The Minneapolis public school district will now fire white teachers before anyone else, regardless of their seniority, as part of an agreement reached with a Minneapolis teachers’ union.
Normally, teachers are laid off by seniority, but a two-week strike last spring gave the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers enough political capital to add a racial component to the process.
“If excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population,” the agreement going into effect this school year states.
Excessing is the process of reducing the number of teachers to match budget cuts, decreases in student populations, and other reasons.
These “educators of color protections” also include prioritizing “underrepresented populations” over white teachers when being reinstated.
The stated purpose of the race-based policies is to “remedy the continued effects of past discrimination.”
“This contract language is not very surprising to those who know what the end game has always been with the equity movement,” Parents Defending Education Director of Outreach told Breitbart News. “But if they are really going to, retain teachers who are members of populations underrepresented by licensed teachers in the district, I guess all the men get to stay.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on similar issues in the past, finding that introducing race-based schemes for the express purpose of combatting “past discrimination” or attempting to remedy discrimination by providing “role models” for minority children is impermissible.
In Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, Justice Lewis Powell wrote, “Societal discrimination alone is insufficient to justify a racial classification.”
“The ‘role model’ theory employed by the District Court would allow the Board to engage in discriminatory hiring and layoff practices long past the point required by any legitimate remedial purpose,” he continued. “Moreover, it does not bear any relationship to the harm caused by prior discriminatory hiring practices.”
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.
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