Will new school guidelines encourage more bad behavior?
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced new guidelines for classroom discipline that he says are intended to end racial disparities in discipline and punishment in America's public schools.
But several educational experts and commentators have blasted the move as an attempt actually to erect a race-based system of punishment in public education.
Journalist Jack Cashill, who has covered racial issues extensively and whose latest book, "If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman," investigated the racially charged trial of Zimmerman, told WND that several school districts throughout America, including Trayvon Martin's Miami-Dade School District, have already implemented similar guidelines and are partially responsible for the tragic end of Trayvon Martin.
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"In a way, the Miam-Dade School Police Department was ahead of its time in trying to racially balance the criminal activity of its students. Trayvon Martin was the beneficiary of that policy, meaning that the crimes he committed that otherwise would've gone into juvenile justice, were treated as mere school disciplinary problems," Cashill explained.
To Cashill, Trayvon would still be alive today if his school district had treated his actions in the appropriate manner.
"Trayvon Martin would be alive if Miami-Dade School District had treated his infractions as crimes and his parents would then have been aware of what he was up to and they would not have allowed him to roam the streets as though he were just a mischievous teen and not a likely criminal," Cashill stated.
Instead, the way the school treated his actions led to the tragic events that ended in his death.
"The net result of that policy was that his parents were totally in the dark about his descent into criminality. Consequentially, they treated it like a minor infraction instead of getting serious about finding help for Trayvon. The result was them letting him loose on his own, undisciplined and unsupervised, on a night where he should not have been out on the streets at all," Cashill opined.
According to Cashill, these polices are just another sign of the racialized bent that the Department of Justice has taken under the leadership of Eric Holder.
"When Holder was called onto the carpet for his release of the New Black Panthers involved in voter intimidation, Bartle Bull, a civil rights lawyer, commented that this was the most egregious voter intimidation case he had ever seen and Holder called those comments an insult to 'my people,'" Cashill explained.
"The fact is that Holder has created two different systems of justice – one for everyday Americans and the other for 'my people.' Unfortunately, that causes more problems for 'my people,' not fewer problems."
In Cashill’s opinion, these policies have proved to be disastrous for the black community and have created more problems, not less.
"Over the last 50 years, virtually every policy designed to help black people ends up hurting black people and this one seems particularly ill-designed. It is designed to simply appease and not to resolve. If you don't discourage bad behavior, you encourage it. You can't be neutral about it," Cashill said.
In "If I Had A Son," Jack Cashill tells the inside story of how, as the result of a tragic encounter with troubled 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the media turned Zimmerman, nicknamed Tugboat, into a white racist vigilante, "the most hated man in America."
"If I Had A Son" tells how for the first time in the history of American jurisprudence, a state government, the U.S. Department of Justice, the White House, the major media, the entertainment industry and the vestiges of the civil rights movement conspired to put an innocent man in prison for the rest of his life.
All that stood between Zimmerman and lifetime internment were two folksy local lawyers, their aides, and some very dedicated citizen journalists, most notably an unpaid handful of truth seekers at the blogging collective known as the Conservative Treehouse. "If I Had A Son" takes an inside look at this unprecedented battle formation.
It also tells the story too of the six stalwart female jurors who ignored the enormous pressure mounting around them and preserved America's belief in its judicial system.