You must be a public school teacher.I am. What sort of fact-based rebuttal is that, though?
You said that "race baiting tatics...resulted in zero tolerance/zero justice policies".
I replied:
If you'll do even a cursory search about "zero tolerance", you'll find it was enacted not because of "race-baiting" or fairness issues, but because of fears of school violence, sparked in part by widely publicized school shootings. You'll also find that most research shows that minorities are more likely to be punished under zero-tolerance policies.
In public schools, "zero tolerance" means that students are quickly suspended or expelled for breaking the law or violating school rules. These policies were initiated on the federal level by the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act, which responded to several notorious school shootings across the country. The federal law required states to kick out students who brought firearms to school.
Yet this fear of random violence is clearly the prime motivator for the adoption of zero tolerance approaches to school discipline.
The report raised concern that zero tolerance policies were resulting in high levels of suspension and expulsion of minority students. In 1998, more than 3.1 million students were suspended from school; although African-American children represent 17% of the public school enrollment, they constituted 32% of the out-of-school suspensions.
It is true that currently administrators use the rules to show that they aren't differentiating between students, but it's unclear as to whether or not any of the potential lawsuits are race-related.
School administrators say many schools depend on inflexible zero-tolerance policies because officials fear being sued if they differentiate among students...."We live in a litigious society today," says Edward Kelly, superintendent of a 51,000-student system in Prince William County, Va., outside Washington, D.C. "In the old days, you could handle something on an individual basis. But today, parents are reluctant to accept a school's authority. They're quick to sue if they don't like a punishment."