Please read the entire article, I am only providing a few snippets from it.
Education Week: Obama Administration Targets 'Disparate Impact' of Discipline
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Federal officials are getting the word out that addressing racial disparities in school discipline is a high priority, and they plan to use “disparate-impact analysis” in enforcing school discipline cases—a legal course of action that some civil rights lawyers contend was neglected under the administration of President George W. Bush.
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And yet again, the all intrusive federal government thinks it needs to poke its nose into your school district.
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“Regrettably, students of color are receiving different and harsher disciplinary punishments than whites for the same or similar infractions, and they are disproportionately impacted by zero-tolerance policies—a fact that only serves to exacerbate already deeply entrenched disparities in many communities,”
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If it is true that children of color are getting a different punishment, then that needs to change.
Zero-tolerance is exactly that, there is no gray area, so there is no way that ones skin color has a disproportionate impact. I call bull-feces on that.
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In enforcing civil rights law, she said, federal officials look for evidence of “different treatment,” or that people intentionally discriminated against a particular group. But federal officials are obliged to also look at “disparate impact,” she said, whether a particular group is disproportionately affected by a policy though no intention of discrimination may exist. An education agency would be found out of compliance, for example, only if an equally sound policy would have less of a disparate impact, she said.
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Essentially, she is saying that if the school is 20% black, but over 20% of disciplinary actions are taken against blacks, it is "disparate impact', regardless of the fact that over 20% of the actions requiring discipline were cased by blacks.
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“In education, with respect to discipline, my concern would be that school districts are afraid they will be hauled before a court or some administration agency and threatened with a loss of federal funding whenever they have a racial imbalance of one kind or another,” he said. He explained that educators might become hypersensitive to students’ race or ethnicity in discipline decisions, resulting in disciplining some students who shouldn’t be and not disciplining others who deserve it.
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That is exactly what will happen, and we all know which direction those discipline decisions will favor.
10-20-2010, 06:34 PM
Obama Administration Targets 'Disparate Impact' of Discipline
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