Madison schools boss admits race-based discipline isn’t working

Young people from Madison are marching on Janesville to the home of Speaker Paul Ryan to protest school shooting deaths.

It’s not quite marching on Selma, Alabama, for Civil Rights. Or the Mobe March on Washington 1971 during the Vietnam War protests but, as Marlon Brando said in the Wild Ones, it’s what we’ve got.

The Children’s Crusaders say they don’t feel safe in their schools. If that’s the case, the March Marchers from Madison could take a shortcut and surround Anna Moffit’s house. The lady wants re-election to the Madison School Board where she is a leader in the movement to get armed police out of Madison’s troubled high schools. Including the cop that disarmed the La Follette student who brought a loaded handgun to school.

Instead, the Blaska Policy Werkes recommends putting more cops IN the schools, starting with former cop Gloria Reyes, who is running to replace Ms. Moffit on the school board.

Because a couple dozen parents and students told the Madison School Board one month ago (we recount their pleas here) that THEY don’t feel safe in the schools due to the constant disruptions and fighting (some of which have injured students and teachers).

We said then that the social justice warriors were fixated on race, not results. They are willing to endure chaos in the classrooms in the name of racial equity. Because too many Students Of Color were being suspended. The curse of disparate results. So our liberal-progressive-socialist leaders change the rules to make the numbers work.

Except that the numbers are still not working. Student suspensions are up by one-third and 62% of suspensions are “black or African American” although accounting for 19% of the districtwide enrollment. White students comprised 42% of all students but 13% of suspensions. “The trend in disproportionality in incident events has remained steady when looking at race/ethnicity,” the first semester review summarizes.

Supt. Cheatham advances the Broken Windows theory

In a welcome story in this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal, MPS superintendent Jennifer Cheatham acknowledged what we’ve been saying for too many years now: “Fear of being seen as racist may work against good behavior in schools.”

Wary of the race card, teachers are letting the small stuff slide until the misbehavior escalates into big stuff. As the Broken Windows theory of policing predicts.

Sometimes we don’t warn kids of color, because we ourselves are afraid of maybe appearing racist or appearing like we’re picking on kids of color. When (small) things are allowed to get by or continue, students are receiving a message that we don’t actually hold them to high expectations, love and care about them.

Then there’s the issue of single students getting as many as eight, nine suspensions. That kind of dithering sends a powerful message to miscreant and scholar alike: this ain’t serious. Your humble bloggeur was startled when board member T.J. Mertz told him that only three students have been expelled and that those expulsions usually last but one semester.

MPS is considering an alternate school for troublemakers at La Follette H.S. Watch for the social justice warriors to go running to the ACLU if its students are not precisely racially balanced.

We missed the “Expel Cops from our Schools” event March 18 at Festival Foods on East Washington Ave. We have said before, the MPS Behavior Education Plan is too cumbersome, it gets in its own way. It is time to outlaw the collection of data by race.

Obama Justice Department encouraged reverse racism

The Trump administration plans to scrap the Obama Administration directives that “turned schools into war zones,” as the  colorful New York Post puts it.

The federal directive, issued jointly in 2014 by the US departments of Education and Justice, warned public school districts receiving federal funding — including New York City — that they could face investigation and funding cuts if they fail to reduce statistical “disparities” in discipline by race. On average, the administration noted, black students are suspended at three times the rate of their white peers.

The directive also discourages student arrests and holds districts liable for the actions of “school resource officers … or other law enforcement personnel.”