Fighting Statistics with Racism Fails Again

Our local school district has a problem. According to some people it is so damn racist that it rivals the Jim Crowe south and the federal government must save us from our wicked ways. The district, in order to avoid a potentially devastatingly costly lawsuit, agreed to a Consent Decree that was supposed to fix it all. And they agreed both to it's Constitutionality and to defend it if anybody says otherwise. Years later it seems to have had the opposite effect than intended and costing massive amounts of cash that could have been used to actually fix the poorly performing schools.

So we're stuck with this consent decree that tells us over and over how skin pigment is some sort of critical factor in the success or failure of our local schools. It tells us that the average level of skin pigment of the students hurts or helps a school. It tells us that the average level of skin pgiment of the teachers and staff hurts or helps a school. It even goes as far as telling us that skin pigment should be taken into consideration on whether or not you have enough kids in special education or gifted programs.

Wow.

The legacy of abuses in the past has left a disproportionate result in socioeconomic status of many people. Tools that generally help students at a disadvantage will disproportionately help them. Improving schools that have a high proportion of disadvantaged students will disproportionately help disadvantaged students. It's not rocket science.

Poor performing schools are not performing poorly because the students' average skin pigment level is too high and they aren't peforming poorly because of any skin pigment ratio between students and staff. They're performing poorly because there are more students there who need more help. And while everyone is running around shaking their fists at historical ghosts and goblins, we aren't getting the additional teachers, teaching assitants, or additional community support for kids who need additional help.

So how do we get unstuck out of this racist agreement that our school district has sworn itself to defend even if challenged by a third party? Fight it as a third party, fight against the district, and drag this thing all the way to the Supreme Court to be stomped out for the racist rubbish that it is. This isn't the deep south. We aren't living under Jim Crowe. Ku Klux Klan members aren't teaching our children or running our schools. From reading the consent decree you'll find endless statements on disproporationate statistics but nothing on any discriminitory policy, specific acts of discrimination, let alone anything that would tie the disproportion to those policies or acts. It's sad that fear of defending itself against an expensive lawsuit was enough to get them to shred any notion of human equality in open court.

Unfortunately the district has, through Consent Decree, agreed to defend racist policies, segregate people by race in their actions and treat them unequally based on race, using (of all things) the Fourteenth Amendment to defend such views, and has sworn to defend this view against any third parties who might take them to task for it. Some will argue that the district cannot afford to go through more legal calamities in order to defend its prior agreement against third parties, especially if it means dragging it all the way to the Supreme Court. I would argue that is to our advantage. It is only required to defend its stance in court. This does not mean that it has to hire a vast team of lawyers and experts to defend itself. They merely have to hire one lawyer to defend their stance, and for our sake, unsuccessfully do so.