Weaponized Equality

PK Note: Forgot to publicize this exclusive post over at Vdare on the Chick-Fil-A, Coca-Cola, and Cobb County. The battle was over long ago; but the war is just about to begin.

It dawned on me reading Lawrence Auster's piece, The next frontier—racially equal outcomes in school discipline, that we are witnessing the "last gasp of the Harvard establishment."

Equality has been weaponized, jeopardizing the health of students and classrooms across America -- all in the name of the continued promotion of Black-Run America (BRA). Last year we wrote the Department of Education and the state of Michigan's war on - well - nature with the entry Black Privilege articulated in One Article: Grand Rapids Public Schools punished for punishing Black Students Disproportionately. We wrote:

That school systems are now punished for punishing Black students that act out in class because they can’t follow the same rules that white and Asians students have no problem following is a cause for federal involvement. 

Never mind that in such diverse geographic areas as Charlotte, Seattle, Chicago, and Delaware that the one constant variable in school discipline is a propensity for Black students to be overly represented in those suspended.

This could never explain why the proficiency of Black male students was found to be much lower than anticipated, right?

The federal government will soon require every school system to be cognizant of Black student’s proclivities for not abiding by the rules governing proper behavior. Their rebellion will be a state-sanctioned form of self-expression.

Now, The Daily Caller reminds of just how far the idea of "Black Privilege" has come in a year (Obama backs race-based school discipline policies, Neil Munro, July 27, 2012):

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

His July 26 executive order established a government panel to promote “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”

“African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools, and challenging college-preparatory classes, and they disproportionately experience school discipline,” said the order, titled “White House Initiative On Educational Excellence.”

Because of those causes, the report suggests, “over a third of African American students do not graduate from high school on time with a regular high school diploma, and only four percent of African American high school graduates interested in college are college-ready across a range of subjects.”

“What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for,” because school officials will try to level punishments despite groups’ different infraction rates, predicted Hans Bader, a counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Bader is a former official in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and has sued and represented school districts and colleges in civil-rights cases.

“It is too bad that the president has chosen to set up a new bureaucracy with a focus on one particular racial group, to the exclusion of all others,” said Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity.

“A disproportionate share of crimes are committed by African Americans, and they are disproportionately likely to misbehave in school… [because] more than 7 out of 10 African Americans (72.5 percent) are born out of wedlock… versus fewer than 3 out of 10 whites,” he said in a statement to The Daily Caller. Although ” you won’t see it mentioned in the Executive Order… there is an obvious connection between these [marriage] numbers and how each group is doing educationally, economically, criminally,” he said.

The order created a “President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.” It will include senior officials from several federal agencies — including the Departments of Education, Justice and Labor — which have gained increased power over state education policies since 2009.

The progressives campaign for race-based discipline policies also won a victory in Maryland July 24.

The state’s board of education established a policy demanding that each racial or ethnic group receive roughly proportional level of school penalties, regardless of the behavior by members of each group.

The board’s decision requires that “the state’s 24 school systems track data to ensure that minority and special education students are not unduly affected by suspensions, expulsions and other disciplinary measures,” said a July 25 Washington Post report.
“Disparities would have to be reduced within a year and eliminated within three years,” according to the Post.

The state’s new racial policy was welcomed by progressives, including Judith Browne Dianis, a director of the D.C.-based Advancement Project. “Maryland’s proposal is on the cutting edge,” she told the Post.

Dianis’ project is also a law firm that litigates race-related questions, and it gains from laws and regulations that spur race-related legal disputes.

“The combination of overly harsh school policies … has created a ‘schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track,’ in which punitive measures such as suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior,” claimed the group’s website.

This “is a racial justice crisis, because the students pushed out through harsh discipline are disproportionately students of color,” the group insisted.

The administration had previously advertised its support for the campaign to impose race-based discipline policies.

In February, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that “we’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled.”

“This is, quite simply, unacceptable. … These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed,” he said in his speech, given in Atlanta, Ga.

Weaponized Equality. If you can't close the racial gap in achievement with billions, trillions, perhaps quadrillions (toss in the opportunity costs wasted over the past fifty years, that dollar amount adds up quick) of dollars and man-hours in labor attempting to teach the unteachable, perhaps, just perhaps the only way to obtain educational equality is to stunt white students development by realizing that merely their showing up to school dripping with "white privilege" is a cause for disciplinary actions in BRA.