DeVos pushes for safer schools — even if New York won’t

Federal Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is moving to roll back Obama-era school-discipline policies. The sooner she does, the better for America’s students.

A new report by her school-safety commission, empaneled after the horrific Parkland high-school shooting in Florida, urges her to tear up the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter that has shaped school-discipline policies since then. The letter stressed alternatives to suspension and reducing “disproportionate” punishment of minority kids. School districts were warned that any unlawful “discrimination” in discipline would trigger civil-rights enforcement.

The Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden says the DCL was modeled on policies in Parkland’s Broward County that helped let the shooter slip through the cracks.

Here in the city, Mayor de Blasio and then-Chancellor Carmen Fariña also moved to curb school suspensions. Yet, as Eden noted in a 2017 report, fewer suspensions correlated with “less order and discipline in the classroom.”

“A policy intended to help minority students,” he observed, “hurt them the most,” because their schools became less safe.

The deterioration of discipline at The Bronx’s Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation, for example, laid the groundwork for last year’s fatal stabbing there of 15-year-old Matthew McCree by a classmate he allegedly bullied.

Even kids who aren’t involved in violence suffer: After all, who can learn anything when disruptive kids go unchecked?

Yet the troublemakers’ apologists aren’t satisfied with the damage de Blasio has caused: They now want him to cut the length of the few suspensions they still mete out.

DeVos has been spot on in moving to undo misguided Obama-era rules governing college-campus sexual-assault cases. Now she’s looking to shore up public-school safety.

How refreshing. Her approach is to let local school districts themselves, not DC bureaucrats, shape their own strategies for classroom management.

Alas, that will allow de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza to continue their destructive “reforms” even after DeVos discards the Team Obama rules.

Which will be a genuine tragedy for the kids in Gotham’s out-of-control schools.

https://nypost.com/2018/12/29/devos-pushes-for-safer-schools-even-if-new-york-wont/