Betsy DeVos addresses civil right in schools

During my teaching career one thing that teachers objected to and would take every opportunity to address in the hope that it could be rectified as the uneven meting out of discipline. Beyond the favoritism shown by vice principals to the students they liked which resulted in weaker disciplinary actions than those applied to students they didn’t, there was clearly a division along racial lines.

White and Black students breaking the same rule would not be treated equally, with the Black students discipline being observably stricter.

Teachers’ complaints about this were routinely dismissed, as most educationally related critiques and suggestions were treated based on the odd notion that the people furthest from the classroom knew more about them than the people in them. The “I know you are, but what am I?” defense was reduced to “the only reason you think I m being biased is because you are biased.”

Actually, the charges of bias were based on the observed behavior of the disciplinarian and undeniable inequity of treatment.

How dark a student’s skin was, how good their command of English was, or how different they were from the disciplinarian, including sexual orientation, determined the severity of the punishment.

To address this in one of the districts in which I taught, the union demanded a well spelled out code of conduct with well defined steps to be followed where each had a prescribed act of discipline so the students knew the consequence of a particular violation of rules, from first offense to fourth, and vice-principals knew what was expected of them when disciplining a student. The idea was to ensure that all discipline was universally applied in spite of any bias. However the ideal was not realized as bias was defended by the claim that discretion on the part of the disciplinarian had to be respected. But at least the victims of bias had something tangible to back up their claims of biased treatment.

During my days as a Special Education teacher, this was back when SpEd was a new thing, the people in charge really had no idea what it was all about, and anytime I proposed a program for my students to find alternate ways to get them to learn and motivate them to at least try, in total blindness they often objected to and denied permission to let my students have the program because the regular education kids wouldn’t have it, and it would not to fair to let the Special Ed kids have something those kids didn’t have.

There hard headed ignorance forced me to have to fight for things that should have been a given.

The greatest ally in support of a student’s complaint or that of a teacher who addressed the violation of the discipline plan, and my Special Education kids getting what they needed was the Department of Education’s office on Civil Rights.

Well, at least that was how it was until the cold blast of air that is Betsy DeVos.

The Office of Civil Rights investigates claims of civil rights abuses in schools, but under DeVos, a provision has been introduced that allows the Office for Civil Rights to dismiss cases that reflect “a pattern of complaints previously filed with O.C.R. by an individual or a group against multiple recipients,” or complaints “filed for the first time against multiple recipients that” place “an unreasonable burden on O.C.R.’s resources.”
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What she wants is efficiency, not justice.

Civil right complaints just take up too much time, and that is why, to speed thing up, more than 500 disability rights complaints have simply been dismissed.

Betsy wants the Department of Education to dismiss, outright, claims that students’ civil rights have been violated especially if a person has brought “too many claims” already. Apparently, the offender just has to keep it up because, rather than their having to stop what they are doing, those whose rights they trample on have to just accept it. Her provision also holds that a student cannot file a complaint if the negative treatment is from more than one person, and can only complain in those situations where rights are violated only by one person.

The complication in this is that the student will have to address offenses committed by more han ne person one at a time which results in multiple complaints and, therefore, will be inefficient to deal with.  While one case may be resolved, there is the next one to deal with.

The victims, under DeVos’s plan, has to accept that her Department of Education will allow the abuser to abuse and take advantage of them because she is a dedicated opponent of students with disabilities:

She has already rescinded over 70 documents that outlined disabled students’ rights which allows as many civil rights claims of vulnerable students as possible to be thrown out unaddressed.

The actions of Betsy DeVos are unabashedly anti-student.

 

 

 

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