Learning While Black [Kid starts a fight at school. Kid's dad, angry his son got punished, sues.]

"The 16-year-old high school junior [with his father, above]
from Salida, Calif., is a C student with a filthy mouth who has been known to
saunter into class on his own schedule. And, yes, as Russell readily admits, after a
bout of name-calling with a white classmate last fall, he threw the first punch in a
fistfight that left him battered and his adversary with five stitches over his left eye.

But is Russell actually a victim?…."

Learning While Black

You've heard of racial profiling on the roads and in the skies. But are minority kids also being unfairly singled out for discipline in schools?

BY JODIE MORSE

No one is saying Kenneth Russell is an angel.

The 16-year-old high school junior from Salida, Calif., is a C student with a filthy mouth who has been known to saunter into class on his own schedule. And, yes, as Russell readily admits, after a bout of name-calling with a white classmate last fall, he threw the first punch in a fistfight that left him battered and his adversary with five stitches over his left eye.

But is Russell actually a victim? The N.A.A.C.P. and some of his teachers think so. His father John has filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, charging that Kenneth was unjustly punished for the fight. Although officials from the local Modesto school district ruled the scuffle "mutual," the white classmate received a three-day suspension while Russell was sent home for a little more than a month and later expelled from his school and assigned to one farther from where he lives. "It's been hard catching up with my work," says Kenneth. "I lost out on a month of my high school life."

For years black parents have quietly seethed about stories like Russell's. Now civil rights groups have given those silent suspicions a recognizable name: racial profiling. They contend that not unlike police who stop people on the basis of race, teachers and school officials discipline black students more often - and more harshly - than whites. The result: black students are more likely to slip behind in their studies and abandon school altogether - if they're not kicked out first. In Modesto, black students are 21/2 times as likely as their white peers to be expelled. This kind of treatment persists not only in the farm country of Modesto but also in urban districts like Minneapolis, Minn. During the 1998-99 school year, only one state (South Carolina) suspended 9% or more of its white students, but 35 states suspended that percentage of blacks, according to The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. The syndrome has even acquired a catchphrase: "learning while black."

In the past two years, advocacy groups in a dozen cities have taken up the cause, and the N.A.A.C.P. called on every state to submit a plan to redress discipline and other educational inequities by May 10. Last week the group announced that it would file civil rights complaints against the 22 states that missed the deadline. Meanwhile, legislators in Maryland and Rhode Island have set up task forces to study school discipline. In April, under a new state law, Ohio released suspension data broken down by race for each of its school districts. Earlier this month the Rev. Jesse Jackson addressed a conference at the Northwestern University School of Law titled "Dreams Deferred: A Closer Look at School Discipline."

Despite the current concern, the school-discipline gap is actually an old problem, first noted by social scientists a quarter-century ago. But with schools suspending nearly twice as many pupils as they did in the early '70s, the racial disparities have widened sharply. And today the penalties are stiffer. In the post-Columbine era, which has seen administrators reach for one-strike-and-you're-out, or zero-tolerance, policies, many schools no longer grant students a warning and a second chance, turning over even the most routine disciplinary matters to local police. "Schools now call in the police if a student is talking too much or doesn't do his homework," says Pedro Noguera, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

There is some evidence that black students are more likely to wind up in the dragnet. A study being released this fall by the Advancement Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, reports that black students, although they made up just 30% of the population of Miami-Dade County public schools in 2000-01, accounted for half the school arrests in that district. Says Judith Browne, senior attorney with the project: "This is no different from what happens on the street, only now it's school administrators abusing authority."

Predictably, talk of racial profiling turns very nasty very quickly. No matter the venue, the debate revolves around the same set of slippery questions: Do differences in data equal racism? Or could it be that blacks actually drive more recklessly or, in the case of schools, behave worse? Perhaps race is just incidental, and gender or class is the overriding factor. "This is not a simple matter, where the numbers speak for themselves," says Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. "In the past two years there have been five or six conferences on traffic-stop data, and there's still no consensus."

The school-discipline picture is even cloudier. "In isolated cases, there appears to be a difference in treatment," says Susan Bowers, an enforcement director with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights who investigates claims like the one filed in Modesto. "But often school districts have a justification, and race goes away." Researchers have theorized that anything from lead exposure to passive smoke may drive some students to act out more than others. The National Association of Secondary School Principals has deemed the discipline gap "an issue of socioeconomic status." The interim findings of the Rhode Island task force bolster this view. The group, after considering a student's race and whether he or she qualified for free lunch, concluded that "poverty is the single most pressing factor" associated with the disproportionate suspension of minority students in as many as a third of Rhode Island schools.

But a major study to be released in December in The Urban Review journal squarely shows the opposite. Russell Skiba, an associate professor of educational psychology at Indiana University, charted the discipline patterns of 11,000 middle-school students in a major urban district in Indiana, in which black students were more than twice as likely as their white peers to be sent to the principal's office or suspended - and four times as likely to be expelled. When Skiba factored in the financial status of the students and their families, the discipline gap did not budge. But a second finding smacks more overtly of discrimination: while white students were typically reprimanded for behaviors like smoking and vandalism, black students were more often disciplined for nebulous infractions like excessive noise and disrespect. "It's pretty clear that black students are referred for more subjective behaviors," he says. "You can choose not to use the word racism, but districts need to look seriously at why this is going on."

The more closely districts look, the less transparent the diagnoses. Beginning last year, Texas' Austin Independent School District began requiring principals to track discipline data by race to discern if any specific teachers were using a heavier hand with black students. The answer was yes, but the reasons were far from straightforward. Cornel Jones, principal of Austin's Oak Springs Elementary School, does not blame racism but chalks the problem up to "cultural misunderstandings" between his white teachers and the 97%-minority student body. One insidious source of confusion: When a teacher scolds a black or Latino student for a simple matter like talking out of turn, Jones says, that student typically looks away out of respect. Feeling her authority challenged, the teacher may send the student to the office. "It cycles up into a big monster, and then nothing the child can do is right," says Jones.

But when does misunderstanding slip over the line into prejudice? "There are racial misunderstandings, but there is also racial paranoia," says Beverly Cross, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Education. "We see this a lot with black boys who are cute until about the fourth grade, and then teachers start to fear them." Linelle Clark, Austin's dropout-prevention coordinator, sees some evidence of this in her district. She recalls that "one principal noticed a teacher with a pattern of sending the same black kid to the office, and when he called her on it, she said, 'I'm scared of that child.'"

Because racial-profiling claims are difficult to prove in court, civil rights activists urge parents to bypass the legal system and confront school officials directly. In some cities, the N.A.A.C.P. accompanies families to expulsion hearings. Another tactic popular among advocates is to gather a district's discipline statistics - which are collected by the government and can be obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Act request - and prepare self-published reports for local news broadcasts. After enough badgering, some districts have begun to bend their discipline codes. Last fall Chicago public-schools chief Arne Duncan directed principals to stop handing out suspensions for picayune infractions like "gum chewing" and reserve the punishment for violent offenses. The district is working with local activists and civil rights attorneys to launch a program allowing students to be tried by a peer jury for violations such as arguing with a teacher or using profanity.

The conversation in Modesto has thus far been much less conciliatory. Despite repeated calls for reform from a small but vocal black parents' group, the district is not weighing any changes to its discipline code. Administrators will not comment on particular cases, but Jim Pfaff, Modesto's associate superintendent, points out that district policy stipulates a stiffer penalty for a student, like Russell, who inflicts injuries causing "stitches, loss of consciousness or a fracture." Pfaff attributes the high rate of black expulsions to an influx of black families from San Francisco "who do not understand" Modesto's discipline code, which provides few second chances - just consequences. He has little patience for charges of profiling. "Because we expel more males than females, does it mean that we discriminate against men too?" he asks. Even the black community has splintered over the issue, with some parents who want change accusing others of kowtowing to the district. "[She's] dealing with the people we're fighting, running to the white man with everything," sniffs Mack Wilson, education chairman of the local N.A.A.C.P., speaking of a black mother who joined with school officials to form Project Success, a group that tries to defuse small disciplinary matters before they escalate.

Russell is indifferent to the charges flying around him. He has more urgent matters to attend to, like the D and the F on his latest report card and whether they will affect his prospects for studying architecture in college. While parents and administrators continue to bicker, he has found his own remedy for the discipline gap. "You learn which teachers treat different ethnicities differently," he says. "And you learn when you're around them to stay quiet and keep to yourself."

I did a search and found a National Review article about this TIME article, but, not the original TIME article, as here.

I could really go off on a rant about this article, but I'm going to try to keep my cool here.

(1) Where was the teacher when this fight broke out, you ask? Well, I don't know. Maybe the teacher's back was turned to write on the blackboard. Or, believe it or not, some high schools have portable classrooms, and it is a big 20 second walk from the school's main building out to the portable, but, in those 20 seconds, a fight can break out and a teacher may not be around. Some teachers have the wild notion that 16 year old students can walk all by themselves without incident for 20 seconds, just like 6 year olds can do in elementary school. But, some teachers would be wrong about that.

(2) If a teacher was around, why didn't the teacher break up this fight, before the student had injuries so severe he had to get stitches? Uh, you never know if a 16 year old who has a foul mouth, in chronically late, calls other students names, throws a first punch, and then beats up a kid to the point where the kid needs stitches is also carrying a knife. Of course, to search such a student ahead of time could be "racial profiling" and subject the teacher to a lawsuit. And, to break up a fight, with a kid who will take out that potential knife and use it on a teacher, is just not a good idea if the teacher wants to avoid being cut up.

(3) Now, here's my question: When does the teacher (and other school officials) get the right to sue this kid's father for filing a bogus lawsuit in this matter? Or, when do parents of public school children start signing legal waivers prior to sending their kids to public school, so that time and taxpayer money is not wasted on these bogus lawsuit? If Bill McBride and Janet Reno would like to try to win this teacher's vote, they should countersue the NAACP and this kid's father. Also, explain to this kid's father that from a teacher's perspective, the problems concern the fact his son: (a) has a foul mouth; (b) is late everyday to class, disrupting everyone; (c) still calls his classmates names; (d) starts fights; (e) assaults students; and (f) has a father who is too busy filing bogus lawsuits to teach his son how to behave.

Finally, what happened to GW's Teacher Protection Act? That was a good idea. Did it ever get signed into law? If not, it should, because of events such as those described in this TIME article, and the article below:

Bad Kids in Class [Palm Beach teachers: 'We leave teaching because of kids' bad behavior.']

And, yes, as Russell readily admits, after a bout of name-calling with a white classmate last fall, he threw the first punch in a fistfight that left him battered and his adversary with five stitches over his left eye.

...but 35 states suspended that percentage of blacks, according to The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. The syndrome has even acquired a catchphrase: "learning while black."

It sounds like the white student that Russell punched was a victim of that syndrome known as SPITEBABSWW, or Sucker Punched In The Eye By A Black Student While White.

Unbelieveable. This kid, a troublemaker, is whining because he got a worse punishment for a) starting the fight and b) inflicting far greater damage. And the parents would rather scream racism than deal with the fact that their son is seriously troubled and is heading toward more (at least he was not criminally prosecuted). You know, I'm black, and somehow I managed to go through thirteen years of schooling without a single suspension. This kid could have too if he stayed out of trouble and his parents woke up and dealt with their son's problems.

Cases like this are why I didn't become a teacher, as much as I liked the other aspects of the work.

All you have to do is take a look at the expression on Dad's face in the background to get a feel for where this poor kid learned how to be a juvenile delinquent. Presumably he'll graduate to the prison system where he can make Daddy proud.

As always, there may be missing details, but what is described doesn't support a lawsuit. This kid's dad must be doing everything he can to make sure his son has a lousier life than he did: teach him to spout obsceneties at school, ignore class schedules, resolve disputes with violence and then blame authorities for punishing his illegal behavior. What a screwed-up legacy!

There are lies, damn lies and statistics. In this article, Jodie Morse seeks to somehow find a statistical explanation for what the Modesto School District did, when the answer is rather obvious: this kid clearly had discipline problems prior to this incident, then escalated from unfocused hooliganism to assault. The school "farther from where he lives" is probably the California equivalent of a reform school, and it looks like they were late in transferring him there.

Real racial discrimination is still rampant in many forms. Here it is being used as a weapon by this kid's racist father, but there are many genuine victims of racial discrimination in the U.S.

Self-serving nonsense like this discredits and delegitimizes real racism complaints, and hurts all victims of racial discrimination.

Imal

No one is saying Kenneth Russell is an angel.

The 16-year-old high school junior from Salida, Calif., is a C student with a filthy mouth who has been known to saunter into class on his own schedule.

The damage that has occured by allowing thugs and apprentice criminals into the public school system is immeasuarable. Kids like this one place no value in education. In many cases, neither do their parents. For them, highschool is a place to engage in criminal behavior, assault and intimidate other students (and faculty) and disrupt the learning process for everyone.

Liberals can't seem to figure out why "White Flight" occured after the schools were integrated. This article sums it up nicely.

Homeschool bump!

Unfortunately, I see this attitude amongst many, many parents these days, whether black or white (or anything in between, for that matter).

Case in point: It's against regulations in the area where we live to leave kids under the age of 12 unsupervised, yet 99.9% of the time I am the only parent outside watching the kids play...and that includes two- and three-year-olds, as well. (What kind of parent sends a toddler outside to play without any supervision whatsoever? There are plenty of teenaged girls in the neighborhood who would love to be paid five bucks for watching a little one play outside for a couple of hours!)

The other day some unsupervised kids were playing on a neighbor's porch and broke a planter and a stand with glass shelves, all over the neighbor's front porch. I wasn't out at the time (nor were my kids), but came out when I heard her yelling at these kids to go home, get off her property or she was going to call the police. The kids, about a dozen of them ranging in age from 4 to 8, scampered off laughing but half-scared. Later on, would you believe some of the parents of these hooligans had the audacity to threaten the woman for yelling at their kids? Never mind that the kids were the instigators, playing where they should not have been, responsible for destruction of private property--in their view this woman was completely at fault for yelling at the children. One response: "If you don't like kids, you shouldn't have moved to a family neighborhood." (Followed by mutterings of profanity directed toward the woman.)

NONE of the kids, to my knowledge, were punished for being on this woman's porch or for breaking her planter and shelf. Rather, they were coddled for having to endure being verbally disciplined.

And, as evidenced in the news story above, the little hooligans will most certainly grow into big hooligans with mummy and daddy still getting mad at the discipliner, NOT the perpetrator who is actually at fault.

(2) If a teacher was around, why didn't the teacher break up this fight, before the student had injuries so severe he had to get stitches?

I have to take great exception to your question here. It seems obvious you've never seen a bare fist fight, nor been in one. A hard bare fist to the eyebrow area can, and usually will, cause a deep gash. This can take all of .7 seconds to occur. In other words, the teacher would have had no chance even if he/she was in the front of the same room.

Here we see the reverse side of zero tolerance. I am against zero tolerance, because it is stupid and allows school administrators to avoid making a decision and using common sense. But what happens to a school that doesn't use zero tolerance and instead using logic and common sense in meeting out punishments? they get sued by the agrieved party. So for that reason (as proved here), many schools simply employ zero tolerance to avoid law suits.

Sometimes I wish we would outlaw lawyers.

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