Progressive Racism In Practice: The Case Of School Discipline

What is “racism,” and what is “anti-racism”? This is one of those subjects on which I just see the world completely the opposite from the vision of the current crop of woke progressives. The woke progressive program calls for things like diminished law enforcement, increased state handouts and social service programs, and even “reparations,” as the “anti-racist” remedies for racism. By contrast, in a post in April 2019, I wrote that these same sorts of things only provide evidence of:

the utter contempt in which the self-anointed elites of our country hold members of minority groups, most particularly African Americans. Somehow, these elites — or at least some very substantial number of them — have decided that African Americans are not capable of accepting personal responsibility in life or of being treated like adults.

For today, let’s consider how this issue plays out in the context of student discipline in public K-12 schools. The students in question are not adults yet, but they shortly will be. The question is whether there is an expectation that minority students are capable of becoming responsible adults, and whether their education reflects such an expectation, versus an expectation that they are on track become sub-adults in a lifetime of permanent dependency. For the research here, I’ll be relying mostly on information compiled by Thomas Sowell in his excellent new book Charter Schools And Their Enemies.

It turns out that student discipline has become a flash-point in the current battle by traditional public schools to limit or eliminate competition from charter schools. As charters have grown over the past couple of decades, data have accumulated showing dramatic — in some cases spectacular — differentials in favor of the charters on the metric of success of minority children on standardized tests. Read Sowell’s book to find hundreds of examples. What accounts for the differentials? In social science you can never do a perfectly controlled experiment; but to limit the factors that may come into play, Sowell has created a data base consisting of pairs of schools in New York City — in each case one a charter and the other one traditional — that share the exact same buildings and draw students from the same neighborhood. With those factors controlled, what other factors are left that differentiate the schools? Sowell discusses several, but a sharp distinction in the practice of student discipline looms large.

Of the charter schools that consistently out-perform the traditional public schools by wide margins, two networks stand out: the KIPP (“Knowledge Is Power Program”) schools, and the Success Academies. Both, it turns out, have had from the outset a focus on strict student discipline to avoid classroom disruptions and enable the kids to focus on learning. For example, in the case of KIPP, one of the co-founders, David Levin, began his career with Teach for America at a traditional public school in Houston, where he had a series of frustrating experiences getting no support from school administrators in trying to impose discipline on his charges. Disruptive students, no matter how egregious their conduct, would be promptly returned to the classroom without any meaningful sanction; and the other kids quickly learned that lesson. Sowell continues:

Later, when Levin and Michael Feinberg founded the first KIPP school, their policy was “instant and overwhelming response to any violation of the rules.”

Sowell then quotes from Samuel Casey Carter, who in 2000 observed a lunchroom in a building shared by a traditional public school and a KIPP school:

At lunch on any given day, children from the same neighborhood, eating the same food, at the same time, in the same room are a portrait in contrast. On one side of the room the KIPP students, all but two in attendance, are seated in order and eat while they talk in quiet, conversational tones. On the other side of the room, chaos is breaking out. Although a full third of the local school students are missing, lunch monitors scream at the children through bull horns, desperately trying to maintain control.

I don’t know about you, but my experience in school at all levels was that even a small amount of disruption by students was extremely destructive of the learning environment. Meanwhile, there were students in just about every classroom where I ever found myself who were primed to disrupt proceedings as soon as an opening presented itself. (Yes, we even had such students at Harvard Law School.). I always found that the ability to maintain order in the classroom was a far better measure of effective teaching than mere mastery of the subject matter. Sowell comments:

Though neither behavioral standards nor any other single factor is likely to explain why some schools do much better than others, it is hard to imagine how educational quality can be maintained amid bedlam.

In any event, the results at KIPP and at Success speak for themselves.

And thus you will not be surprised to learn that undermining the ability of schools, and particularly charter schools, to impose discipline and maintain order has become a focus of attack from teachers unions and progressives generally. Sowell:

Behavioral standards in charter schools have repeatedly come under fire from critics.

Sowell cites to a series of initiatives, beginning in January 2014 with one of those “Dear Colleague” letters issued from the Obama Department of Education. This one declared that “Federal law prohibits public school districts from discriminating in the administration of student discipline based on certain personal characteristics.” Sowell’s comment:

Statistical disparities were now being equated with discrimination, with the full power of the federal government behind that interpretation.

More recently, the efforts to relax school discipline, supposedly in the name of racial justice, have been specifically expanded in multiple jurisdictions to apply to charter schools — with great potential to undermine or even eliminate the superior educational results that charters have been able to achieve for minority students through stricter discipline. As one of many examples, Sowell cites to new Section 48901.1 of the California Education Code, enacted in 2019, which prevents the use of school suspension or expulsion as disciplinary devices by charter schools even in highly egregious circumstances:

A pupil enrolled in a charter school in kindergarten or any of grades 1 to 5, inclusive, shall not be suspended on the basis of having disrupted school activities or otherwise willfully defied the valid authority of supervisors, teachers, administrators, school officials, or other school personnel engaged in the performance of their duties, and those acts shall [also] not constitute grounds for a pupil . . . to be recommended for expulsion.

(Very similar provisions then apply to pupils in other grades up to 12.).

In the very, very short run, I guess we will now see fewer suspensions and expulsions of black and other minority kids from charter schools. In the not-very-much-longer run, thousands of minority kids who had the potential to learn self-discipline as the precursor to successful adulthood will instead have learned that disruption is fun and will not be punished. Since these kids are only kids now, they will have no way of knowing how they have been deprived of the most critical lesson in how to become a functioning adult — a lesson far more important than memorization of the multiplication tables.

I would mark down the effort to undermine charter schools and their program of effective student discipline as a prime example of progressive racism in practice. Somehow, progressives can convince themselves that it is the opposite.