Free Republic

In Fairfax County, Virginia, changes set to be approved May 26 would punish ‘malicious misgendering’ at the same level as assault and battery.For those who scoff that Florida’s new education law bans “non-existent” gender indoctrination, let the tale of Fairfax County, Virginia serve as a wake-up call. Fairfax County’s school board has long prided itself on leading the way for the nation in cutting-edge education policy and curriculum. As the tenth-largest district in the nation, it holds disproportionate sway over other school boards. In 2015, the Fairfax school board blindsided parents with changes to its non-discrimination policy, followed by a...

Chancellor Richard Carranza on Thursday night fled rather than face parents’ fury over growing discipline and safety problems at city schools. At a packed Community Education Council meeting in Queens, Carranza took direct fire from two parents whose kids were victims of separate physical and sexual assaults at MS 158/Marie Curie in Bayside. Once a highly regarded school, MS 158 has seen a string of ugly incidents in recent months, including a vicious caught-on-video lunchroom fight last week and a classroom sexual assault last month. Video of the fight shows a relentless assault by one female student on a classmate...

Last month, NBC Nightly News aired a segment on the latest classroom-management technique to sweep America’s schools: “room clears”: When a child throws a tantrum that could physically endanger his peers, teachers evacuate all of the other students from the classroom until the troublemaker has vented his rage upon empty desks, tables and chairs. The technique was virtually unheard of five years ago. But 56 percent of surveyed teachers and parents in Oregon now report having experienced a room clear in their or their child’s classroom over the last year. Surrendering the classroom to a single student: The average reader...

... On Thursday, responding to longstanding concerns that the system penalizes black and Hispanic students, Mr. de Blasio announced new rules that will limit arrests in schools for low-level offenses. In addition, it’s likely that the maximum amount of time for suspensions will be sharply reduced. For decades, city statistics have shown that the New York City school system has disciplined black and Hispanic students at higher rates than white and Asian children — an unsettling yet consistent feature of the nation’s largest school district. The new guidelines represent perhaps Mr. de Blasio’s most dramatic attempt to change how students...

... Mr. Pollack believes that “political correctness killed Meadow.” A prominent villain in his narrative is Robert Runcie, who came to Broward from Chicago in 2011 as the superintendent of the county’s public schools. Mr. Runcie introduced a program called Promise—a feel-good acronym for Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support and Education—under which students who commit crimes in public schools would no longer be reported to the police by administrators. Under Promise, students would be evaluated and dealt with exclusively within the schools and their associated reform programs. Even felonies as severe as drug dealing, sexual assault and bringing...

The Trump administration has formally scrapped an Obama-era policy that was meant to curb racial discrimination in schools but that became tangled in a national debate over school safety. Officials from the Education and Justice departments finalized the rollback Friday, just days after it was proposed by a federal panel on school safety. President Donald Trump formed the panel in March as the government’s response to the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In revoking the rule, federal officials said they won’t intervene with schools’ disciplinary decisions as long as they don’t violate federal discrimination laws. […] The 2014 policy...

In 2014, the Obama administration promulgated a “guidance” to America’s public schools that threatened federal investigations and litigation against schools where black students are disciplined (e.g., by suspension) more often, on a pro rata basis, than white students, on the ground that such numerical discrepancy is evidence of discrimination. Many schools responded by adopting discipline quotas, which meant in practice that after a certain number of students of a particular race had been suspended, teachers and administrators were helpless to enforce any kind of discipline in classrooms. The Obama administration is gone, thankfully, but its “guidance” has not been revoked....

MINNEAPOLIS — When Erin Rathke, the principal at Justice Page Middle School, is called to extract a student from class, she hears the same plea over and over again, most often, she has to admit, from black children: “The teacher only sees me.” The plea weighs heavily at Justice Page, where African-American students are 338 percent more likely to be suspended than their white peers. “It’s painful sometimes, but I have to say, ‘Yes, that’s probably true,” Ms. Rathke said. It is a reality that district leaders here have been grappling with for years: The Minneapolis school district suspends an...

... In 2012 the Education Department released a study showing that black students were three times as likely to be suspended and expelled as their white counterparts. Two years later, the department issued a “Dear Colleague” letter warning school districts to address this racial imbalance, or else. The letter said that even if a disciplinary policy “is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention race—and is administered in an evenhanded manner” the district still could face a federal civil-rights investigation if the policy “has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of...

Beaumont police say a teacher was arrested Friday after video on Twitter showed her slapping a student on the head. [Snip] Hastings was arrested and charged with assault. She has been released on bail at this time. Ozen High School has placed Hastings on administrative leave, and the school district has released this statement:

Some St. Paul public schools are unsafe for students and teachers, writes Katherine Kersten, a senior policy fellow at the Center for the American Experiment, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. A Central High teacher was “choked and body-slammed by a student and hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury,” while another teacher was knocked down and suffered a concussion while trying to stop a fight between fifth-grade girls. There have been six high school riots or brawls this school year. Hoping to close the racial suspension gap, the district has spent millions of dollars on “white privilege” and “cultural competency” training for...

A student walks down a Harding High hallway wearing headphones, chanting along to violent rap lyrics. Teacher Erik Brandt taps him on the shoulder. Turn it down, he gestures. The kid stares at Brandt with chilling intensity. He points at the older man, fingers bent in the shape of a gun, and shoots. Then moves on. Within Harding's corridors is a turbulent clutter of students who push and cuss and bully their way from one end of the building to another. Brandt, a finalist for Minnesota's Teacher of the Year and a 20-year veteran of the English department, doubles as...

Combine an administration that disdains the idea that it has any legal boundaries with the “liberal” penchant for coerced equality and you get some amazingly absurd results. A case in point is the recent cave-in by public school officials in Minneapolis to the Department of Education regulations I wrote about here, regulations that threaten schools with loss of federal funds if they punish “disproportionate” numbers of students from certain groups. The “proportional discipline” rules are beginning to bite. After all, bureaucrats don’t just make rules for the sake of keeping busy – they demand obedience. Public school officials in Minneapolis...

Purpose A large body of empirical research finds a significant racial gap in the use of exclusionary school discipline with black students punished at rates disproportionate to whites. Furthermore, no variable or set of variables have yet to account for this discrepancy, inviting speculation that this association is caused by racial bias or racial antipathy. We investigate this link and the possibility that differential behavior may play a role. Methods Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class (ECLS-K), the largest sample of school-aged children in the United States, we first replicate the results of prior studies. We...

Racial minorities are more likely than white students to be suspended from school, to have less access to rigorous math and science classes, and to be taught by lower-paid teachers with less experience, according to comprehensive data released Friday by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. In the first analysis in nearly 15 years of information from all of the country’s 97,000 public schools, the Education Department found a pattern of inequality on a number of fronts, with race as the dividing factor. Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. A...

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...