“Disparate impact” is the idea that when normal, rational processes of hiring and promotion don’t yield exactly the right percentages of people from the groups the left favors, the government needs to step in. During the Obama years, the concept was applied to education. The U.S. Department of Education decided that if more black students were being disciplined in school than “ought to be” in terms demographic representation, then schools could face federal action.
At long last, the department, no longer bowing down to leftist ideology, has repealed some of its disparate-impact regulations. In this Liberty Unyielding post, Hans Bader explains that the
disparate-impact regulations led some school districts to make discipline decisions based on race. Under Obama and Biden, the Education Department used disparate-impact regulations to undermine school safety and pressure school systems to allow more misbehavior by minority students. Race-conscious curbs on suspensions led to violence in some school districts.
Those regulations are certainly the most egregious of the Obama-Biden pandering to DEI zealots. Discipline for school misbehavior should depend on the individuals who act up, not on group percentages.
Quoting lawyer Paul Mirengoff, Bader writes that “investigating school districts merely because they discipline blacks at a higher rate than whites ‘gives schools and school districts a strong incentive to achieve racially proportionate outcomes so as to avoid legal liability or, in the case of public schools, to avoid the loss of federal funds. In many cases this will entail not disciplining black students who deserve and need to be disciplined. The effect of not disciplining them will be less classroom discipline, more classroom disruption, and less learning. And many of the victims of this outcome will be black students who don’t misbehave.’”
Disparate-impact regulations remain, and the Department of Education needs to keep going.