Thomas Sowell, Washington Examiner, November 18, 2014

If anyone still has any doubt about the utter cynicism of the Obama administration, a recent agreement between the federal government and Minneapolis Public Schools should open their eyes.

Under the Obama administration, both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have been leaning on public schools around the country to reduce what they call the “disproportionate” numbers of black male students who are punished for various offenses in schools.

Under an implicit threat of losing their federal subsidies, Minneapolis Public Schools has agreed to reduce the disparity in punishment of black students by 25 percent by the end of this school year, and then by 50 percent, 75 percent and finally 100 percent in each of the following years. In other words, there are now racial quota limits for punishment in Minneapolis schools.

If we stop and think–as old-fashioned as that may seem–there is not the slightest reason to expect black males to commit the same number of offenses as Asian females or any other set of students.

When different groups of human beings have behaved differently in all sorts of ways, in countries around the world, for thousands of years of recorded history, why would we accept as dogma that the only reason one set of students gets punished more than others is because the people who are doing the punishing are picking on them?

Politically–which is the way the Obama administration looks at everything–any time it can depict blacks as victims, and depict themselves as their rescuers, that means an opportunity to get out the black vote for Democrats.

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Other schools in other cities, which have also caved under pressure from the federal government and agreed to lighten up on black kids who misbehave, have reported an increase in misbehavior, including violence. Who would have thought otherwise?

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The people in the Obama administration who are pushing this counterproductive policy are not stupid. They are political, which is worse. They know what they are doing and they are willing to sacrifice young blacks to do it.

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