2014 rule contributed to disruptive classrooms

School Safety Commission recommends
staffing schools with armed police

Federal policies requiring school districts to discipline fewer minority students are being rolled back. The federal Commission on School Safety released a report this week blaming the 2014 directive for an increase in school violence.

“The commission’s focus was part of a broader effort to reject the previous administration’s race-conscious education efforts,” the New York Times reports. The safety commission found that the focus on race over safety  has made schools more dangerous.

‘A disservice to schools’

Critics of the Obama rule have long argued that the edict pressured districts to keep suspensions low at the expense of student safety. According to U.S. News & World Report, educators now argue the Obama-era guidance did a disservice to schools, “creating disruptive classrooms where teachers feel unsafe because they are pressured by school administrators not to report students.” The entire purpose of the Obama rules was to make the race numbers work.

The White House school safety report was commissioned in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a former student killed 17 children and adults. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was among those blaming the Obama discipline “guidance” for allowing the gunman in the Parkland shooting to skirt law enforcement, despite a well-known history of disturbing behaviors.

The 177-page report recommends school districts consider arming school personnel, either teachers or law-enforcement officials present in school buildings, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Obama forced racial quotas in school discipline

Back in June, we traced some of the chaos at Madison’s Sherman middle school to trying to make the numbers work by reducing school suspensions of students of color. National Review magazine elucidated:

Threatening lawsuits if the administrators didn’t comply with the “guidance,” the January 2014 letter coerced many school systems into adopting illegal racial quotas in their disciplinary decision-making.

The Obama letter utilized the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement, whereby a policy that does not discriminate on its face, in its intent, or in its application is nonetheless deemed illegal if it has “disproportionate” statistical effects among different racial and ethnic groups.

… There is overwhelming evidence that Obama-era policies culminating in this “Dear Colleague” letter pushed schools to avoid disciplining students who needed to be disciplined. It made avoiding politically incorrect numbers more important than maintaining school safety.