In the latest example showing how backward progressive thinking is, a school district in Washington state is set to employ a new policy encouraging administrators to take race into account when disciplining students. The Clover Park School District board approved the measure on a 3-2 vote earlier this month despite concerns over the obvious problems with such an approach.
The Daily Mail reported:
The district in the suburbs of Tacoma will now use ‘culturally responsive discipline’ that encourages school staff to impose punishments that ‘may be adapted to individual student needs in a culturally responsive manner.’
Opponents of the new approach point out that this is, in effect, a race-based policy that will result in varying levels of severity in punishments based on race. It could lead to white students being disciplined more harshly than minorities.
However, those supporting the policy claim it is in accord with a state law passed last year that forces districts to “align with Cultural Competency, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusions standards.”
School board member Anthony Veliz, who voted for the measure, asked for an example illustrating how this new method could be employed. Acting Superintendent Brian Laubach responded, explaining that the program would consider whether administrators are “dispersing discipline across the ethnicities, the racial groups, equitably.”
John Arbeeny, a former deputy mayor of Lakewood, wrote a letter to the editor of the Suburban Times in which he pointed out that this program is a sneaky way to mete out discipline based on race or ethnicity. He wrote:
So “culturally responsive discipline” is merely a deceptive cover term for “racially/ethnically based discipline” which seeks to “even out” the numbers of disciplinary incidents based upon racial/ethnic populations or some other undefined criteria. It has little to do with group or individual cultural differences (the determination of which is problematic), discipline generally or creating a safe academic environment. I wonder what the public would think if this were explained in plain language: “a discipline policy based upon race/ethnicity”?
“The Clover Park School District, which is the 28th largest in the state with an enrollment of 12,022, is 35 percent Hispanic, 28 percent white, and 13 percent black, and 4 percent Asian,” according to The Daily Mail.
Board member Paul Wagemann opposed the policy. “Until we, the five of us, have discussed all these definitions at work, until we do that, I think we are negligent to send this forward,” he said at a March 14 meeting.
“Let’s say we both commit the same offense. Then the question should be what are the consequences of that offense, and how do we go through that process?” he asked.
It wasn’t hard to see this coming with the wave of wokeism that is sweeping through many of America’s schools. Progressives in education have already been pushing the idea that schools should lower learning standards for black and brown students to ensure they are able to graduate. However, this has produced easily foreseeable results – too many of these students are graduating without having the requisite skills to function in the real world.
Now, the far-left seeks to set up differing approaches to discipline based on race, meaning that minority students will be punished less harshly than their white counterparts. This is ostensibly to counter the supposed racist disparities in how children of different races are disciplined.
Some studies have shown that black students are more likely to face disciplinary action than white students even when they have similar patterns of misbehavior. However, as with the vast majority of progressive “solutions,” this one just trades one type of racism for another. By being more lenient to black students even when they commit the same type of infractions as white students, they are not being held to the same standards, meaning that they will not benefit from corrective actions as much as white students.
This particular approach is particularly insidious because it sends the message to minority students that there are no real consequences for their actions, meaning they will fail to learn how to operate in the real world. Just as lowering standards for minorities ensures they will be less equipped to perform in their careers, teaching them that behavior does not, or should not, carry any real consequences will give them a false sense of how the real world truly is, which will prove even more damaging in the long run.
But, this type of foolhardy policy is the progressives’ bread and butter: Pretend to employ programs to help black and brown people while you are actually making life harder. If I didn’t know any better, I might be tempted to think this is more malice than incompetence.
