Black women have a major problem: discriminatory skill policies in our people schools. At least, that ’s the tale pushed by Democrats in Congress, who are calling for a radical overhaul of public school skill to address racial disparities among K-12 individuals.
According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office ( GAO ), black girls are 5. 2 times more likely to be suspended from school compared to white women. Reflecting only 15 percent of all women enrolled in public schools, dark women receive nearly half of exclusive control: suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to law enforcement. They are, the review concludes, “overrepresented among women disciplined compared to their picture in the entire population of women. ”
The produce? Racism, of training.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. , lauded the document, stating that it “push[es ] up on the dangerous narrative that Black women are disciplined more because they misbehave more. ” In her hit discharge, Pressley asserted that the GAO record proves that the disparity is caused by “biases such as adultification and colorism. ” She also argued that black girls are punished more because of “a absence of understanding of the historical, cultural, and economic inequities such as hunger, pain, poverty, and violence that often affect pupil behavior. ”
Previous Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attributed the gap to “the undesirable bias that Black and brown women face in K-12 colleges every time. ” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. , said that in her deep-blue region in Minneapolis, black women are discriminated against every day because of “discriminatory locks and dress plans. ” In other words, our common institutions, according to Democrats, are racist.
The solution? Pressley is pushing the “Ending PUSHOUT Act. ” The plan would prevent a laundry list of consequences, like punishments and expulsions. Under the act, schools — in exchange for federal money — may vow to eliminate differences, create new control systems as “alternatives to suspension or expulsion, ” and “create consciousness of implicit and explicit discrimination and use historically boosting techniques. ” The Act appropriates$ 500 million every year for grants, which may not be used for police officers, surveillance equipment, or metal detectors.
This knee-jerk reaction — that disparities are caused by discrimination — is an all-too-common political argument. And in this case, it is not supported by the evidence.
According to the GAO report, significant differences in the rate of exclusionary discipline for black and white girls were found using 2017-18 data. But there are problems with this analysis. To begin, the GAO only found significant differences in four types of misbehavior. But 12 types of misbehavior were under study— meaning a difference was found only one-third of the time. If schools are engaged in discrimination, one would imagine this disparity would exist in defiant behavior ( where a disparity was found ) as well as for dress code violations ( where no disparity was found ).
Despite drilling down on specific types of misbehavior, the categories in the report simply remain too broad to reach the sensationalized conclusions reported. To agree with the Democrats, you would have to believe that school administrators exhibit racial bias only in response to a fraction of bad behaviors, but not the vast majority.
Even if disparities exist, of course, they are not always caused by discrimination, biases, or bigotry. According to a report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, there are a host of other causes of disparity that should be considered before jumping to the conclusion that discrimination is the cause. These include student family structure, income, and disability status.
Buried in the appendix, the GAO report admits that their sample of schools is “biased ” on some of these dimensions. They attempt to account for this bias through a complex weighting process that, suffice it to say, is questionable from a social science perspective.
The PUSHOUT Act is a continuation and expansion of the Biden administration ’s push to water down school discipline policies, even though surveys consistently show students and teachers are feeling less safe. In formal guidance, the Biden administration subtly threatened school districts with investigations and sanctions unless racial disparities were erased.
Last week, the administration made good on this threat in Kentucky, forcing Jefferson County Public Schools to sign an agreement committing to significant changes, even though no compelling evidence of discrimination was found. School officials were even forced to provide “compensatory services ” to black students who had been disciplined differently than white students, without any real evidence that the disparity was caused by discrimination or other racial bias.
Discrimination has no place in our public schools. If black girls are the victims of discrimination by school officials, then those discriminators should be punished. But Democrats are not actually claiming black girls are the victims of intentional race discrimination by school officials. It is, as they say, “the system. ”
Blaming “the system ” is not evidence. It’s faith in the religion of anti-racism, which is perpetually hoisted upon the American public by those in the corporate, political, and media ruling class. Under this belief system, all disparate outcomes are evidence of racism, and the only solution is to impose equal results among all racial groups.
Facts, though, demand a different result. School discipline should punish students who disrupt school and hurt others. Otherwise, the true victims — other students— will feel less safe and have worse academic outcomes. And that fact is supported by the data.
Dan Lennington is deputy counsel, and Dr. Will Flanders is research director, at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.