- Progressive guilt and consequences
- Getting the fake anti-racism schtick out of Ed policy
- Racial equity and discipline
- Recognizing intentional failure and managed decline
- You need more than order and discipline in a classroom
You can’t always get what you want. Rolling Stones. Also, when searching roughly 60,000 pieces of content on GraniteGrok. You want it, but you can’t get it. But “It’s out there, somewhere.” American Tale (Ronstadt and Ingram). In this case, beneath the pale blue-light glow of your device. And in this case it was. It was there, and I found it. “Obama Era Program Allowed Parkland Shooter To Commit Mass Murder.” And it did.
The government-will-protect-you-narratives of the gun-ban left took a few more hits this week. Broward County School Officials finally admitted (discovered?) that Parkland Shooter Nikolas Cruz was referred to the Obama-Era program that prevents arrests for behavior that would have prevented Cruz from buying the gun he used in the shooting spree.
Nikolas Cruz had trouble written all over him, but the Bamster and his woke elite progressive band had told schools it’d be racist if you referred to anyone of ethnic descent to the attention of local law enforcement. In the case of Cruz, he was already well known, and in the end everyone pretended they were just seeing things because his last name wasn’t Johnson, and lots of people died.
This is the end result of everything democrats do, so we can’t truly be surprised. Saddened by the tragedy. Angry about the wasted lives. Aggravated by the incompetence. Inspired to find a way to do better, but in the face of the racists claiming there’s no such thing as anti-racism.
That’s dumb too.
Anything measured by race is by definition racism, and the Obama thing was fledgling anti-racism, which is to say, we ignore behavior we’d never accept in political society from some kids as if that will make it all better. 19-year-old Cruz killed 17 and wounded 17, so the Obamanaughts could feel better about decades of bad Democrat-Party policy on public schools and decades more to come.
More have been shot, stabbed, robbed, raped, and died, but let’s not get too far off this reservation. All of them, including those in Parkland, were sacrificed on the altar of an equity lie. Crime is colorblind, which is why the Trump Administration and Department of Ed head honcho Linda McMahon just undid Obama’s bad policy.
“For too long, the Left’s pursuit of ‘equity’ has perversely required schools to discipline students differently, based on their race; it has prevented teachers from keeping their classrooms safe, put students in harm’s way, and severely compromised student learning opportunities,” Kimberly Richey, assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement first provided to the Daily Signal.
“Today’s guidance clarifies Title VI’s legal requirements and ends these harmful practices,” Richey added. “[The Office for Civil Rights] will vigorously enforce Title VI to ensure that schools’ disciplinary systems are neutral and fair, and that they operate in a nondiscriminatory manner.”
Vigorously enforce.
The gist of it all is simple. Just the facts, ma’am. Sgt. Joe Friday, Dragnet. “schools [are] to neither favor nor disfavor students based on race when it comes to discipline.” Everyone equal. If the DOJ finds out, and you receive federal funds, you’re in trouble. You could lose Federal Funding.
The original Obama letter made the case that “schools could still violate Title VI, and therefore lose federal funding, if their disciplinary programs led to adverse outcomes for students of certain races—despite not intentionally discriminating on the basis of race.”
The problem is that union-run, government-managed public education was doing that by design, and it still is. The more Democrat-run the city, the worse the schools get. That’s deliberate. Bad schools spend more money. On administrators and staff, but rarely on infrastructure, supplies, or actual education.
Inner-City Public Schools are what Democrat-Socialism will do to society if allowed. Launder vast sums of money directed at a supposed good to the benefit of a chosen few.
Suburban schools, charter schools, and rural schools were dragged under the guilt umbrella and forced to embrace bad policy, but that’s been the entire life-cycle of government-run education since Jimmy (Peanut Farmer) Carter and Congress erected the misnamed edifice we call the Department of Education.
Managed decline, which makes Democrats almost feel like they should feel bad, so they make it worse. They know no other way.
But this is the way. You have to have discipline in a classroom, or no one learns anything but how not to learn. No one should expect widespread adoption, even given the DOJ Office of Civil Rights threat, but it’s a start.
Now, if we could get the feds to address the fiscal laundromat of mainstreaming “special Ed” kids into the regular classroom, that would be another distraction that has slowed learning to a crawl. I’m not saying don’t teach them, but some of them are unteachable, and most of them need to be in a different school and not an excuse to bloat public school budgets with specialists who aren’t doing anyone but themselves any favors.
And I’m not saying they don’t care or mean well. I’m saying that any real professional would know the system as currently deployed isn’t really helping anyone but the people getting paid, who, despite any effort, have to watch it not work.
You can’t always get what you want (Rolling Stones), and taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay more to watch kids learn less, for top dollar, when there is always another way; you just have to stop leaning on guilt to make everyone else dumber so you can feel better.
Oh, and ending the Department of Education is still on the table. The one thing that would stop future presidents from holding schools hostage to really bad ideas.
