War on standards
December 6, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The City Council of Washington, D.C. has approved a measure decriminalizing fare evasion in its public transportation system. In D.C., “fare-jumping” will become a civil offense punishable only by a $50 fine. The legislation was originally introduced by dumb-as-a-rock anti-Semite Trayon White. It passed by a vote of 10-2. Fare-jumping is, of course, a form of theft. And not an innocuous form. The local transit authority loses more than $25
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April 20, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Let’s start with the disclosure thing. As an attorney, I had the good fortune to represent Starbucks in various matters, including a case, a matter of public record, where race discrimination was alleged (but not found). Nothing in this post is based on any information obtained as an attorney representing the company more than six years ago. What to make of the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks
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March 15, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Four years ago, the Obama administration promulgated a Dear Colleague letter on school discipline. It was a joint Department of Justice/Department of Education production. More than a year into the Trump administration, the letter still stands. The fault lies with Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education. The Justice Department under Jeff Sessions strongly supports recalling the Dear Colleague letter. I’m told, however, that the DOE is pushing back. The DOE’s pushback
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February 28, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Daniel Horowitz convincingly ties the Parkland shooting to the culture of leniency towards criminals, also known as the jailbreak agenda. He writes: The jailbreak agenda is definitely on display in the Broward County law enforcement agencies. It turns out that Broward County has been promoting a program, funded in part by the federal government, to incentivize local officials to do everything they can to keep juveniles out of jail. .
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February 13, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
I had hoped that the idiotic left-wing outrage at Attorney General Sessions’ use of the term “Anglo-American law enforcement” would dissipate without making it into mainstream discussion. The fact that former President Obama has referred to the Anglo-American nature of our justice system seemed to support my hope. No such luck. This morning, I heard NPR pretend there is a legitimate racism story here. So did ABC News and the
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October 26, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I missed this story at the time, but earlier this year the New York Times reported that the New York Board of Regents eliminated a requirement that aspiring teachers in the state pass a literacy test to become certified. The Board eliminated the requirement because Black and Hispanic candidates for teaching jobs passed the literacy test at significantly lower rates than white candidates. In lieu of passing the literary test,
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October 19, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about an op-ed by professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander in which the authors praised America’s 1950s “bourgeois culture.” Though acknowledging the existence of “racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism” in that culture, they insisted that the modern “loss of bourgeois habits has seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups.” Wax and Alexander described the habits they extolled this way: Get married before you
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September 2, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Mark Graber is a distinguished law professor at the University of Maryland. Until very recently, he coached the school’s mock trial team, leading it to the national championship in (or around) 2008. Until very recently, his daughter Abigail Graber assisted him. She’s an attorney in Washington, D.C. who clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and served on the Yale Law Journal. On
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August 28, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
We have written about the war on standards. Most of the time, this war takes the form of attempts to bulldoze standards of conduct and achievement that stand in the way of equal distribution of society’s benefits and prizes to Blacks. Usually the standards are specific, as are the potential consequences of falling short. A certain test score must be attained to qualify for a job. A criminal law, if
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August 1, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Have you noticed that when sensible, neutral, and longstanding rules and policies don’t produce the racial outcomes desired by the left, it calls for changing those rules and policies? Plagued by a lack of solid family structure and constructive role models, young Black students as a class behave more poorly than White students and thus are disciplined more often. The solution? Change the disciplinary rules and tolerate disciplinary breakdowns —
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April 5, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
We’ve discussed how the Obama administration, through disparate impact theory, seeks to coerce employers into the assuming the risk of hiring criminals. It does so by arguing that African-Americans are overrepresented among ex-cons, and thus that excluding applicants based on criminal records has a disparate impact on this group. So far, to my knowledge, this approach has yielded little if any success in court. However, it may well be that
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March 28, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Last week, Scott and I wrote about an article by Katherine Kersten regarding the ruinous impact on schools in the Twin Cities of racial “equity” in school discipline. As Kersten demonstrated, the attempt to reduce the number of disciplinary actions against minority school children, on the theory that they are disproportionately disciplined, has helped turn some schools in the Twin Cities into war zones. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the
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March 25, 2016 — Scott Johnson
My friend Kathy Kersten wrote the devastating column featured in the Star Tribune this past Sunday on disorder in the St. Paul public schools following from the directives of the Obama administration. Kathy’s column was published as “The school safety debate: Mollycoddle no more.” I drew attention to Kathy’s column in “Kersten’s discipline.” Paul reviewed the column at length in “The war on standards in Twin Cities schools.” Yesterday the
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March 23, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that the Montgomery County school district (which covers an affluent suburban county just outside of Washington, D.C.) is concerned about racial disparities in its “gifted student” programs. A report it commissioned found marked disparities by race and ethnicity in enrollment and acceptance rates, with white and Asian students faring much better than their black and Hispanic counterparts. The report notes, for example, that enrollment in the
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March 21, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
I hope you read Katherine Kersten’s article, presented yesterday by Scott, about the impact of “equity” in disciplinary action on schools in the Twin Cities. As Kersten explains, “equity” in this context isn’t about fairness — that is, the same rules for everyone. Rather, it means that “if one group’s outcomes on social measures are not identical to all of the others’, the cause is presumed to be discrimination and
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March 19, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
The Justice Department has instructed local courts throughout America about how to treat people who violate local ordinances. DOJ has already sued Ferguson, Missouri for allegedly violating citizens rights by virtue of its treatment of people who run afoul of local rules and refuse to pay the resulting fines. Now, Vanita Gupta, head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has sent a warning letter that, in her words, “articulate[s] a set
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December 27, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that police officers fatally shot 965 people this year. One can’t draw any important conclusions from these numbers alone, since they don’t tell us anything about the circumstances and/or justification for the police conduct. However, the Post presents some additional information. It says that cases in which white officers killed unarmed black men represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. This statistic doesn’t quantify
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