President Obama did a lot of bad things, but, pound for pound, one of the worst was the January 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter sent jointly by his Education and Justice Departments to all public schools threatening lawsuits over racial discrimination in student discipline. The letter came after years of his administration browbeating schools for their failure to discipline every race of student at the same rate.

As the Huffington Post put it: “American Schools Are STILL Racist, Government Report Finds.” The evidence? “Five percent of white students were suspended annually, compared with 16 percent of black students, according to the report.” Q.E.D.

According to theory, there’s NO WAY blacks and Hispanics are doing things that require more school discipline than whites or Asians. So if more black students are expelled than Asians, well, gentlemen, we have our proof of racism. To comply, schools would have to stop suspending black kids for breaking a teacher’s jaw, but suspend Asians for dropping an eraser.

Using the same logic, I could close the achievement gap between blacks and Asians in a single day by going to every principal’s office in the country and burning the transcripts. (Liberals are saying, “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”)

The “school-to-prison pipeline” argument for racial quotas in discipline was hatched in education schools and black studies departments. What I want to know is: How did they test the idea?

To validate the theory that recording students’ criminal behavior produces students with criminal records, we divided students into two groups. Group A we continued to suspend when they acted up; Group B we would not suspend no matter what — even when they engaged in their little mischief, like cracking heads with crowbars, dropping teachers off buildings, using a switchblade to cut other students’ eyes out.

RESULT: At the end of the year, Group B had better records.

Were the researchers really in suspense about how the experiment was going to turn out? I could have told them at the beginning that their odds of success were tremendous — unless they forgot halfway through and began accidentally suspending students in Group B.

But the Obama administration said: Wow! That’s amazing. Do you think other schools could replicate those results?

One of the administration’s models was Broward County, Florida. Which is kind of important, now that we know that it was Broward’s official policy to make it impossible to arrest students like Nikolas Cruz, thus allowing him to amass a cache of firearms, walk into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murder 17 people.

The “school-to-prison pipeline” nonsense may not be the explanation for every school shooting, but it is absolutely the explanation for THIS school shooting. No matter what Cruz did, no matter how many times his crimes were reported to the sheriff or school officials, there was no way a lad with a name like “Nikolas Cruz” was ever going to leave school with a record.

Broward County’s innovative idea of eliminating school discipline captivated Obama’s Department of Education. It was expressly cited by the department’s Civil Rights Division with the notation: “New model for other jurisdictions?”

Last October — nearly a year into the Trump administration — Broward Schools Superintendent Robert W. Runcie humbly noted that the district was receiving “invitations from around the country, including from The White House and Federal Office of Civil Rights, to share details about the historic reforms” on school discipline.

Either: Liberals truly believe that all races commit crimes at exactly the same level, frequency and intensity; or they are willing to have people die for their political agenda.

Conservatives didn’t pick this school shooting as the test case for gun control. It was liberals who were going to ride the Parkland shooting all the way to the midterms. They thought they had a beautiful story about the evil NRA.

Not the mass shooting in Orlando — because of the obvious immigration angle. Not San Bernardino — for the same reason. Not Las Vegas — probably for the same reason, but we’ll never know because law enforcement has issued only lies and nonsense about that shooting.

The media did all the hard work of making sure Parkland was the only topic on anyone’s mind, with everyone demanding that we “do something!”

And then we got the facts. Cruz’s criminal acts were intentionally ignored by law enforcement on account of Broward’s much-celebrated “school-to-prison pipeline” reforms.

Thank God for the Internet, or we’d never have known the truth.

Admittedly, most of the harm done by the policy that enabled Cruz is not usually a mass shooting. The main damage done by the “school-to-prison pipeline” idiocy is: broken bones, smashed teeth, traumatized students, making it impossible for other students to learn, having a bad influence on marginal students and teachers sinking into depression.

Check at your local school for the full results. Thanks to the Obama administration, this crackpot theory is sweeping school districts across the nation!

The next time Democrats control Congress and the presidency, we will have racial quotas for prisons, too. When that happens, you better hope the government hasn’t taken your guns.

COPYRIGHT 2018 ANN COULTER