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03/10/2010: "Here We Go Again, Same Old Shit Again"

Students' Civil Rights to Get Scrutiny
By Neil King "http://online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=NEIL+KING+JR.&ARTICLESEARCHQUERY_PARSER=bylineAND"

WASHINGTON…quot;The Obama administration plans to crack down on civil-rights infractions in school districts and university systems, including alleged disparities in the disciplining of white and black students.

The campaign will essentially put an enforcement stick behind the carrot of the administration's $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, which holds out the promise of extra federal funding if states revamp their education policies. While Race to the Top will reward school reforms, the civil-rights push will emphasize the potential to punish offending schools.

States found to be violating laws designed to assure equal treatment in education could, in extreme cases, face litigation or a withholding of federal school funding, U.S. education officials said. They portrayed the move as an effort to make up for years of lax enforcement under the previous administration.

"We are back in business," said Russlynn Ali, who heads the Education Department's civil-rights bureau. "Across all of the statutes under our jurisdiction, we will vigorously enforce civil-rights laws."

Stephanie Monroe, who led the civil-rights office under President George W. Bush, disputed any contention that the Bush administration was lax on enforcement. "We did not sit on our hands," she said.

In fiscal year 2007, the Bush administration initiated 23 compliance reviews and the following year it initiated 42 reviews.

Ms. Monroe applauded the Obama team's plan to focus on civil rights but cautioned against what she called "big pendulum swings in enforcing laws that have been on the books for decades."

The administration has scheduled specific compliance reviews this year for 27 states on civil-rights issues ranging from shortened school days to the availability of English-language instruction for non-English speakers, according to a strategic plan completed Friday.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan plans to announce the steps at a speech Monday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., scene of the "Bloody Sunday" civil-rights confrontation 45 years ago.

According to an advance text of the speech, Mr. Duncan is expected to say the department will focus on racial disparities in the availability and quality of high-school college-preparatory classes and on the differences in how students of different races are disciplined in public schools.

The department plans to examine disciplinary practices in districts within five states, including North Carolina, Minnesota and New York.

"African-American students without disabilities are more than three times as likely to be expelled as their white peers," Mr. Duncan plans to point out in his speech.
The department also plans to scrutinize potential infractions in a number of states of a law designed to guarantee equal access to women. The 1972 law, known as Title IX, has had the strongest impact in opening athletics programs to women. Ms. Ali said the government would look at patterns of sexual violence against female students at a number of universities.

Ms. Ali said the department planned to pursue a number of what are known as "disparate impact cases," in which districts can be found to have violated civil-rights laws even without deliberate intent.

These infractions often crop up, she said, in the area of course availability, where largely white schools offer a much wider array of courses than are offered at predominately minority schools in the same district.

Ms. Ali said the administration wasn't seeking confrontations with the states, and would push toward litigation, or the withholding of federal funding, "only in extreme cases."
Obama administration officials said they had briefed members of Congress on the plans, but Republican lawmakers expressed surprise.

"This is the first we've heard about a new approach to civil-rights enforcement," said a House Republican spokeswoman. "It's usually helpful for the administration to brief Congress before making a public announcement."

Andrew Smarick, an Education Department official in the previous administration, said he was surprised that Mr. Duncan was revving up compliance enforcement after putting so much stress on encouraging innovation. "This seems like a shift of focus," he said.

"http://cofcc.org/2010/03/obama-pledges-new-4-5-billion-totalitarian-race-based-race-to-the-top-public-school-initiative/"

Obama recently pledged to reward “reformed” public schools with money and punish other schools. At the top of the list is specific “civil rights issues.”

The Obama administration is calling for totalitarian race based discipline at public schools. Currently blacks students on average are three times more likely to be suspended. However, blacks are seven times more likely to commit murder than other races. This statistic alone suggests that public schools are already coddling black students. The rate at which blacks misbehave in school compared to others should be at least as high as their murder rate.

School administrators are already in fear of punishing black students, and it is getting worse every day. Yet Obama wants to make it worse. Obama’s program calls for punishments and litigation against schools who don’t improve the imbalance in suspension rates between the races. This means that schools will have to suspend whites for doing something a third less severe than what a black student is currently suspended for, or black students will have to be suspended only when they do something three times more severe than what they are currently being suspended for!

The message that Obama is sending to black school children is that they should be able to misbehave all they want. When a teacher threatens them with punishment they should scream “that’s racist,” and they will have the full backing of the president of the United States. America is starting to look a little bit like Zimbabwe.