Obama's Affirmative Action For School Discipline

Obama has signed an executive order entitled “White House Initiative On Educational Excellence,” which qualifies as deceitful a name as a politician has ever invented. It should be called, “Affirmative Action in School Discipline.” What this literally means for all of us is that discipline in schools will no longer be based on the content your character, but on the color of your skin.

Obama has signed an executive order entitled “White House Initiative On Educational Excellence,” which qualifies as deceitful a name as a politician has ever invented. It should be called, “Affirmative Action in School Discipline.” This order establishes a government panel composed of senior officials from the Departments of Education, Justice, and Labor for the purpose of promoting “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.” The order goes on to say, “African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools, and challenging college-preparatory classes, and they disproportionately experience school discipline.” You would think this was pre- Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) the way this order is worded.

What this literally means for all of us is that discipline in schools will no longer be based on the content your character, but on the color of your skin. Since a disproportionate number of African – American students currently receive punishment, this federal mandate means there will be only two ways to balance the scales: punish more white kids who didn’t deserve it, or ignore more offenses by black students. This is all based on the fact that there is a numerical discipline disparity between the two groups, not because of any proven racial discrimination. This is the same tactic the left used when they bludgeoned American companies with affirmative action in hiring, firing, and promotion. Ditto for colleges when it came to admissions, even though no discrimination beyond raw numbers had ever been proven. Not only was there no law mandating such unequal treatment, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that these kinds of policies were unconstitutional. However, that didn’t stop the feds from relentlessly pressuring companies and schools into compliance. But once the courts ruled against them, they stopped doing it openly, and resorted to disguising their intentions while continuing the same practice under nice sounding names like “diversity.” Under diversity policies, characteristics other than race must be taken into account for employment and admission decisions – things like culture and language. Companies and colleges now proudly boast about their “diverse” workforce or student body, which is supposed to enrich the experiences of all those white employees and students. The courts haven’t caught up with this tactic yet, or this too should be ruled illegal, since these policies are not based on merit, but are blatantly discriminatory. Forget that our own Declaration of Independence stated that the only purpose for government was to secure the natural rights given to us by our Creator. In Obama’s view, the primary purpose for government is to make all outcomes (not opportunities) equal and fair, whether it was deserved or not.

All of this presumes to make up for some unknown or unproven discrimination, which the left assumes must be happening, based on the pure percentages of blacks disciplined, versus the percentage of blacks and whites in the general population. Since the percentages of blacks who are punished for misbehavior exceeds the percentages of whites, an incorrect assumption is made that this must be the result of discrimination, not behavior. This would be like presuming that most NBA teams discriminate against whites because blacks compose the majority of their teams, percentage-wise, far in excess of their percentages in the general population. Why doesn’t the federal government demand that teams employ a “diverse” workforce in proportion to their numbers in the population? The obvious answer is because discrimination is not the likely reason for these teams’ make-up. The same goes for school discipline. Would the fact that the vast majority of black kids are born out of wedlock and are raised in single parent homes have anything to do with why they act up in school? Many studies have shown this exact direct relationship. In my teaching experience, virtually ALL of the misbehaving students, white or black, were from broken and dysfunctional homes. On the other hand, I rarely had to discipline any student who came from a two-parent home, particularly if those parents were the student’s birth parents.

This is an outrageous infringement on our educational system, which the federal government has no business being involved in anyway, and policies like this are the reason why. It’s bad enough that they are co-opting our schools’ curriculum with politically correct stuff like the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, which programs our kids to be obedient little world citizens. Now we have to endure disciplinary lottery. What's next, a program such as the one Obama envisioned for the energy industry –cap and trade – where companies could trade carbon credits to lessen their tax burden? If one inner-city school has too many black miscreants, let them trade for some suburban “white credits” so their school will stay under the required disciplinary quotas . Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims can be traded in the same way so that “fairness” will reign supreme in the universe of students. If this sounds crazy, and it is, it is no crazier than this mindless Obama Equi-bad policy. Why not take it one step further and enact the same policy for gender that we do for race? Boys get punished more than girls. Isn’t this unfair to boys, since they comprise most of the disciplinary problems? Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen because government isn’t interested in protecting boys, only those it perceives as victims – women and minorities. None of this, of course, will do anything to raise the dismal academic record of American schools, and may even make things worse, as morale suffers due to wrongheaded policies like this one. This isn’t funny or sane, and should be resisted on all fronts. If your state legislators will not commit to fighting this unconstitutional interference with our schools, then vote them out and replace them with someone who will.

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