The result of liberal school discipline policies

[_Maxine Waters]

The Broward County school district’s adoption of a school discipline policy that was praised by the Obama administration for seeking to reduce the reported number of school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests may have played a role in the fact that Nikolas Cruz remained under the radar until his shooting rampage in Parkland, Florida, on February 14.

“The facts pattern that has emerged strongly suggests it played a role,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Max Eden tells Breitbart News. “It’s not actually accurate to say that what Broward County did was the result of the Obama policy. It might be more accurate to say that what Broward County did was in some way the inspiration for Obama’s policy.”

The Obama-era Departments of Education and Justice – under education secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder –issued school guidelines in 2014 that claimed students of color are “disproportionately impacted” by suspensions and expulsions, a situation they said leads to a “school-to-prison pipeline” that discriminates against minority and low-income students.

“Broward County was the first to have the goal of lowering suspensions, lowering expulsions, lowering arrests,” explains Eden. “And, so, they decided to reduce police involvement by not bringing in cops to arrest kids for a whole range of serious offenses, and then, as you would expect, the arrests go down when you stop arresting. That was taken to be a sign of success, based on that metric alone.”

According to the Obama administration’s 2014 “Dear Colleague” guidance, any school district whose disciplinary measures showed “disparate impact” – meaning a disproportionately greater number of minority students are affected – is open to investigation by the Departments of Justice and Education, regardless of whether the behavior leading to the discipline is unacceptable. Eden explained at National Review in November how the Obama-era school discipline policy “extended Black Lives Matter’s ideology down into America’s classrooms”:

Social-justice activists assumed that just as racial disparities in the criminal-justice system must be evidence that cops are (at least implicitly) racist, so too racial disparities in school suspensions must be evidence that teachers are (at least implicitly) racist. Therefore, teachers — like cops — have to be restrained. Several years before the Obama school discipline policy appeared, however, the Broward County school board hired as superintendent Robert Runcie – who had worked for Duncan in Chicago – and also joined with the NAACP, law enforcement, and government agencies to adopt the district’s Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline, dubbed PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support, and Education). As M. Catharine Evans reports at American Thinker, in academic year 2011-2012, just prior to the school board’s decision to hire Runcie, the Broward County public school district had 1,062 school-related arrests – the highest number in Florida.

Evans continues: The Obama administration’s Department of Education was also involved in implementing PROMISE. Obama, who routinely dangled carrots in the form of matching federal grants to local districts for their participation in Common Core and Race to the Top, doled out millions to Broward. With the promise of federal monies, it’s no surprise that Superintendent Runcie (annual salary: $335,000) was happy to oblige his friends in D.C. Within a year of Runcie’s arrival, student arrest rates were down 66 percent, and Broward County Schools were about to hit the federal jackpot. One of the premises of the PROMISE program cited in the agreement and supported by data from the Obama Department of Education Office for Civil Rights reads: WHEREAS, across the country, students of color, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students are disproportionately impacted by school-based arrests for the same behavior as their peers.

“In 2015, the Obama administration brought them to a White House Summit on rethinking school discipline and to highlight their success and tell school districts throughout the country, ‘Look at what Broward is doing as an example,’” Eden says.

Broward County Sheriff Union president Jeff Bell told Laura Ingraham on Fox News that he places some blame for the horrific shooting on the school board and the adoption of its PROMISE program:

For years they know that the schools have been soft targets, and they claim that they want to have better police presence inside the schools, and they want tougher security, but, yet, they do not want to cough up the money to pay for that better security and fortify their schools and have better designs. They don’t want that. And, then when they are fortunate to have a school resource officer deputy on scene, and armed police presence, a lot of the liberal-thinking principals on campus there, they don’t want the police officers making arrests on campus, and they don’t want the drugs to be found on campus, and they don’t want the warrants to be served on campus because it looks like there’s bad stats at the school.

So, I place a lot of blame on the school board with that and some of the programs that they’ve initiated with the state attorney and the sheriff’s office in years past. For example, the PROMISE program … the problem is when that program started, we took all discretion away from the law enforcement officers to effect an arrest if we choose to.

During an interview Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel first defended the PROMISE program as one that is “helping many, many people,” but then later admitted that if a report is not made about an aggressive student’s behavior to law enforcement, “there’s no malfeasance or misfeasance if you don’t know about something”:

TAPPER: I think there are a lot of people, sir, who think that there are a lot of mistakes, other than that one deputy.

But let me ask you something else. A lot of people in the community have noted that the Broward County School Board entered into an agreement when you were sheriff in 2013 to pursue the — quote — “least punitive means of discipline” against students.

This new policy encouraged warnings, consultations with parents and programs on conflict resolution, instead of arresting students for crimes. Were there not incidents committed by the shooter as a student had this new policy not been in place that otherwise he would have been arrested for and not able to legally buy a gun?

ISRAEL: What you’re referring to is the PROMISE Program. And it’s giving the school — the school has the ability under certain circumstances not to call the police, not to get the police involved on misdemeanor offenses and take care of it within the school. It’s an excellent program. It’s helping many, many people. What this program does is not put a person at 14, 15, 16 years old into the criminal justice system.

TAPPER: What if he should be in the criminal justice system? What if he does something violent to a student? What if he takes bullets to school? What if he takes knives to schools? What if he threatens the lives of fellow students?

ISRAEL: Then he goes to jail. That’s not applicable in the PROMISE Program.

TAPPER: That’s not what happened. But that’s not what happened with the shooter.

ISRAEL: If – Jake, you’re telling me that the shooter took knives to school or bullets to school, and police knew about it?

TAPPER: I don’t know if police knew about it.

ISRAEL: No. Well, police …

TAPPER: I know that the agreement that you entered into with the school allowed the school to give this kid excuse after excuse after excuse, while, obviously …

ISRAEL: Not for bullets, not for bullets, not for guns, not for knives, not for felonies, not for anything like that. These are infractions within the school, small amounts of marijuana, some misdemeanors. You’re absolutely exacerbating it. That’s not …

TAPPER: There are at teachers at the school had been told, if you see Cruz come on campus with a backpack, let me know. Does that not indicate that there is something seriously awry with the PROMISE Program if these teachers are being told, watch out for this kid, and you don’t know about it?

ISRAEL: We don’t know that that has anything to do with the PROMISE Program. I didn’t hear about this until after the fact. I have heard about this information about a week ago. I do know about it. I don’t know who the teacher was. It hasn’t been corroborated, but that has nothing to do with the PROMISE Program.

I can’t, nor can any other Broward sheriff’s deputy, handle anything or act upon something you don’t know about it. There’s no malfeasance or misfeasance if you don’t know about something.

“So much of the question that we should be asking is how did Cruz go under the radar and what role these policies played in that, because we have evidence that, at a lower level, these dynamics are playing out in school districts across the country,” Eden asserts.

He observes that in Washington, DC, principals of nearly every high school “systematically took suspensions off the books.”
“They told teachers not to let those students back into school, but they never told Central Office about it,” he explains. “So how much troubling student behavior was never able to be processed because of the way administrators reacted to a shift that says we expect you to post lower numbers on disciplinary problems?”

Evans notes that in October 2016, Broward County’s school board and its partners renewed the PROMISE agreement: After the 2016 signing, it was announced a couple of weeks later on October 18, BCPS was the only large urban district in the country to receive a Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant from the U.S. Dept. of Education totaling $53,808, 909. One of the TIF’s grant priorities is listed as “improved life for students in poverty/students of color.” Nevertheless, as the Washington Post reported, the Florida Department of Children and Families report regarding the investigation into Cruz states that, in 2016, school resource officer Scot Peterson had been approached by investigators, but “refused to share any information … regarding [an] incident that took place with” Cruz.

The Post continues: That same year, the sheriff’s office revealed Thursday, it was told about “third hand information” from a “neighbor’s son” suggesting that Cruz “planned to shoot up the school,” although the specific school was not listed. The sheriff’s office said a deputy contacted the caller, determined that Cruz had knives and a BB gun and sent the information to the school resource officer — presumably Peterson. It is unclear whether he investigated. “If we’re trying to answer the question, ‘How did Nikolas Cruz remain under the radar?’ it certainly seems as though part of that answer is the fact that the radar was shifted and that students like him were supposed to be put under the radar in the first place,” Eden suggests. “The point of the PROMISE program was to not let them know about it.”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... spensions/

And yet for some reason all Democratic legislators want to do in response to this shooting is head out to the hollows and hills and confiscate the guns of rural Americans. Gee, I wonder why.

[_Gadianton]

That was interesting, since Cruz's profile doesn't fit anything they're complaining about. At worst, there is an incentive to arrest more whites in order to satisfy Obama that we're being fair. It looks like even liberal reverse discrimination at its worst wasn't able to solve the problem of white killers.

Anyway, forget about that for now, and suppose you are right. The NRA's very own position on owning a gun safe proves that it doesn't matter.

Let's review their position:

There are many reasons why you as a gun owner should seriously consider investing in a gun safe. The first is to prevent children who are too young to understand gun safety from gaining access to your firearms...and even if your children are well-educated and responsible, consider that their friends may not be.

Suppose that you have kids, Ajax, who are old enough to understand gun safety and are well-educated on guns. The family AR-15 sits in the living room propped up against the wall with a few clips and a pack of ammo on the coffee table, and it's no big deal because everyone in the home is a super-responsible right-winger. But suppose your kids have friends who come over now and again without totally pure white blood, and who have benefited from the PROMISE program. As the NRA says, these friends might be risky. You have two options, Ajax, which do you choose:

a) get a gun safe as the NRA recommends.

b) Forget about the gun safe, as Amore will tell you, that gun is innocent, and we don't want to commit a logical fallacy by blaming it. What we should do instead, is allow the gun to sit in the open, and go to work with other right-wingers to get rid of the PROMISE program and get the arrest level back up into triple digits. If we can achieve that, then there is "a chance" that if any of your children's friends are potentially dangerous, then they will be arrested before they take your gun and go mad with it one day while playing nintendo with your kids.

[_Maxine Waters]

That was interesting, since Cruz's profile doesn't fit anything they're complaining about.

The way I understand it, Cruz was adopted and raised by Hispanics, hence the Hispanic name Cruz. Are you counting him as white?

You have to understand the beliefs of liberal administrators of education. Their point was that if children are punished for their behavior and continue doing the same action then by definition the punishment failed and shouldn't be meted out anymore. So if Cruz was suspended for bringing a gun to school, served the suspension, and later came back to school again with a gun, that means the teacher is at fault for giving the wrong punishment or for punishing him at all. It's also the teachers fault for not stopping the behavior before it got to the principal. The teacher should be able to fix this so no child ever needs to be arrested while having his hands tied. You may think I'm exaggerating but our public school system is really this screwed up because it's the manifestation of the will of vocal political minorities threatening an elected school board. The rule of law is capricious and unpredictable in this environment, lacking any consistency.

I'm not sure what your analogy is trying to say. Of course I'd get a gun safe. A gun safe doesn't take away my right to defend myself nor possess the key. For some reason when an urban Hispanic kid goes and shoots up a high school, your reaction is to march out to the hollows and hills and confiscate every country boy's shotgun. I guess that allows you to blame the people you want to blame but it certainly doesn't address the problem.

[_Gadianton]

I'm not sure what your analogy is trying to say. Of course I'd get a gun safe. A gun safe doesn't take away my right to defend myself nor possess the key.

What we're demonstrating here is that direct physical restriction of the weapon that may be used in a crime can and should be considered independent of the social and psychological factors of the persons who might use the weapon. Like the NRA blurb says, you can't screen all your children's friends for every possible educational, psychological, and social ill that may induce them to grab that gun and do something crazy with it. You can, however, take away the weapon. Let's look at the list of problem social conditions:

- children without fathers (amore)
- children on psych drugs (amore)
- children adopted by hispanic parents (Ajax)
- children of color empowered by PROMISE (AJax)

And I think we can just go on and on with this list. Both you and Amore are saying it's absolutely crazy we'd take away the weapon. Yet, you at least, agree that securing the weapon is the obvious thing to do at a family level, rather than let the weapon stand accessible while we solve all of society's problems first -- what you and Amore demand is the only viable solution at the national level.

As you point out, this is an analogy. Let's break it down:

- the parents who make the rules etc. = government.
- the children of the parents with proper gun education = probably good citizens.
- the friends of the children = unknowns -- potentially good but potentially very bad.
- gun safe = a generic metaphor for various ways of physically preventing both good and bad citizens from using guns.

The most important part of this analogy is the fact that it's not illogical at all to consider how to restrict the weapon, in fact it's the first thing we should consider, independent of any other efforts to understand and prevent people from using it.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Majax,

If Cruz couldn't procure an AR-15 would he have killed 17 students with an AR-15?

- Doc

[_Maxine Waters]

If Cruz couldn't procure an AR-15 would he have killed 17 students with an AR-15?

Drugs are illegal now. Why doesn't the law stop people from illegally procuring those? Has it even helped? We have a heroin epidemic right now.

[_honorentheos]

We have a heroin epidemic right now.

...largely fueled by reckless opiate over-prescription practices.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

If Cruz couldn't procure an AR-15 would he have killed 17 students with an AR-15?

Drugs are illegal now. Why doesn't the law stop people from illegally procuring those? Has it even helped? We have a heroin epidemic right now.

Please answer my question.

If Cruz couldn't procure an AR-15 would he have killed 17 students with an AR-15?

- Doc