Civil Rights
As a teacher I generally do not accept the excuse that a particular task is too hard and therefore should be abandoned.
I am not an advocate for giving up.
I do not collect tough texts halfway through reading them and say, “Well, that was taking too long.”
I am not about modelling behaviors that create a culture of quitting.
But, maybe I should reexamine my practice. Because my values do not seem to be those which will make America great again.
I realized this when I read the article “Education Dept. Says It Will Scale Back Civil Rights Investigations” in the New York Times yesterday. See, the article seemed to indicate that the Department of Education, under the leadership of that venerable hero to American schoolchildren, Betsy DeVos, would not longer be investigating civil rights cases with the same consistency, depth, and thoroughness previously applied to them.
The mandates issued by the Obama administration required too much work and were slowing things down.
I am not kidding. I went on to read articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which only bolstered the conviction of this conclusion. The main argument for changing our policy on investigating civil rights violations in schools is that doing so more thoroughly creates a “backlog.”
In other words, once we really delve into this issue it turns out it is a huge problem!
Investigating patterns of injustice takes examination of years of data, and that is time-consuming and costly. So, the new plan? Just don’t do it. Changing the burden of proof in campus sexual assault cases, thereby possibly shifting away from a pervasive culture of campus sexual assault? Costly. Time consuming. Hard. New plan? Don’t do it anymore.
And protecting transgendered kids? Well, they might do it. Maybe. See now, transgender protection will be determined on a case by case basis.
Yeah, I was raised not to be a quitter. I have always tried to instill in my students that something worth doing is worth doing right, and that finding out the truth, no matter how much research it takes, is a valuable pursuit.
Perhaps, however, I am wrong. Maybe in this brave new version of a once great America, if it is hard, if it is uncomfortable, it is okay to do something halfway, or even, not at all.
