Actually, the software to do this already exists. It is used all the time in movies and TV shows that combine live actors with CG effects.

Ten years from now, when surveillance cameras are routine, bias challenges could be resolved by random selection of cases, both where serious discipline is applied and where it is not. Before an arbitration panel gets to examine the video record of incidents, software (not invented yet) would alter the appearance and voices of participants to disguise their race and ethnicity. The panelists would record their recommended disposition of each case; only after they had gone on the record, would they get to know the races involved and compare their decisions with those taken for real by the school administrators.

In the meantime, some of the most passionate denunciation of suspensions and expulsions of Black students could be addressed by “in-school suspensions” and reform schools. Disruptive kids would still have a chance at an education, rather than being left to hang out on street corners.

Bob

But disagree with this sentence:

“Such reforms [to harsh discipline] might well have the effect of narrowing disproportionately high rates of discipline for students in some minority groups.”

They won’t. Such reforms, like curbing zero-tolerance rules, have already been tried extensively, and such reforms actually increase the ratio of suspended black students to white students, until the schools mask that effect either through fudging the numbers (off-the-books suspensions of black kids), or engaging in outright racial favoritism towards black kids.

The Los Angeles Times’ Terese Watanabe reported on how the Los Angeles schools, under pressure to reduce black suspensions, suspended misbehaving black kids “off the books” to hide those suspensions.

Investors Business Daily says violent black kids are going unsuspended in California schools to avoid racially “disparate impact.” Edmund Janko once wrote in City Journal about how he showed racial favoritism towards black kids by giving them a mere warning for things that would get a white kid suspended, in order to appease Federal civil-rights officials.

If you define “disproportionality” in terms of ratios of blacks to whites suspended (as the Education Department apparently does), getting rid of stupid zero-tolerance policies actually INCREASES disparate impact, as lawyer/statistician James P. Scanlan has explained over and over again, citing actual data from schools in Denver, California, Maryland, etc. (as he has explained in the Recorder, the Baltimore Sun, etc.)

Racial disparities in discipline are the product of differences in rates of misbehavior, not racism by school officials. Misconduct rates are not the same for different races. A 2014 study in the Journal of Criminal Justice by criminologists like John Paul Wright found that racial disparities in student discipline result from more frequent misbehavior by blacks, not racism. The study, entitled “Prior Problem Behavior Accounts for the Racial Gap in School Suspensions,” concluded that higher black suspension rates are “completely accounted for” by students’ own behavior.

Any suggestion of anti-black racism in Minneapolis is further undermined by the fact that the Minneapolis schools superintendant is black, and minorities are not underrepresented in the schools’ workforce compared to the qualified labor pool.