When The Truth Is Too Uncomfortable

You can read the entire story about a school/district in which too many students--mostly of a specific race--are out of control. Students don't feel safe, adults don't feel safe. What the heck? The conclusion really hit it out of the park for me:

Between public racial sensitivities, current federal regulations, and (it’s a good bet) their own reluctance, the administrators’ hands are more or less tied. In 2013, the Obama administration’s Department of Education Civil Rights Division warned school districts that schools violate Federal law when they “evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race” (author’s emphasis). Cheltenham’s ruffians will be safe from discipline and stigma, though not, of course, from each other.

The bitter irony of the widespread evasion about racial discrepancies in “externalizing” behavior is that it harms Cheltenham’s blacks above all. The large majority of kids who are well prepared to walk the halls and talk to teachers with a modicum of civility are forced to cede their educations and safety to the uncivilized few. Cheltenham has a committed (for now) cadre of white parents dedicated to diversity, but the township’s population is considerably whiter than its schools; a sizable number of whites have clearly already fled the local schools or decided not to move there in the first place. They’re not alone. Several disgusted black parents said that they had pulled their children out of the local schools despite paying “astronomical” taxes in order to live in the reputedly excellent district.

Now this lovely suburb with once-envied schools is facing black as well as white flight. (boldface mine--Darren)  Let’s see how the Education Department’s Civil Rights Division deals with that.

To paraphrase an old saying: you may not be interested in the reality, but the reality is interested in you.

You can pretend all you want, but the reality still reigns.