The Consequences Of "Benevolent Racism"
"Benevolent racism" (a takeoff on "benevolent sexism") is a term that just came to mind for the results of the determination that school discipline is discriminatory if it affects certain races differently than others.

Heather Mac Donald writes at City Journal:

Disparate-impact analysis holds that if a facially-neutral policy negatively affects blacks and Hispanics at a higher rate than whites and Asians, it is discriminatory. Noticing the behavioral differences that lead to those disparate effects is forbidden. In the area of school discipline, disparate-impact analysis results in the conclusion that racially neutral rules must nevertheless contain bias, since black students nationally are suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students. In 2014, the Obama administration relied on this methodology to announce that schools that suspended or expelled black students at higher rates than white students were violating anti-discrimination laws.

...And so school districts, threatened with a loss of federal funding if they didn't reduce racial disparities in discipline, left disruptive students in the classroom rather than removing them. The results were predictable: chaos and less learning than ever. In Des Moines, for example, students hit teachers and other students with little consequence, according to the Des Moines Register, leading to a teacher exodus. A nine-year-old boy was repeatedly struck by a fellow student, but the teacher felt powerless to do anything lest she be accused of discriminating against a minority student.

In 2018, a cell-phone video captured a classroom assault emblematic of the post-disciplinary era. A physics teacher in Texas had confiscated a student's smart phone. "Give me my fucking phone. This is the last time asking your stupid ass," the teen yelled, towering over the teacher sitting frozen behind his desk, grinning nervously, the very image of submission. The student aggressively swept the papers on the teacher's desk to the floor, then violently shoved him in the face. Still impassive, the teacher pushed the phone across the desk back to the student, who grabbed it with a self-righteous shrug and strode away. The school principal explained that it "was just a bad day the student was having," and commended the teacher's response. The other students who observed this adult capitulation to thuggery learned a terrible lesson about their apparent immunity from any consequences for atrocious behavior.

A substitute teacher who worked in Los Angeles's inner-city schools documents similar insubordination in his recent book, Sit Down and Shut Up: How Discipline Can Set Students Free. One student, recounts author Cinque Henderson, shoved a pregnant teacher in order to grab her laptop and watch a video. The dean then interrogated the teacher about why the student was not "jibing with her." An instructor from Miami-Dade County told Henderson: "It is virtually impossible to discipline a student. I know we are losing a generation of kids of color as a result of allowing them to run wild."

Once again, Mac Donald nails it:

Excusing insubordination and aggression in the name of racial equity is not a civil rights accomplishment. The third-party victims of such behavior are themselves disproportionately minority--whether fellow classmates who cannot learn, or law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods who have to worry about taking their children safely to school without being carjacked or caught in a drive-by shooting.

But the alleged beneficiary of a racial double standard in conduct is also a victim. Schools are usually the last chance to civilize children if their family has failed to do so. They accomplish that civilizing mission through the application of a color-blind behavioral code, neutrally enforced, that communicates to students that their behavioral choices have consequences. A student who perceives that his race is an excuse for bad conduct will be handicapped for life. Pace the race advocates, it is this disparate-impact-induced state of affairs--not the supposed implicit racism of teachers and principals--that constitutes an actual school-to-prison pipeline.