Hey @zecarlo. I’ll move this over here since the other thread is mostly 2A talk.
Yes to the above.
I think you’re referring to the policy changes that came down from the Federal Dept of Ed during the Obama Era in 2010?
Disproportionate discipline rates based on race or ethnicity got a lot of attention over the past decade. The idea that we suspend or expel a higher number of AA kids, in particular. Think Ferguson and BLM, but extended down to the schools.
It’s problematic because they give zero regard for factors like socioeconomic status or the absence of a father in the home, but schools are now required to keep statistics on the suspension or expulsion rates for students based on race or ethnicity. Ok, right? Except culture does not factor into these stats at all. Neither do interventions, like the fact that the principal or counselor may have met with a kid 10 times before finally suspending him or her.
Schools who discipline a disproportionate number of AA or Hispanic kids are going to be portrayed as having a problem with equity, and will be held up as examples of widespread discrimination. Schools must comply with bringing their suspension or expulsion of minority students down, or face penalties, need to hire expensive consultants, and set aside $100s of thousands of dollars sometimes for staff education to help them not be discriminatory or racist. For example, I believe Minneapolis St. Paul area alone spent several million dollars in staff training, so it’s a BIG deal.
These numbers do not in any way take into account cultural factors in districts like Chicago where you have a very high homicide rate among kids who grow up in certain neighborhoods. The national homicide for kids ages 14-17 is 10 times higher in young Black men than for Whites and Hispanics combined. A small segment of that demographic is effectively terrorizing their communities because they are in street gangs. And every single indicator for behavioral problems will be statistically higher in young men who do not have a father in their life.
These policies effectively assume that these kids some how magically develop into violent felons at 18, but are likely to have normal school behavior or comportment that would mirror their AA, Asian or White peers who are growing up in in the small houses and apartments nearby, often with working class two-parent families. There is no allowance for these very statistically significant cultural differences. Only language about “disparate treatment.”
I worked for several years at a school near Compton, if you’re familiar. It’s a very high crime area near LA. Crips and Bloods. In one of my schools, nearly all the students were being raised in an old Great Society Era housing project. It was common to have three generations of female-run households who had all grown up there. Kids with a young single mother, or often by a grandmother, with at least one parent in prison or both young parents MIA due to legal or drug problems. I saw kids every single day on my caseload who had a parent in prison, and who were being raised by a grandmother. I did grief counseling with kids who had their father shot, sometimes they had witnessed it, and one student who had been raped by an older adolescent. Most of our staff, including the principle of the school was Black. You’d expect those kids to have higher discipline rates than the working class Vietnamese, Filipino or White kids who lived in the surrounding area, often with two parent families. Yeah, too bad that isn’t a consideration, under these policies. There is only racism as an explanation in this moral universe.
True. We usually just go to mediation and settle. I’ve been through a couple of those. Super fun stuff.
We have policies that strongly penalize districts who expel or suspend some very aggressive and violent kids because we’re highly motivated to NOT look like we’re discriminating against AAs or Hispanics. Meanwhile, we began passing zero tolerance policies toward bullying, with mandatory expulsion for some offenses. Some of this is from the state level, but these laws open up the schools to lawsuits if they are unable to protect kids from the behavior of aggressive and violent kids.
The schools are caught between a rock and a hard place.