Obama Administration Promises to Make Public Schools Even More Dysfunctional

I've been pointing out for years that the theory and practice of disparate impact is fundamentally catastrophic to American public education, since any realistic, effective policy will have a racially disparate impact, and therefore make schools vulnerable to discrimination lawsuits. The Obama Administration today announced: Undermining public education is not a bug of disparate impact, it's a feature!

From the New York Times:

Officials Step Up Enforcement of Rights Laws in Education
By SAM DILLON

Seeking to step up enforcement of civil rights laws, the federal Department of Education says it will be sending letters in coming weeks to thousands of school districts and colleges, outlining their responsibilities on issues of fairness and equal opportunity.

As part of that effort, the department intends to open investigations known as compliance reviews in about 32 school districts nationwide, seeking to verify that students of both sexes and all races are getting equal access to college preparatory curriculums and to advanced placement courses. The department plans to open similar civil rights investigations at half a dozen colleges.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is to announce the initiatives in a speech on Monday in Selma, Ala., where on March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights marchers were beaten by Alabama state troopers.

Mr. Duncan plans to say that in the past decade the department’s Office for Civil Rights “has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating gender and racial discrimination and protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities,” according to a text of the speech distributed to reporters on Sunday.

It continues, “We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.”

At the end of high school, white students are about six times as likely to be ready to pursue college-level biology courses as black students, and more than four times as likely to be ready for college algebra, department officials said. White high school graduates are more than twice as likely to have taken advanced placement calculus classes as black or Latino graduates.

Assertions about discrimination in access to Advanced Placement (AP) classes can be easily tested by looking at performance on AP tests.

If smart blacks and Latinos are being kept out of AP classes at an unfair rate, then blacks and Latinos should be scoring higher on the actual Advanced Placement Calculus AB test, right? Because so many more low-potential whites are being channeled into taking the class and thus the test, whites should be doing worse, right?

Except that the average score, according to the College Board, on Calculus AB is (on a 1 to 5 scale with 5 being best):

Asian: 3.23
White: 3.14
Mexican-American: 2.13
Black: 2.00

Since about 70% of blacks get a 1 (the lowest possible score, equivalent to an F in a freshman Intro to Calc course at an average college) on the Calculus AB AP test compared to about 30% of whites, there is more evidence to suggest that too many blacks are enrolled in Calculus AP courses than too few. Kids who get a 1 on the Calculus AB AP test would probably have been better off taking Statistics or a less fast-paced Calculus course or something else, because they apparently didn't get much out of their AP Calculus class.

The department enforces civil rights laws in schools and universities by responding to specific complaints from parents, students and others, but also by scrutinizing its own vast bodies of data on the nation’s school and university systems, looking for signs of possible discrimination.

I.e., the feds sniff out Disparate Impact.

A school seen to be expelling Latino students in numbers far out of proportion to their share of the student population, for instance, might become a candidate for compliance review, officials said.

The NYT Magazine and Newsweek have articles this week complaining that public school teachers can't maintain discipline in their classrooms.

Effect, meet Cause.

How are schools going to punish troublemakers fairly when the federal Department of Education threatens them if they do? What the schools end up doing, of course, is not punishing troublemakers adequately, which damages the learning environment for the good kids.

... Russlyn H. Ali, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in an interview that the department would begin 38 compliance reviews before the current fiscal year ended on Oct. 1. That number compares with 29 such reviews carried out last year, 42 in 2008, 23 in 2007 and nine in 2006, she said.

“But the big difference is not in the number of the reviews we intend to carry out, but in their complexity and depth,” Ms. Ali said. “Most of the reviews in the recent past have looked at procedures.”

In cases analyzing potential sex discrimination, for instance, federal investigators would often check to see if schools and universities had grievance procedures in place, and if so, take no enforcement action, she said.

“Now we’ll not simply see whether there is a program in place, but also examine whether that program is working effectively,” she said.

The department plans to begin a major investigation on Wednesday in one of the nation’s largest urban school districts, Ms. Ali said. She declined to identify it because, she said, department officials were still notifying Congress and others of the plans.

The compliance reviews typically involve visits to the school district or university by federal officials based in one or more of the department’s 12 regional offices.

The department intends to send letters offering guidance to virtually all of the nation’s 15,000 school districts and several thousand institutions of post-secondary education, officials said.

The letters will focus on 17 areas of civil rights concern, including possible racial discrimination in student assignments and admissions, in the meting out of discipline, and in access to resources, including qualified teachers. Other areas include possible sex and gender bias in athletics programs, as well as sexual harassment and violence. Other letters will remind districts and colleges of their responsibilities under federal law with regard to disabled students.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer