The Board of Education in the town where I live in Illinois just announced a revision to the discipline policy across all of its individual schools. Of course, as with every Blue State in America, Illinois is allergic to punishment and personal responsibility, believing children and adults alike should be shielded from consequences, so this latest “solution” is simply part of the larger national pattern of Liberal blame shifting and virtue signaling.

Our school district’s Director of Equity and School Improvement, which is the Woke-Speak job title assigned to the designated apologist for relentlessly lowering behavioral and academic standards in the pursuit of so-called social justice, identified the the problem with the current discipline code as such: 11% of incidents involving White students led to exclusionary disciplines; however, more than double (28%) of incidents involving students of color led to expulsion or suspension.

These disciplinary numbers must be absolutely even because, if they are not, clear and unmistakable racism must be the cause. This is so unfair, right?

The doctrine of “disparate impact” has been a fixture of civil rights law for many decades; it is the intellectual pretzel that has (my apologies to Helen of Troy) launched a thousand lawsuits, all while turning the notion of equal outcomes—rather than equal opportunity and accountability—into a defining practice that now dictates every facet of institutional, governmental, and educational policies.

This all started, innocuously enough, with an employment discrimination lawsuit that came before the Supreme Court back in 1971, Griggs v. Duke Power Company, which held that the tests for employment used by Duke Power Company amounted to “practices that are fair in form [emphasis mine], but discriminatory in operation” because fewer Black candidates were hired.

Congress codified this new “disparate impact” standard into law in 1991, and its reach has crept onward and upwards over the decades to include presumed discrimination that affects Americans based on gender identification, disability status, national origins (unsurprisingly, this is routinely used to impede the enforcement of immigration laws), and other sub-groupings of our society. 

As it stands today, even if your criteria, rules, or expectations in a given situation, school, or workplace are reasonable and logical, if the end result is one group of people is affected more than another, you are engaging in “discrimination” that must be remedied. This belief now informs the thinking of virtually every Liberal in America, who look around and see only a bigoted and evil nation. “Disparate impact” is the gift that keeps on giving because it relieves the complainant from actually proving discriminatory intent—the outcome is all that matters.

As it applies to educational outcomes in our public schools, this legal doctrine has been a disaster because districts across America have eliminated Gifted programs, Advanced Placement classes, and Honors seminars—because too few students of color were enrolled. In terms of enforcing rules of behavior, respectful speech, and appropriate dress, it has hamstrung many efforts because it is often the case that students of color misbehave more often, but institutional bigotries are not the reason.

The Liberals running so many of our nation’s schools—and their overtly Marxist national teacher unions—are absolutely right that these children have been victimized, but it wasn’t by the mythical white supremacists they believe are lurking behind every tree in our nation. The victimizers of these troubled students of color are typically their clueless unmarried moms who begat with the help of a hit-and-run baby daddy.

Flash forward 16 years. The toxic combination of a frazzled thirty-something mother who has given up on parenting and an absent or unreliable father (plus a likely succession of mom’s less-than-laudable boyfriends) has created an adolescent who is hostile, hurt, defiant, lonely, and prone to lash out due to their many frustrations. Thankfully, there are a significant number of Black and Brown students who are not in this tragic situation, but the fact is many are, and it is ruining the futures of children and adolescents before they even have a future. 

To be fair, a good number of troubled White students would benefit from parenting by the Black and Brown parents who are loving, mature, and married. Unfortunately, regardless of one’s race or ethnicity, we are currently suffering from a national epidemic of single parents who are absent, abusive, or incompetent—so insisting on balancing out the school discipline numbers is the most pointless of all solutions to this problem.

Over the past 50 years public education has mutated into a racket for the racial bean counters who hate the standardized tests that expose how little learning is taking place and prefer to attack America as a whole instead of recognizing the real problem is what happens—and does not—at home with parents who have no clue about how to parent a child. Every day this sad charade continues, more misery is being created, more anger is being born, and more futures are being destroyed.

It is also worth remembering that setting high expectations for behavior and dress—and employing consistent discipline when these expectations are not met—is a critically important part of a child’s emotional maturation. The fragility, fear, and foolish willfulness of so many young adults today is directly related to never being held accountable when they were younger—and this is true no matter the color of one’s skin. If this discipline does not happen at home, it is unlikely schools will be able to remedy this parental deficit, but climbing this steep and thankless hill is another burden daily placed on educators who are often already overwhelmed by the impossible and contradictory demands piled on their desks.

All children are impacted by bad parenting and the neglect that leaves them unable to deal with the unrelenting and unforgiving challenges of adulthood, and this impact is not disparate but diffuse. If you see a troubled child or adolescent, look to mom and dad for the reason—if you can find them.