Schools Implement Explicit Racial Bias in Suspensions

The good: Minneapolis Public Schools want
to decrease total suspensions for non-violent infractions of school
rules.

The bad: The district has pledged to do this by implementing a
special review system for cases where a black or Latino student is
disciplined. Only minority students will enjoy this special
privilege.

That seems purposefully unconstitutional—and is likely illegal,
according to certain legal minds.

The new policy is the result of negotiations between MPS and the
Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Minority
students are disciplined at much higher rates than white students,
and for two years the federal government has investigated whether
that statistic was the result of institutional racism.

Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson has been working to decrease
suspensions district-wide. She has encouraged other forms of
mediation to take precedence in cases where a student’s behavior is
merely inappropriate, rather than violent. That’s all well and
good; public schools have gone discipline-crazy over the years,
punishing students all-too-harshly for silly reasons every day. Any
respite from overcriminalization is welcome.

Any respite, except this one:

Moving forward, every suspension of a black or brown student
will be reviewed by the superintendent’s leadership team. The
school district aims to more deeply understand the circumstances of
suspensions with the goal of providing greater supports to the
school, student or family in need. This team could choose to bring
in additional resources for the student, family and school.

That comes directly from Johnson’s
desk. I suppose it’s well-intentioned—but don’t all students,
regardless of skin color, deserve to have their disciplinary issues
adjudicated under the same standards? And yet Johnson is committed
to reducing suspensions for minority students by a specific
percentage, irrespective of the facts of the individual cases:

MPS must aggressively reduce the disproportionality between
black and brown students and their white peers every year for the
next four years. This will begin with a 25 percent reduction in
disproportionality by the end of this school year; 50 percent by
2016; 75 percent by 2017; and 100 percent by 2018.

Hans Bader, a senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise
Institute and former Office for Civil Rights lawyer, tells me that
this disciplinary quota system violates 7th Circuit Court precedent
established in a 1997 case, People Who
Care v. Rockford Board of Education. In that decision, the
court determined that it was unconstitutional for a school to
mandate that black students be disciplined at identical rates as
white students. That policy was discriminatory on its face, since
it would result in children receiving different punishments
depending on their race.

Instead of doing to high school discipline what activists have
done to college admissions, let’s relax zero tolerance for
everyone.