Comments on: DoJ: school discipline must follow disparate-impact standards

By: New racial school-discipline guidelines, cont'd - Overlawyered

New racial school-discipline guidelines, cont'd - Overlawyered — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 17:00:03 +0000

[…] here and […]

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January 17 roundup - Overlawyered — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 04:15:10 +0000

[…] justice actually leads to injustice to individual students” [Mona Charen, syndicated, on the new racial guidelines on school discipline, and thanks for […]

By: Education Department ‘Guidance’ Pressures Schools to Adopt Racial Quotas In Discipline

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:00:40 +0000

[…] such offenses from being committed in the first place. But that excessive focus on rehabilitation is myopic: while “research shows that out of school suspensions do no good for the suspended student […]

By: Obama Administration Undermines School Safety, Pressures Schools to Adopt Racial Quotas in Student Discipline

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 17:14:22 +0000

[…] offenses from being committed in the first place. But that excessive focus on rehabilitation is myopic: while “research shows that out of school suspensions do no good for the suspended student […]

By: School suspensions by the (racial) numbers - Overlawyered

School suspensions by the (racial) numbers - Overlawyered — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 04:45:07 +0000

[…] Caleb Brown interviews me on the very, very bad new federal guidelines demanding that schools avoid disciplinary practices with “disparate impact” — in practice, those that result in more-than-proportional suspensions of minority or special-ed kids. Earlier here. […]

By: Boblipton

Boblipton — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 13:23:56 +0000

Disparate impact? Aren’t the vast majority of instances of school discipline directed at the young? Surely this ranks as age discrimination.

Bob

By: Schools Have Rules: Disparate Impact Edition | Simple Justice

Schools Have Rules: Disparate Impact Edition | Simple Justice — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 12:27:31 +0000

[…] to get the federal pendulum to swing, and once it starts, it seems to invariably go too far. As Walter Olson notes, it’s not just that the federal educational bureaucracy has awoken to the insanity of its […]

By: DensityDuck

DensityDuck — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 03:14:52 +0000

Hah. You’re right that “video everything” is a valid answer
to “ensure no disparate impact”.

Except that then people will say “white kids are just exploiting the gaps in the system and they only misbehave in places where the cameras don’t cover and if you had video of locker rooms and toilets you’d see them!”

By: Hugo S. Cunningham

Hugo S. Cunningham — Sat, 11 Jan 2014 16:19:31 +0000

Ever cheaper surveillance technology might eventually protect a sane disciplinary policy from “disparate impact” lawsuits. If every incident subject to discipline was preserved on video (as well as borderline incidents where discipline was not imposed), then DoJ plaintiffs would be forced to argue from objective facts rather than statistical conjectures.

I have some sympathy for the argument that poor kids suspended out of school are more likely to use the time to get in worse trouble. Rather than keeping disruptive kids in class, however, a better solution is to bring back a “reform school” where troubled kids can serve out their suspensions while still learning as much as they can. Some larger schools might be able to operate their own “reform” program while keeping regular classes disruption-free.

By: Sebastian Seiguer

Sebastian Seiguer — Sat, 11 Jan 2014 14:50:03 +0000

Starting with the rate of discipline, rather than the behaviors being disciplined, is backwards. I can’t think of an analogy where such an approach would make any sense. For example, imposing a quota for violent crime to cap it at x% of all crime? Insanity.

Does not seem that the DOJ is targeting biased rules; instead they are engineering the outcome of the application of those rules.