My colleague Andrew Coulson:
Over the past several years, University of Rochester professor Joshua Kinsler has explored this question [of racial disparity in school discipline] using uniquely rich datasets. What he finds is that the variation in punishment between the races is largely explained by variation in discipline policies at the school level: black students are more likely to attend very strict schools. …
in order to achieve the administration’s goal of eliminating the racial discipline gap, schools that currently have many disruptive students and strict discipline policies will have to relax those policies.
Which brings us to Kinsler’s most important discovery: easing discipline policies in such schools causes overall student achievement to fall.
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And here I thought that zero tolerance was supposed to cure all those nasty disparate impact discipline problems. Silly me…
Spare the rod and fail the child. Interesting…
Inevitably, some white and asian students will be transferred out of such a system by their rational parents. The remaining whites and asians will therefore be punished even more and will therefore have that much more incentive to leave.
If – instead of, or in addition to, the foregoing – all discipline is abandoned, the logical conclusion of falling standards coming to equality of result at zero discipline for all races … same result.
Either the idiocy will be abandoned or the schools will be. Next up: search for a scapegoat.