In his Sept. 18 commentary, “Reduced suspensions will mean reduced enrollment,” Peter Bell has adopted the cynical playbook of the Center of the American Experiment, where he is a senior fellow. The writing playbook goes something like this:

1. React against a government intervention to reduce inequality (In this case, curbing suspensions of minority students).

2. Discount racism out of hand as a factor of any sort in the problem.

3. Instead, blame the problem on an overly permissive society and parents who do not discipline their children (black parents who fail to side with their kid’s white teacher, and who are so uncaring as to actually allow their kids to attend their local public school).

4. Make fun of cultural sensitivity training.

5. Claim chaos will reign because of all this. What is the conservative obsession with chaos?

6. Offer no substantive, alternative solution to the inequality problem at hand You parents should just be better parents; cue finger wagging.

The effect of these American Experiment pieces is always the same — to throw a monkey wrench into a progressive government program by indicating that the problem is caused entirely by black parents who just need to fix themselves after being lectured to by the American Experiment.

My problem with this playbook is not that I believe there are not parents who act poorly, but that it rejects that society at large has any responsibility for triggering or mending the problem. I am a white, middle-class parent with children in Minneapolis public schools, and I’m concerned about the quality the high school my kids will be slated into. But I also believe in scientific evidence, and I challenge Bell to revisit this issue two years from now to see if middle-class enrollment has dropped in Minneapolis public schools as he claims it will.

Sometimes I suspect the slightly left-of-center Star Tribune Editorial Board of gleefully printing American Experiment authors just to see them hang themselves on their own rope.

John Champe lives in Minneapolis.