Obama and Holder Become High School Principals

A Friday story in the Daily Caller by Neil Munro brings home to me several points; not just about liberal ideology, but about Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s race-based agenda.

AG Eric Holder with President Barack Obama

President Obama signed an executive order called the “White House Initiative on Educational Excellence” this past Thursday that is going largely unnoticed (read ignored) by the so-called mainstream media.  The order sets up a government panel (we can fix anything with a government panel!) to promote, among other things, “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”

Seems that our illustrious president and his attorney general believe that black children get into too much trouble in school.  That being so, they have decided that the problem isn’t that black children are more likely to act out or break the rules, but that the rules themselves are being unfairly applied.  Nevermind that they have zero evidence to back up that assumption.  It should be patently obvious to any good liberal that if black children are getting into trouble in school more often than children of other races, it must be because those charged with disciplining them are racist.

Now, I have long held the opinion that school discipline policies border on the edges of insanity.  Most schools have been stuck in their “zero-tolerance” mindset for so long that we see idiotic things happening, like students getting suspended for taking aspirin.  But it is far worse than that.  Schools often opt to suspend and expel students at far too high a rate for my tastes.  I believe these forms of punishment to be extremely counter-productive, not just for the student and the school, but for society at large, and that they should be used as the very last resort.  We do have a lot of real problems.

And now President Obama is going to provide us with even more…

The Daily Caller quotes the report as saying that “over a third of African-American students do not graduate from high school on time with a regular high school diploma, and only four percent of African-American high school graduates interested in college are college-ready across a range of subjects.”

Far be it for me to point out that the vast majority of these children are trapped in inner-city schools, and that the liberals are their captors.  The teachers unions have a stranglehold on city schools even stronger than the hold they have in the suburbs.  They have fought against conservative attempts to allow children to leave failing schools at every turn, and yet can not fathom why the children aren’t doing so well.

From the DC:

In February, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that “we’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled.”

“This is, quite simply, unacceptable. … These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed,” he said in his speech, given in Atlanta, Ga.

I find myself in complete agreement with Eric Holder on one thing.  Suspensions and expulsions are indeed destructive, even when ultimately necessary.  But the notion that blacks are somehow being unfairly targeted is ludicrous.

Their solution to the problem is even more destructive, and it leads one to wonder if it may actually be intended to be destructive.  After all, the more people who are dependent upon the government, the more people the government can control, and liberals actually believe that is a GOOD thing.

The president’s panel is set to force several school districts to hand out punishments in line with the racial makeup of the population, regardless of the racial makeup of those breaking the rules.  This means that white and asian students, who operate within the rules more often, are likely to be punished more harshly when compared to black students for the same offenses.

That, my friends, is Obama and Holder’s idea of “equality”.