How Equity Will Resegregate Public Schools

Equity is setting the stage for increased division and racism in the United States.

Thanks, Joe Biden!

The Biden Administration is considering new equity standards for school discipline that Free Enterprise Project Director Scott Shepard points out go hand-in-hand with critical race theory goals and effectively mean that “it’s ok to make white racial outcomes worse (never mind their individual outcomes) if necessary to achieve ‘equity’ (which, note, now has a very fuzzy meaning indeed).”

In a Townhall commentary, Scott writes that “there is literally everything wrong with this.”  He explains:

As an empirical matter, this plan falls down at the first hurdle as well. The program presupposes that all students, by racial or ethnic group, misbehave at the same rate (but that black students in particular are punished for their misbehaviors more than others – presumably even in classrooms taught by non-whites – because of “whiteness”). But as Gail Heriot of the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights has explained, “there is no evidence to support” this assumption of equality of misbehavior, “and abundant evidence to the contrary.”

Here’s the vicious cycle that Scott sees new equitable disciplinary expectations creating:

• “If we are to have equality of punishments with inequality of misbehavior, then the white kids at school are going to have to be punished more for lesser offenses, while other students are punished less for the same offenses.”
• “Then, based on this knowledge, some of the more daring and less educationally committed non-white kids will start misbehaving more, and more drastically.”
• “The non-white kids will know they’re pretty much not getting punished for anything, and some of them will keep – peer pressure having amplified the cycle – behaving more and more badly, because it’s fun and doesn’t create negative responses.”
• White kids “will resent this immensely, and… will of necessity notice racial difference and develop racial antagonisms that they otherwise never would have.”

“And so white parents who have the ability will take their kids out of the objectively racist schools to schools where racist discipline rules don’t ruin the learning environment,” Scott concluded. “This will result in increased segregation – which will also be blamed on ‘whiteness.’”

Not a very successful “anti-racist” strategy. Unless that was the goal all along.

To read all of Scott’s commentary – “‘Anti-Racism is Just Racism: School Discipline Case Study” – click here.