We know that the best schools “sweat the small stuff”; they do not overlook untucked shirts, they do not permit poor posture, they do not deign to hold different students to different standards of discipline.

Instead of following that model, schools in Anne Arundel County are taking the opposite approach—i.e., “training staff in how to work with people of different backgrounds....” Consider these alarming sentences:

Teachers and administrators may misinterpret the body language and occasional confrontational behavior that some African-Americans learn in their neighborhoods and use at school as a way of standing up for themselves, veteran educators say. They will often back down if they’re made to feel safe.

Ella White Campbell reinforced such sentiments by telling the Baltimore Sun, “Being rude means one thing to you and another thing to me.”

Of course, being rude generally means one thing to employers, which is that he who is rude is not hired. Anne Arundel County wants to lower its rates of suspension of black pupils—rates that, according to the NAACP, indicate “discriminatory treatment.” The true discrimination, the soft-bigotry of low-expectations bit, is Anne Arundel’s new position of pretending that black children should be held to different standards of discipline than should non-black children.