Heavy-handed disciplinary policies fall disproportionately on students of color.... Black students are more than three times as likely to be suspended than their white counterparts, according to a report by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Sixteen percent of black students enrolled in K-12 schools were suspended from 2009 to 2012, but only 5 percent of white students were, the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found....
The consequences of these harsh disciplinary policies are profound. Students who are temporarily or permanently kicked out of school are far more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, a track known as the school-to-prison pipeline. But when Dan Roth, a Berkeley-based criminal defense lawyer, testified before the California State Senate about the bill’s potential to have a racially disparate impact, Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, who drafted the law, dismissed Mr. Roth’s points as “hyperbole.” Lawmakers similarly rejected Mr. Roth’s common-sense suggestion that the bill include a provision for data collection on its racial impact....
California has rightly resisted the Trump administration’s attempts to roll back protections for the environment and undocumented immigrants. But as a lawyer who sees the extraordinary racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, I believe that this flawed policy from the Obama administration is a legacy California should not pass on to its children....
September 22, 2017
"California’s Sexual Assault Law Will Hurt Black Kids."
A NYT op-ed by University of San Francisco School of Law professor Lara Bazelon.
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72 comments:
What ever happened to reform schools?
Black students are making Minnesota's schools chaotic hellholes.
You have to get the violent kids away from those , black and white, who want to study.
Suspension is not enough. We need reform schools.
The violent kids are probably not redeemable and will go to prison no matter what is done.
The consequences of these harsh disciplinary policies are profound. Students who are temporarily or permanently kicked out of school are far more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, a track known as the school-to-prison pipeline
Correlation is not causation. Surely the more logical position is that those who offend in school are the same people who are mostly likely to offend in other ways?
Suspension is not enough. We need reform schools.
It'll never happen. The demographics are too unpleasant.
Students who are temporarily or permanently kicked out of school are far more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, a track known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Perhaps because students who act badly enough to be suspended also act badly enough to later commit crimes.
Nah, couldn't be.
Yes, we need reform schools. Not that they are likely to reform anyone but it keeps them off the street. I get a little tired of hearing about disproportionate black discipline and incarceration. Blacks commit more infractions. It's that simple. I believe this is also true of Hispanics. There are cultural reasons for this that are only going to be addressed successfully by those cultures.
California has rightly resisted the Trump administration’s attempts to roll back protections for the environment and undocumented immigrants. But as a lawyer who sees the extraordinary racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, I believe that this flawed policy from the Obama administration is a legacy California should not pass on to its children....
Everyone is a conservative in that which they know best.
Correlation is not causation. Surely the more logical position is that those who offend in school are the same people who are mostly likely to offend in other ways?
Exactly so, Gahrie!
What rubbish. Who has to tolerate this behavior? Better question is why?
And ... he has to mention Trump. Apparently there is a new God ravishing godless California, and his name is Trump.
Black students are more than three times as likely to be suspended than their white counterparts,
Most Black students attend schools run by Black administrators, staffed by Black teachers and governed by Black school boards.
Perhaps the difference is due to differences in behavior and not racism?
In these discussions the key statistic of the racial distribution of acts deserving punishment is always ignored leaving us to deal with only one side of an equation.
The education department today rescinded the Obama guidelines that essentially removed "due process" from the disciplinary equation in cases of alleged sexual assault. Unlikely that CA will follow suit. The best thing that could happen would be that charges of sexual assault were treated as criminal matters and handled by the police. My guess is, if that were the case the "epidemic" of campus sexual assault would cured in no time. More than likely it would also permit us to have usable statistics regarding the racial distribution of those convicted of sexual assault.
No fathers.
@MichaelK You are correct that MN - primarily the Twin Cities - is just beginning to wake up to the fact that there is a significant violent crime problem growing there. That is part of the reason the cops are so jumpy, I think.
There's a pecking order of victims in the left's pantheon - and blacks outrank womyn.
@Kevin There are no atheists in foxholes!
No fathers.
Plus no church and the glorification of thug life.....
Gahrie - of course you're right. Part of it is culture, but allowing the more violent kids who are committing these offenses to stay in those schools only perpetuates a bad culture.
If disruptive kids of whatever ethnic background were removed from the public schools proper, then the bad culture wouldn't be propagated. The civil rights lawyer here is arguing the reverse of what needs to be done.
I'm with Michael K. Reform schools.
As Basil Fawlty put it, "Don't mention the war[*]."
*On fatherhood and the resulting absence of black dads in the black households.
Discipline is part of freedom.
You could, of course, write this about any punishment for violent criminal offenses- almost all of them have disparate impact on blacks.
It's nice to see someone in the NYT OpEd page catching up, but of COURSE the Obama-era moves to weaken due process and related rights of accused will cause harm, and likely disproportionate harm, to young black men.
The author can conflate "all suspension" with "proceedings & punishments related to sexual assault/sex crimes" if they want, but that's really what we're talking about and those punishments fall disproportionately on men.
I mean...this isn't some new insight. The Left insists that "justice" type proceedings are all biased against minorities. The Left pushes hard to make it easier for particular "justice" type proceedings to "convict" accused men. Who do they think is going to be MOST hurt by that? Yeah, obviously.
In a just world the fact that the Obama-era changes unfairly hurt a large class of people (mainly men attending college) should have been enough to garner opposition, but I guess it comes down to being able to show that the unfairness also applies, or applies even more strongly, to a group the Left actually pretends to care about.
The litmus test for any proposed law should be whether it will help or hurt black people. It simplifies legislation wonderfully.
I agree that disruptive kids need to be removed from schools. (I am a public school teacher) However you run into two problems:
1) What do you do with these kids? Concentrating them into reform schools produces different problems, and these schools are very hard to staff effectively.
2) How do you deal with the unpleasant demographics and charges of racism?
Conclusion; feminists are afraid of black men, therefore they are racist.
The wages of critical race theory. It's a big hammer.
Gahrie said...
Suspension is not enough. We need reform schools.
It'll never happen. The demographics are too unpleasant.
Not if we embrace the progressive concept of safe schools for children of color, non-traditional sexual orientation....
Knoxville kicks the violent kids out of their high school, but provides them with evening classes, an armed security officer in the room.
Heavy-handed disciplinary policies fall disproportionately on students of color.... Black students are more than three times as likely to be suspended than their white counterparts, according to a report by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Sixteen percent of black students enrolled in K-12 schools were suspended from 2009 to 2012, but only 5 percent of white students were, the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found....
Missing qualifier is "for the same volume and severity of infractions". Without that qualifier, they are simply saying that they DON'T care about the disparity in the number of incidents, they only care that an equal proportion of each race within the student body gets disciplined. You know, equality of outcome.
Ambrose said...
"There's a pecking order of victims in the left's pantheon - and blacks outrank womyn."
Just lie back and think of Diversity.
More than likely it would also permit us to have usable statistics regarding the racial distribution of those convicted of sexual assault.
This is a scandal hiding in plain sight. The majority of college men accused of sexual assault are black.
Another Ivy League law professor who has been involved in sexual-assault policy said to me of the issue of race, “Nobody wants to talk about it.” He said students are pushing their boundaries and that many hook up with a partner of a different ethnicity for the first time. But then, “if there is any kind of perceived injury—emotional or physical—when you cross racial lines, there’s likely to be more animus. It needs to be talked about and hasn’t been.” The professor requested anonymity, citing the difficulties of publicly discussing the subject.
Since there are no national statistics on how many young men of any given race are the subject of campus-sexual-assault complaints, we are left with anecdotes about men of color being accused and punished. There are many such anecdotes. In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’s spoken with who “routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases” say that “most of the complaints they see are against minorities.”
Gahrie said...
"2) How do you deal with the unpleasant demographics and charges of racism?"
Good question. By "demographics", I assume you mean, the fact that somewhere around a third of black males are born criminals. Yeah, that's a tough one, alright. Anyone who even put that observation into words would necessarily be a racist. Which is far worse than being a born criminal.
When the rule of law and disparate impact collide.
"Democratic constituencies on collision course" could become a new evergreen headline. If Taranto was still doing BOTW he would have a tag for this phenomenon. It covers a wide range of autophagy among progressive groups. But this one, the anti-male jihad in education that has gone on a long time has "disproportionately affected" black males, the minoritious of minorities on campus. Subverting due process to virtue signal is cause a hell of a showdown and it'll be ugly.
And they'll blame Trump. And this'll get 'em more Trump.
preponderance-of-evidence standard to find the accused student responsible for sexual assault — that is, if the allegation is proved true by 50.01 percent.
There may be better ways to respond to students’ bad behavior. Some California school districts have implemented methods like restorative justice, which brings together the victim and the offender, along with a larger group that includes teachers, counselors and parents, to address what happened and devise solutions to repair the harm and promote accountability.
So the argument here seems to be that "preponderance-of-evidence" leads to racism, and "restorative justice" is less racist because it leads to less suspensions. I'm unconvinced that determining whether or not justice has been done or whether or not a system is fair should be based around the quantity of suspensions dealt out.
One has to wonder what the school district thinks the appropriate "restorative justice" for sexual assault/rape is...
They are as usual confused re correlation vs causation.
The school to prison pipeline isn't; both levels of failure are fated due to a common set of causes.
This inability to consider alternatives is due to, well, the simple utility of the argument to those who want to profit from it.
Students who are temporarily or permanently kicked out of school are far more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, a track known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
As others have pointed out upthread, the phraseology suggests that suspensions put the affected students on the road to prison, but what if those students were already on the road to prison and activities serious enough to warrant suspension or expulsion are merely a marker along the way?
The Term is Racial Equity. Pacific Equity Group seems to be the consultant of choice in this, and also believes in critical race theory.
Article on Pacific Equity Group
Pacific Equity Group
If you can figure out their client list, I would use that for considering a school district. They took it off their site...
The idea is good. Basically that nobody should be discriminated due to race for punishment by schools.
The problem is how it's achieved. Basically by looking for disparate impact, if have more of one population being disciplined than another, there is a problem. And this should be fixed by lowering the amount of that population disciplined. The end result is no fear of discipline by that population. And the classes with members of that population, become unteachable.
Some Links:
Click St. Paul Teacher Assaulted then Fired
If you discuss the discipline issues, your a racist.
Fox News Article
Heavy-handed disciplinary policies fall disproportionately on white students.... White students are more than three times as likely to be suspended than their Asian counterparts.
Actually 3.7 times more likely.
This inability to consider alternatives is due to, well, the simple utility of the argument to those who want to profit from it.
This!
Fine. Let's have a study of the racial impacts of the punishments. Then let's also have a study of the racial and gender impacts of the students' misbehavior.
I did a bit of substitute teaching, and got my teaching credential in a school where the majority of students did not graduate in LAUSD. The difference in attitude between the school my daughter went to, and the school was night and day. Nice kids, but unfortunately they did not care. Offer a make up test for those that missed, and nobody shows. Where my daughters school anything less than an A was seen as a disaster. For the substitute teaching, I would take any assignment at any school. It was eye opening.
One interview I had, the Principal at a continuation high school basically said some students could not be saved, and they were waiting till they reached 18 so they could be kicked out. That floored me.
I am very hopeful on what Betsy Devos is doing in the Education Department to allow all US kids the opportunity to get a good education.
Unfortunately when you have drug issues, fetal alcohol syndrome, bad discipline, lousy curriculum, culture issues it's hard. Not to mention making everyone on a college ready program, which does not make sense for everyone.
Lots of well-deserved snark in this comment thread.
Still, there are problems aplenty in the criminal justice system -- differing enforcement policies in urban and suburban communities especially with respect to drug laws, disempowerment of local juries, concentration of decision-making in distant prosecutors unanswerable to local communities, etc. The late Prof William Stuntz outlined those and other structural problems and possible solutions in his book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Can't recommend it highly enough.
When those approaches are applied in the educational context, it all tends to get reduced to farce. Education bureaucracies seem to specialize in brain-dead craziness. Yuo've all see stories about kindergarteners being suspended in the name of 'zero tolerance' for 'inciting violence' or 'threatening terror', where all the kid did was draw a gun or point-and-aim with his finger. Makes you wonder what California's educrats consider 'sexual assault' or (More generally) 'disruptive behavior.' Combine that educrat mentality with the usual nanny-state bossiness that always accompanies it, and you've got a recipe for really terrible outcomes.
How much that contributes to the racial stats on suspensions, I don't know. But I doubt the answer is 'not at all.'
Young black men exhibit lower impulse control, on average, than other racial groups. As a consequence, they will appear to be uncommonly poorly behaved compared to others. I think it can be handled, but not by expecting them to do things they can't do.
NYT is indulging in and propagating color diversity (i.e. racism).
Can we cut thru the racial-grievance, white-guilt bullshit?
There are different cultural mores in different sub-cultures, duh.
In some sub-cultures, a perceived insult or slight requires a violent retaliation.
In some sub-cultures, they ignore it and move on.
In some sub-cultures, it is normal to touch, grab, hug, fondle, pinch each other, and hit.
In some sub-cultures, no touching without express written consent.
The above common sense observation is totally at odds with the quest for "multi-cultural" diversity. If you mix together different cultures, with different mores, voila: (1) you'll have conflict and (2) it will be disproportionate among the groups, particularly when their is 1 fixed standard.
Now, I grew up in a racially-mixed neighborhood in Northern California, and it seemed to work pretty well. My best friend was this black kid, BP, who was a saint. But, most of the crime and trouble and turmoil, was caused by other kids, who weren't saints, who happened to be black.
Black males cause much more crime, per capita, then any other group. If you have a strict a code of conduct, then, more blacks will run afoul of this code, than whites or asians. And blacks will be suspended and disciplined much more than whites. And liberal white school administrators will worry about being called "racist," and be torn on what to do.
To ignore this reality, is to invite problems. But that's what the Left is good at. Causing the problems in the first place with naive schemes, and then feverishly and incompetently trying to solve them.
I think your wrong on this:
>There's a pecking order of victims in the left's pantheon - and blacks outrank womyn.
Sexual Harassment is seen as a bigger issue than racism in schools. As Michael K. noted, The majority of college men accused of sexual assault are black.
And how can you argue against protecting females?
I am out of date, but Male Teachers were lectured (scared to death) of sexual harassment claims. You were guilty until proven innocent. Kids I met had no idea what they were saying / doing was sexual harassment.The culture may celebrate sexual content, but your behavior is not supposed to be. And with the zero tolerance attitude / rules this will be a disaster if CA follows this policy in K-12.
The CA legislation is far left, so I don't see anything stopping this.
At a Federal Level, finally there is some sanity in the Education Department.
There are different cultural mores in different sub-cultures, duh.
Careful. At Penn Law School, that can bring down some serious shit.
Better yet, embrace the law with an exemption for those of the preferred race.
It's a clearer way of highlighting this sort of thinking.
Bay Area Guy said...
If you have a strict a code of conduct, then, more blacks will run afoul of this code, than whites or asians.
It's actually the opposite, which is why the "disparities" are highest in liberal areas where whites have relatively low rates of incarceration.
"Figure 2 illustrates the disparity paradox. The white incarceration rate is the independent variable. Notice that high disparity ratios are found mostly in progressive states, and low ratios mostly in conservative states. For adult males, the correlation between the disparity ratio and the white incarceration rate is strong and inverse (R = -0.54)."
Wow that "Top NYT Pick" for a comment:
basically saying "at my daughter's school, its the black male kids who act out all the time so stop blaming racist teachers for disparate discipline"
Nice point Fernandinande Readers should pay more attention to La Griffe du Lion; lots of uncomfortable truths there.
@Khesahn, I've been watching the "Vietnam" documentary on PBS each night, so I gotta ask, man, whether you were there at Khe Sahn back in the day? Bad place to be.
Wouldnt such sexual offenses have a disparate effect on the black girls who attended schools with rapists in attendance I've read that in South Africa, fifty percent of women report being raped at least once. Perhaps we should attempt to sell this as an effective way of protecting young black women from sexual assault. People who speak out in favor of leniency should be accused of enabling the sexual assault of young black women.
Thanks Fernandinande
Great read!
Be interesting if related to family structure / broken homes of those convicted upbringing.
@ Fern,
"It's actually the opposite, which is why the "disparities" are highest in liberal areas where whites have relatively low rates of incarceration."
No, that's apples to oranges.
In Oakland, there is no white on black crime.
Let me repeat that: there no white on black crime.
All crime in Oakland, is mostly: black on black or black on white/asian/hispanic with a few hispanic on hispanic crimes.
It is the liberal truth, that dare not speak it's name
Don't make a rule you know you won't enforce. First rule of parenting.
Well, I'm starting to see some Race Realism here. Maybe we can start to move beyond "La-la-la-la I can't hear you".
It is common knowledge that essentially all rapes are committed by men. It is not sexist to say that. As a male, I find that fact disquieting, but I certainly can't claim that anyone citing it is motivated purely by misanthropy, nor that it should not be considered in devising laws and policies. Acknowledging this evident fact is not equivalent to suggesting the immediate incarceration of all males. Maybe we can acknowledge the differences between races in the same way -- as an evident fact to be dealt with, not a hateful lie to be condemned. Not all of us, of course. But maybe some of us.
"There may be better ways to respond to students’ bad behavior. Some California school districts have implemented methods like restorative justice, which brings together the victim and the offender, along with a larger group that includes teachers, counselors and parents, to address what happened and devise solutions to repair the harm and promote accountability."
The question is, can a system that privileges the needs of perpetrators over those of victims still be called a "justice" system?
Yep, yep, yep, right along with laws against causing great bodily harm, armed robbery, murder, etc. Can't cause any black male any inconvenience.
This is a scandal hiding in plain sight. The majority of college men accused of sexual assault are black.
That article seems to imply that women who regret inter-racial dalliances are much more likely to persecute/prosecute the possibly-imagined offense. And if that is so, the school administrators that want to believe that women never lie about rapes and that men are dangerous rapists generally, are racists! And, amazingly, the Trump administration is responding to support due process in defense of possibly innocent young black men who are being wrongfully accused of rape - by white liberals!
Since it was the Obama administration that pushed the Title IX panic, does that mean that Obama may have been Woodrow Wilson reincarnated?
@Fernandinande.Good point. Also it illustrates that there is a very distinct class($) division amongst liberals. Elites ( lawyers, financiers, mass media, and universities versus footsoldiers ( blacks and hispanics). Most racists group in America.
It's actually the opposite, which is why the "disparities" are highest in liberal areas where whites have relatively low rates of incarceration.
I'm not sure I understand, but does this describe Madison, Wisconsin?
"There's a pecking order of victims in the left's pantheon - and blacks outrank womyn."
And Muslims outrank both.
"There's a pecking order of victims in the left's pantheon - and blacks outrank womyn."
And Muslims outrank both.
And LGBTQ outrank all three.
They required ill-trained and intimidated school administrators to use a preponderance-of-evidence standard to find the accused student responsible for sexual assault
This is an attempt to protect the schools and administrators from criticism. In fact the training quite effectively accomplished its goals with the enthusiastic support of these administrators. The government didn't push this on schools. Russlynn Ali authored the Dear Colleague letter after a lifetime of indoctrination in the radical-left education bureaucracy (partial bio below). This entire project is driven by the activists inside the education system.
Prior to joining the department, Ali served as vice president of the Education Trust in Washington, D.C., and as the founding executive director of the Education Trust—West in Oakland, Calif., since 2001. In those positions, she advocated for public school students in California focusing on achievement and opportunity gaps separating low-income African-American and Latino students from their peers; worked with school districts to improve curriculum and instructional quality at high-poverty and high-minority public schools; and designed, field-tested and implemented comprehensive audit tools that examined inequities in schools and districts. Ali also advised legislative and gubernatorial staff as well as senior education experts on education matters from her positions on numerous boards of directors and advisory committees, including College Track, the Institute for College Access and Success, and Great Schools. She was a member of the review board of the Broad Prize in Urban Education, was appointed by Gov. Schwarzenegger to the Governor's Advisory Committee on Education Excellence, and the Curriculum and Instruction Committee of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, and received the Aspen Institute's New Schools Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education Fellowship.
Previously, Ali was a teacher, served as the liaison for the president of the Children's Defense Fund, as assistant director of policy and research at the Broad Foundation, and as chief of staff to the president of the Los Angeles Unified School District's Board of Education. She has also taught at the University of Southern California Law Center and the University of California at Davis.
gerry said...
"There's a pecking order of victims in the left's pantheon - and blacks outrank womyn."
"And Muslims outrank both."
Not sure that's true. CAIR is pretty obnoxious, but they don't form mobs, riot, loot, burn and shoot cops. I suspect they would find themselves on fairly thin ice if they did. They don't have the numbers, and their Guilt Card has a much lower credit limit.
What a hoot and a totally garbled hoot as well. The Obama sexual assault hysteria runs up against the Obama racial disparate impact of school discipline hysteria. The fact is the Obama era gave us the kangaroo courts of academia's modern day sexual assault witch hunt, which this lawyer sees as the horrid injustice it is. But he does not appear to see the disparate impact nonsense Obama gave us as equally horrid. BOTH pressures are arising from the same source. If black kids commit a disproportionate number of offenses, it would be discrimination NOT to suspend them disproportionately. And condescending to them as well - along with insulting and inciting to non-black students. But of course, if black kids commit offenses disproportionately, it is logical to assume they commit sexual assault offenses disproportionately. So what's a poor P.C. guy to do? Lara Bazelon cannot square this circle and so lapse into total incoherence trying. Thus does identity politics reveal itself as the zero-sum game it is. Which is why it will NEVER offer liberals a way to recover a truly unifying majority movement.
@Big Mike Just caught up with your question. My battery was part of Operation Pegasus (Ist Air Cav, 1st Marine Regiment) that relieved Khe Sanh after the siege had pretty much dwindled out. I was not there during the real shit storm and I am forever grateful. We were down around Hue at that time. As we were moving up toward Khe Sanh it was clear (to me anyway) that the right tactical move was to shut the place down and withdraw. Khe Sanh served absolutely no strategic or tactical purpose and was at the end of ridiculously long supply line. Scuttlebutt had it that what made sense - closing and withdrawing - was in the cards. Then a couple of days later we were told we were going in to replace/reinforce those already there. ( I always assumed that the folks in DC asked themselves how they could possibly explain closing Khe Sanh when it was such a symbol of "fortitude". So rather than do the sensible thing they sent us in.) We were there for a couple of months , shot a lot of rounds, did an interesting heli-lift operation, lost a couple of guns to artillery fire and had a few men killed and wounded. When I rotated out in July '68 orders had come down to pack up and withdraw. So instead of doing the right thing the boys in DC put us and a bunch of other Marines in the bullseye for no reason other than PR, then when everybody forgot about the siege closed the place. Me, bitter? Never!
John Burack: "...what's a poor P.C. guy to do [to square the circle]?" IMHO it can be done by prosecuting more white guys regardless of guilt. That (over) protects women from sexual assault and improves the black/white disparity among the "perpetrators." It also gives Title IX bureaucrats more work, thus more budget, and more power. Women will "feel safer" and white men will be terrified of even looking at them. What's not to like?
/sarc
preponderance-of-evidence standard to find the accused student responsible for sexual assault — that is, if the allegation is proved true by 50.01 percent.
Pretty low standard when faced with reports the accused can not have counsel, can not introduce evidence such as text messages and can not introduce evidence via witnesses.
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