Free Republic

he Obama administration is issuing new recommendations on classroom discipline that seek to end the apparent disparities in how students of different races are punished for violating school rules. Civil rights advocates have long said that a "school-to-prison" pipeline stems from overly zealous school discipline policies targeting black and Hispanic students that bring them out of school and into the court system. Attorney General Eric Holder said the problem often stems from well intentioned "zero-tolerance" policies that too often inject the criminal justice system into the resolution of problems. Zero tolerance policies, a tool that became popular in the 1990s,...

(Reuters) - The Justice and Education departments unveiled guidelines on Wednesday to prevent schools from violating civil rights laws and keep students out of jail after data found minorities and the disabled were more likely than others to face discipline or arrest. Attorney General Eric Holder said the guidelines were aimed at giving direction to school law enforcement officers, protecting the civil rights of students, and keeping kids in the classroom.

In November, the Obama Justice Department dropped a lawsuit aimed at stopping a school voucher program in Louisiana. The Louisiana Scholarship Program is intended to give students in failing public schools a chance to attend better schools, including private ones. Justice tried to block the program on the basis that it may have violated a 1975 federal desegregation order. The case began to heat up when Republican governor Bobby Jindal, joined by some parents of students (chiefly minorities) who had benefited from the voucher program, began a defense in the courts. Justice then filed a motion contesting the parents' standing...

WASHINGTON The Obama administration is urging schools to abandon overly zealous discipline policies that civil rights advocates have long said lead to a school-to-prison pipeline that discriminates against minority students. The wide-ranging series of guidelines issued Wednesday in essence tells schools that they must adhere to the principle of fairness and equity in student discipline or face strong action if they don't. The American Civil Liberties Union called the recommendations "ground-breaking."

The Associated Press, via Breitbart, reports that Attorney General Eric Holder wants public schools to back off zero tolerance policies that he alleges discriminates against minority students. Putting a chill on discipline and stymieing schools from ousting miscreants means lots of public schools -- particularly inner-city ones -- will do even less educating. Holder 's guidelines aim at halting "targeting minorities," but, practically, will accomplish defining deviancy downward yet again in urban minority-dominated schools -- that's mostly black and Hispanic kids from broken families and single-parent households. The A.G.'s guidelines are another tacit admission that there are enormous dysfunctions in...

Now the federal government wants to run the classroom. Not just what’s taught, who gets tested for what or what gets served for lunch, but who gets punished for what and how. Now Washington dictates on discipline. That was the clear word out of Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore yesterday as the attorney general and secretary of education announced new federal guidelines and mandates on school discipline. The goal? To disrupt the “school-to-prison pipeline” which Eric Holder and Arne Duncan say plagues our nation. Specifically, to eliminate what they call racial disparities in discipline. It turns out that black...

Education experts decried a new memo from the Departments of Justice and Education that instructs public schools throughout the country to cease punishing disruptive students if they fall into certain racial categories, such as black or Hispanic. The letter, released on Wednesday, states that it is a violation of federal law for schools to punish certain races more than others, even if those punishments stem from completely neutral rules. For example, equal numbers of black students and white students should be punished for tardiness, even if black students are more often tardy than white students. (RELATED: DOJ to schools: It’s...

<p>Attorney General Eric Holder recently made comments suggesting that Zero Tolerance policies in US schools place minority students at an unfair advantage.</p> <p>Education experts blasted a recent Department of Justice directive, which they say seems to advocate a racial quota system for punishing school kids for such transgressions as being late or chewing gum in class.</p>