Dems Claim Public Schools Mostly Run By Dems Are Racist

Black girls have a big problem: racist discipline policies in our public schools. At least, that’s the narrative pushed by Democrats in Congress, who are calling for a radical overhaul of public school discipline to address racial disparities among K-12 students.

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 girls. Representing only 15 percent of all girls enrolled in public schools, black girls receive almost half of exclusionary discipline: suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to law enforcement. They are, the report concludes, “overrepresented among girls disciplined compared to their representation in the overall population of girls.”

The cause? Racism, of course.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., lauded the report, stating that it “push[es] back on the harmful narrative that Black girls are disciplined more because they misbehave more.” In her press release, Pressley asserted that the GAO report 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 lack of understanding of the historical, social, and economic inequities such as poverty, trauma, hunger, and violence that often impact student behavior.”

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attributed the disparity to “the unacceptable discrimination that Black and brown girls face in K-12 schools every day.” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said that in her deep-blue district in Minneapolis, black girls are discriminated against every day because of “discriminatory hair and dress policies.” In other words, our public schools, according to Democrats, are racist.

The cure? Pressley is pushing the “Ending PUSHOUT Act.” The proposal would prohibit a laundry list of punishments, like suspensions and expulsions. Under the act, schools — in exchange for federal money — would vow to eliminate disparities, create new discipline systems as “alternatives to suspension or expulsion,” and “create awareness of implicit and explicit bias and use culturally sustaining practices.” 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.