Big Brother Obama to Direct School Discipline in the “Name of Equality”

This disturbing article about Obama racial management was printed at PowerLine on Monday:

“The Obama administration’s Department of Education has announced that it will crack down on “civil-rights infractions” in public schools, including alleged disparities in the disciplining of white and black students. This means that the administration will identify and investigate situations in which a facially neutral discipline system — offense X brings punishment Y — results in blacks being discplined more often than whites. School systems will face the prospect of being punished unless they can explain the disparities, presumably based on a painstaking analysis of each disciplinary decision.

As Roger Clegg points out, the easy way out for schools — and what school bureaucrat won’t prefer the easy way out — is to make sure the numbers pass muster, i.e., to make discipline decisions based not solely on the merits, but also on the basis of race. And since administrators aren’t likely to mete out punishment just to balance the numbers, they will balance them by going easier on black students because they are black.

As a result, school discipline will be further eroded, making it increasinigly difficult for students of all races to learn.

It’s bad enough that the Obama-Duncan Education Department is intent on trapping students in bad public schools. Now, it plans, though aggressive “civil rights” enforcement, to undermine whatever measure of discipline these schools have been able to maintain.

Duncan announded his “civil rights” initiative during a speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., scene of the “Bloody Sunday” civil-rights confrontation 45 years ago. That’s good PR, I suppose. But did the civil rights protesters of the 1960s really march so that school administrators would be intimidated into not disciplining black students who violate the rules?

Naturally, no student should be disciplined due to his or her race. But the way to prevent this abuse is to identify and address (at the local level, I would argue) specific cases where administrators treat minority students differently due to race. Such cases are not likely to go unnoticed given the tendency these days for students and their parents to complain. Imposing a presumptive quota system for discipline and forcing administrator’s to justify deviations from the numbers is wrongheaded and corrosive

Once, it was axiomatic that education is a local matter. Today, many believe that there are aspects of the eduational process as to which the federal government has a proper role. But it’s difficult for me to see how classroom discipline is one of them”.

Comment:  I taught at a senior high school in Minnepolis 40 years ago.  It was the era of the Leftwing dictate of forced busing.   Blacks were being spread around the city and later to the inner suburbs to share  the burdens caused by the plantation nature of inner city chaos.   The courts and school admininstrators and politicians in general dictated that any public schools without significant black enrolments were failures.  These schools did not represent American culture, therefore they could be no worthwhile learning occurring there.  They demanded that everyone believe  that there was no cultural differences between inner city society and the civilized Minneapolis public schools with all white populations.   Everyone was totally equal, one side of the liberal mouth insisted. 

In reality the whole purpose of busing was to merge the two diverse cultures because academic and social behaviors were not equal!……One institution was quite civilized obeying traditional rules of school behavior and standards for learning and the other  high school was sinking   in a sea of torrential disorder dominated by hoodlums allowed to express their trouble.

Educators, widely known for their dishonesty, pretended there wasn’t the thinnest dime’s difference   between black schools and those with white enrolments.  It would be racist to say so.   Yet they proposed busing  to solve the vast differences between the two communities.   Nothing quite measures up to public school thinking.  Opponents to busing were purged.

I was transferred to a ‘black’ high school after years of successful teaching at a high school where the only black would be among  the teaching faculty….a fine, highly qualified and respected fellow.

It was assumed and TAUGHT by some on the faculty at the  ’minority’ school that whites were just as disorderly and chaotic as the predominantly ‘minority’ school……that the beatings and robbings  and shootings there were  normal at all white schools and communities as well.  Newspaper reporters, they claimed, would write only about black-caused crime, as part of the white population’s conspiracy against them.

The white high school where I taught had been a civil, well disciplined   high school remindful of “Happy Days”.  A major crime there would be throwing snowballs at police cars.  

To this day black students are far more disruptive in schools than non blacks.   Liberals will intentionally read this statement as racist …..to stir the passions of  their plantation culture allies, a culture in which the family unit has disappeared and racism flourishes.

So, the Obama administration apparently is going to even things out.

Obama’s Habit of Telling Untruths

Obama embellished truth when he ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008.   Obama  stretched, twisted and avoided truth when he ran against and defeated John McCain for the presidency the same year.

Until recently respectable writers have used the word disingenuous to describe Obama’s  nature so foreign to telling the truth.

Now, Obama, as a campaigner yelling to his staged audiences for approval of his corrupt and flawed Obamacare government takeover of the American health industry, has slumped to the level of  chronic liar  into the cozy company of folk such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Jeremiah Wright. 

Here is another article describing the surfacing of the real, unsmooth, Marxist president of more hostile and abrasive tones entitled “Obama and the “L” Word:  the president’s habit of telling untruths.”

“Untruth” is another word for “Lie”.  Matt Welch at reason.com wrote:

“Here’s how predictable the president’s slippery relationship with the truth has become: Hours before the State of the Union address, Washington Examiner reporter Timothy P. Carney posted a “pre-emptive fact check” that, among other things, prebutted any presidential claim to have “stopped the revolving door between government and corporate lobbying.” As it happened, that night Barack Obama made an even bolder (read: less truthful) claim: that “we’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”

In fact, more than 40 former lobbyists work in the administration, including such policy makers as Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn (who was lobbying for Raytheon as recently as 2008), Office of the First Lady Director of Policy and Projects Jocelyn Frye (National Partnership for Women and Families), White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Muñoz (National Council of La Raza), and Treasury Secretary Chief of Staff Mark Patterson (Goldman Sachs). 

When Carney confronted a White House spokeswoman with the falsehood, she conceded nothing. “As the President said,” she wrote, “we have turned away lobbyists for many, many positions.” Just not all of them. 

As such defiance suggests, this was no isolated slip of the tongue. The president, who promised in both word and style to usher in a “new era” of Washington “responsibility,” routinely says things that aren’t true and supports initiatives that break campaign promises. When called on it, he mostly keeps digging. And when obliged to explain why American voters are turning so sharply away from his party and his policies, Obama pins the blame not on his own deviations from verity but on his failure to “explain” things “more clearly to the American people.”

Take the issue he has explained more than any other: health care. In the State of the Union address, Obama claimed that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had estimated that “our approach” to health care reform “would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades.” This is, strictly speaking, not true. The Democrats’ “approach” to health care reform includes a permanent change to the Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors, colloquially known as the “doc fix.” The CBO estimated that the doc fix, when combined with the health care reform legislative package, actually “would increase the budget deficit in 2019 by $23 billion relative to current law, an increment that would grow in subsequent years.” This is why House Democrats stripped out the doc fix from the health care bill, and passed it separately; it made the CBO scores look bad, making it harder for the president to present bogus claims about deficit neutrality.

That bit of mendacity only scratches the surface of how Congress and the administration gamed the system to produce nice-looking numbers. The CBO, by its own rules, has to take Congress at its word when a piece of legislation promises unspecified future “cuts” in spending, even though an overwhelming majority of promised future cuts never come to pass (a fact that the CBO itself has repeatedly warned in supplementary comments). The Senate promised more than $300 billion in such cuts. Furthermore, the CBO scores bills in 10-year windows. So the Senate delayed more than 99 percent of the reform package’s spending until 2014, thus allowing the decade of 2010–2019 to clock in under the magic $1 trillion number. Add to all that chicanery the fact that every major health care entitlement expansion in U.S. history has vastly exceeded initial cost projections, and you have ample reasons for why Americans believed, by a margin of more than 3 to 1, that health care reform would exacerbate rather than improve the deficit.

Even when addressing black-and-white examples of broken promises —such as his vow to televise each and every bit of health care legislative negotiations on C-SPAN—Obama can’t quite resist the temptation to plead gray. When confronted directly on the broken C-SPAN pledge during a January meeting with GOP lawmakers, the president said: “Look, the truth of the matter is that if you look at the health care process—just over the course of the year—overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings in which you guys were participating.”

Presidential defiance, dissembling, and disinformation are nothing new, even if such political perennials are more disappointing coming from someone who still boasts (as he did in the State of the Union address) of “telling hard truths” to the American people and “doing what’s best for the next generation.” Voters pretty much knew that Bill Clinton was a slime ball when they sent him to the White House; Barack Obama held out the promise of being more dignified.

The difference between these two most recent Democratic presidents, substantial to begin with (especially in the crucial area of economic policy), may come into sharper relief in 2010. Clinton’s reptilian relationship with the truth, suffused as it always has been with a catch-me-if-you-can sense of personal preservation, actually turned out to have some uses for the nation when he changed course after the 1994 Republican revolution and began co-opting some of the limited-government policies proposed by his opponents. It’s easier for a chameleon to change his spots.

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.

And yet it smacks of something worse still. When a politician cannot fathom opposition to his policies except as the manifestation of wicked manipulation by bad guys, remediable only by more thorough “explanations” from the good guys, it indicates an unseemly paternalism. And if he cannot take the hint that Bush-Obama bailout-and-spend economics are deeply and increasingly unpopular, that indicates something immovable about his core economic ideology. With those two factors as backdrop, it’s hard to say which would be worse: if the president didn’t really believe what he said, or if he did.”