If African American students are disciplined in schools at a higher rate than are white students, the obvious reason is that African American students commit a disproportionate number of infractions.  Not according to "disparate impact" (or "disparate outcomes") thinking, however.  Any time one sees significant gaps in black and white treatments or results--suspensions, test scores, AP enrollments, etc.--racism is at work, it says.  Either the teachers and administrators are consciously or unconsciously prejudiced, or the culture of the curriculum and school is contrary to the culture of black students, or embedded in the institution, somehow or some way, are biased elements that subtly discriminate ("institutional racism").  The etiology of disparate impacts, though, doesn't matter.  This is the power of the approach.  It takes the racial gap itself as evidence sufficient to prove the allegation.  When a disparate impact surfaces, one doesn't have to uncover actual cases of willful discrimination such as a teacher who jumps on black students for the slightest misdeeds while letting white students do the same without reproving them.  No, the bare fact of racial gap is enough to convict the school district of bias.

Heather Macdonald's essay in City Journal, "Undisciplined: The Obama Administration undermines classroom order in pursuit of phantom racism," outlines the consequence when the Federal government adopts disparate impact thinking.  Noting that just about every school district in the United States disciplines black and Hispanic students disproportionately, she reports, the Obama Education and Justice departments have launched a campaign of intimidation and coercion against school systems scattered around the country.

The approach often turns Orwellian.  When Federal officials investigate a school, Macdonald finds, "They have refused to disclose to the school districts under scrutiny why they have aroused suspicion."  Being scrupulously fair and equal is no defense for the schools either, for "even if a school applies its discipline code fairly and in a color-blind fashion, it can still be liable for civil rights violations if minorities are disproportionately affected and it cannot demonstrate the absolute necessity of its disciplinary practices."  Suspected school systems must undergo costly "cultural-proficiency training" and "anti-suspension behavioral-modification programs," face lawsuits, and hire experts and consultants.  More effectively (and damagingly to the students themselves), schools simply lower the behavior bar for black and Hispanic students, thereby closing the disciplinary gap (and elevating classroom chaos).

The Obama Administration regards the problem so gravely that in a March 2010 speech Education Secretary Arne Duncan compared it to that day in Selma, 1965, when civil rights marchers were savaged by state police. But last month when President Obama announced in a speech before the Urban League the new White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, he didn't even mention it.  When justifying the Initiative, the President didn't talk about the culture of black teens, nor did he cite the number of them with no father in the home, high truancy and dropout rates, and anti-intellectual and violent social and street lives.  Instead, he cited unaffordable college tuition, inadequate "access to a complete and competitive education," and too much fun "(Obama lists 'hanging out . . . getting over . . . playing video games . . . watching 'Real Housewives'").  Nothing on real or imagined misbehavior or dereliction by black students, or on their social conditions such as astronomical rates of illegitimacy (70 percent).  In Obama's rendition, what hinders academic excellence for African American students is either financial circumstances or ordinary youthfulness (too much TV, not enough homework).

Given the enormous racial gaps in social conditions (illegitimacy among whites is less than half the black rate), we may make a sure prediction.  It won't be long before the White House Initiative becomes one more Federal office captivated by racism issues and disparate-impact thinking.  President Obama didn't put it that way--he wanted to be positive and genial--and the promise to the Urban League was but another version of Democratic "clientism."  You get out the vote for me in November, he promised this 100-year-old African American advocacy group, and I'll steer more White House resources your way.  But the ostensible mission of the Initiative won't endure, for the problems of African American students are not primarily of access and money.  They stem, first, from family and culture.  When the Office finds that its "academic excellence" emphasis doesn't have much effect, it will likely turns its resources to hunting down discrimination, and disparate-impact allegations offer a ready and powerful weapon.