 2018 study of schools in Wisconsin found that “softer discipline policies, pushed by the Obama administration, are having a negative impact on student test scores.”
The sad irony is that black students, in whose name this was done, were the ones most hurt by racial quotas in school discipline. A 2017 federal survey of school safety by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 25% of black students nationwide reported being bullied, the highest percentage of any racial or ethnic group. --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.
No comments:
Post a Comment