More Distortion from the Ed Department on Racial Discipline Disparities -- By Heather MacDonald, National Review

The U.S. Education Department released yet another study Friday documenting the fact that black students are suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students. The Obama administration and civil-rights advocates routinely trot out this disparity to justify a strong federal hammer against allegedly racist school districts.

This latest Civil Rights Data Collection Snapshot includes preschool suspension rates for the first time, and they, too, are racially skewed: Black preschoolers are 42 percent of the students suspended once, and 48 percent of the students suspended more than once though they are only 18 percent of preschool enrollment. Pre-K suspensions are exceedingly rare, however: Fewer than 5,000 students out of over 1 million preschoolers were suspended once in the 2011 school year, 2,500 students more than once.

The media and the civil-rights complex responded on cue with the usual handwringing about racial “inequity.”

“To see that young African-American students — or babies, as I call them — are being suspended from pre-K programs at such horrendous rates is deeply troubling,” Leticia Smith-Evans, interim director of education practice at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the New York Times. (Ms. Smith-Evans ignored the fact that “such horrendous rates” only affect a little over a thousand black “babies” nationwide.) “It’s incredible to think about or fathom what pre-K students could be doing to get suspended from schools.”

Actually, what Ms. Smith-Evans should be trying to fathom is the black crime rate, which explains the school-suspension rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age combined. Given such high crime rates, what do the civil-rights advocates and the Obama administration think is going on in the classroom — docile obedience and strict self-discipline? In fact, the same weak impulse control that leads to such high crime rates among young black males inevitably means more disruptive behavior in school.

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