This from the redoubtable Heather Mac Donald in City Journal tells us what “even playing field” means to some people — equal results, across the board:
As part of its plan to comply with a federal desegregation order now decades old, Tucson’s school district adopted racial quotas in school discipline this summer.
Schools that suspend or expel Hispanic and black students at higher rates than white students will now get a visit from a district “Equity Team” and will be expected to remedy those disparities by reducing their minority discipline rates.
In Oak Park discipline rates are regularly discussed with a view to disparity of punishment. Objectors to how more often blacks are punished even brought in elected officials from outside Oak Park. But nothing like this has happened. No one has called from a quota that I know of.
As for the language abuse embodied in that “playing field” stuff, it’s been lambasted best by George Orwell in his “Politics and the English Language,” in which he notes the role of language in stultifying our processes:
[Our language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
The ebullient, even bombastic Ezra Pound was even more condemnatory in “A Problem of (Specifically) Style” in 1934:
[A] tolerance for slipshod expression in whatever department of writing gradually leads to chaos . . . and a progressive rottenness of spirit.
In Tucson the pattern seems clear enough:
Tucson’s administrators explain their disciplinary quota pressure on the ground that students removed from class lose valuable learning time, exacerbating the already great ethnic academic achievement gap.
Such thinking ignores the students who are not disrupting class or threatening teachers and who also lose valuable learning time when unruly or violent students remain in the classroom.
Mac Donald adds:
Surely those students have a greater claim to “equity” in school resources than gang members do.
Schools are to look for “root causes” in bad behavior. Mac Donald:
I can save them some time: the root cause of disparate rates of suspension is disparate rates of bad behavior.
“Single parenting” is the biggest one.
If the Tucson school board wants to publicize the essential role of fathers in raising law-abiding children, it might start solving the problem of disciplinary imbalance.
But until then, it should let schools resolve their discipline problems in a color-blind fashion, without worrying about a visit from an “Equity Team.”
It’s “the content of their character,” as Martin Luther King said in his “I have a dream” speech.
Rev. Jesse Jackson wants no part of that. He calls invoking King in this context is “intellectual terrorism.” Orwellian, right?
Blithe Spirit 
Excellent articulation of the problem that extends all the way to Fort Hood. Thanks, Jim.
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This entire discussion is camouflage that prevents our t identifying the real issues. The horrid reality is that way too many minority (Black) students bring disabling handicaps to their school experience — 1) (sadly) too general cultural illiteracy; 2) a group disdain for “white” intellectual values; 3) widespread negative attitudes toward educational achievement , and 4) a value system that disparages middle-class aspirations. What is being produced is a significant minority of our young people that simply does not fit successfully into a dominant culture which it does not comprehend, to which it wishes not to accommodate, and which is seen as standing in the way of the ever-aspired-to “equality.” Under these attitudinal circumstances, is any real equality even possible ?
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