PrintMarch 15, 2012
'Racial Discrepancy' Madness Spreads
I recently suggested that our secretary of education, Arne Duncan, had his brain hacked by enemies of the United States. As proof I offered his bizarre reaction to a report recounting racial discrepancies in school discipline. I argued, for example, that forcibly equalizing discipline across racial lines would devastate racially mixed schools, with the biggest losers being decent African-American students, who typically lack a safer school option.
The capturing of brains may be worse than I initially suspected. A PBS Newshour show also took up how blacks were being disproportionally punished. The host (Jeffrey Brown) interviewed two distinguished educators. Christopher Edley is dean of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and co-chair of the U.S. Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission, and Chester Finn is the president of the Fordham Institute, a well-regarded conservative think-tank that covers K-12 education (Finn also served in the...(Read Full Article)
