Forcing race into the school-discipline question

IMAGINE that you're the principal or vice principal of a high school with the usual array of discipline problems. Your students act up in class, get involved in fights, are routinely late to school or class, or engage in a million other things that you need to know about and deal with.

In your mail, you get a memo on student discipline directly from Eric Holder, the attorney general of the United States. Is this some help for you to deal with the daily effort to contain chaos and foster learning?

The answer clearly would be no. Under the guise of this phony argument about a "school-to-prison pipeline" that involves overly zealous school-discipline policies targeting black and Hispanic students and putting them on a fast track to prison, Holder uses the full weight of his office to attack "zero-tolerance" policies that he says put the criminal-justice system into the classroom.

I've written extensively about the silly overkill of zero-tolerance policies. It seems like every day there is another news story about kids suspended for bringing a plastic knife into school to cut a cake in a third-grade classroom, or very young kids suspended for a kiss, or for using their fingers to form a gun. That is zero tolerance taken to the extreme. I cannot believe that a principal or vice principal wouldn't be embarrassed handing down such ridiculous verdicts.

Holder is not addressing these. Instead, he argues that even if a school's discipline policies are neutral, if they result in more blacks and Hispanics being suspended, then they are discriminatory.

If schools are chilled even a little bit by this, this will result in less education and more chaos in schools, particularly inner-city ones.

I've taught in a lot of schools, and I resent the statements in this memo from Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, like when "the first instinct should not be to call 9-1-1 when there's a problem."

Schools are not calling police for minor infractions. I think that often too much pressure is put on classroom teachers to deal with kids that disrupt learning for other students.

All this boils down to Holder and Duncan suggesting that schoolteachers and administrators are suspending kids or referring them to law enforcement because of some racial bias. Do they really think that in big-city public schools, like Philadelphia's, where many of the teachers and administrators are black or Hispanic, that they are biased and acting out of racial spite?

No, but what they are proposing is a racial-quota discipline system. Is that really what will result in a better learning environment in public schools?

Reaction to this initiative among education experts has been mostly negative. Joy Pullmann, managing editor of School Reform News, said: "It's ridiculous to assign quotas for discipline based on race. If we did that, for one thing, we'd have to believe that Asian students are severely underdisciplined."

I would ask: Are Asian students being favored, since they are not suspended as much as whites? Or is it that they are better behaved in schools?

Andrew Coulson, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, said: "The kinds of kids who just want to be free to learn in peace, who are not disruptive, have their education injured by the disruptive kids who remain in the classroom. And since African-American kids are more often assigned to schools like that, they'll be the ones most hurt."

I've taught in Camden and other places like the places Coulson talks about and he is right on the money. Even one constantly disruptive kid can drain a teacher and a class.

Aside from the bitter racial politics we've seen Holder engage in (like his dismissal of the summary judgment against the New Black Panther Party for their intimidation tactics at the polls in Fairmount on Election Day in 2008), this is clearly the work of those who have never spent time on the front lines of many schools where teachers and administrators endure incredible stresses in order to try and reach kids.

Duncan and Holder would have you believe that these people are not only biased, but are also wusses who can't deal with and solve everyday problems. When you have educrats imposing draconian zero-tolerance punishments for the silliest of infractions, it calls into question the judgment of school leaders to handle any kind of discipline. And it opens the door for this type of chilling discipline-by-quota nonsense.

This fantasyland memo attempts to wish away the problems in many families that then become the problems of the schools. It doesn't address the needs of troubled students and adds levels of chaos that stop other students from learning.

It also plays into the notion that somehow there is a secret system that is targeting kids to get into trouble in school, drop out and end up in prison. I only hope that Holder and Duncan don't get traction and the already very difficult job of teachers and administrators becomes an impossible one.