'Racial Discrepancy' Madness Spreads

Via Looking in the Mirror

I recently suggested that our secretary of education, Arne Duncan, had his brain hacked by enemies of the United States. As proof I offered his bizarre reaction to a report recounting racial discrepancies in school discipline. I argued, for example, that forcibly equalizing discipline across racial lines would devastate racially mixed schools, with the biggest losers being decent African-American students, who typically lack a safer school option.

The capturing of brains may be worse than I initially suspected. A PBS Newshour show also took up how blacks were being disproportionally punished. The host (Jeffrey Brown) interviewed two distinguished educators. Christopher Edley is dean of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and co-chair of the U.S. Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission, and Chester Finn is the president of the Fordham Institute, a well-regarded conservative think-tank that covers K-12 education (Finn also served in the Reagan administration).

Let me summarize how these experts, including a bona-fide conservative, view racial discrepancies in school discipline.

Taking a "civil rights perspective," Dean Edley implied that where there is smoke, there's fire -- these statistics reflect racial discrimination. More important, these gaps suggest that "we are not providing equal educational opportunity." After all, if schools cannot eliminate disorder, how can they impart knowledge to all students? And, Dean Edley continues, by kicking out students, we are pushing them away from academic commitment. We need alternatives to discipline -- for example, training teachers in classroom management and interventions, plus upgraded skills to understand the lives of unruly students. Civil rights means developing school interventions to eliminate both violence and academic inadequacy.

Perhaps only in today's PC-dominated academy does a dean of a Law School reflexively equate plain-to-see divergence in behavior with difficult-to-prove accusations of discrimination. Dean Edley surely knows that blacks are more likely than whites to be convicted of criminal offenses and that this gap cannot be blamed on "discrimination."

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