Posted on 08/22/2012 2:02:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
If I were a Klansman, wanting to sabotage black education, I couldn't find better allies than education establishment liberals and officials in the Obama administration, especially Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who in March 2010 announced that his department was "going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement."
For Duncan, the civil rights issue was that black elementary and high school students are disciplined at a higher rate than whites. His evidence for discrimination is that blacks are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. Duncan and his Obama administration supporters conveniently ignored school "racial discrimination" against whites, who are more than two times as likely to be suspended as Asians and Pacific Islanders.
Heather Mac Donald reports on all of this in "Undisciplined," appearing in City Journal (Summer 2012). She writes that between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white students were arrested at school, mostly for battery. In Chicago schools, black students outnumber whites by four to one.
Mac Donald adds, "Nationally, the picture is no better. The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well."
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nationally during 2007-2008, more than 145,000 teachers were physically attacked. Six percent of big-city schools report verbal abuse of teachers, and 18 percent report non-verbal disrespect for teachers. An earlier NCES study found that 18 percent of the nation's schools accounted for 75 percent of the reported incidents of violence, and 6.6 percent accounted for 50 percent. So far as serious violence, murder and rapes, 1.9 percent of schools reported 50 percent of the incidents. The preponderance of school violence occurs in big-city schools attended by black students.
Educators might not see classroom comportment as a priority. According to a recent hire, a Baltimore high school now asks prospective teachers: "How do you respond to being mistreated? What do you do if someone cusses you out?" The proper answer is: "Nothing." That vision might explain why a 34-year veteran of the school had to be taken from the premises in an ambulance after a student shattered the glass in a classroom display case.
Mac Donald reports that a fifth-grade teacher in St. Paul, Minn., scoffs at the notion that minority students are being unfairly targeted for discipline, saying "Anyone in his right mind knows that these (disciplined) students are extremely disruptive."
In response to the higher disciplinary rates for minority students, the St. Paul school district has spent $350,000 for teacher "cultural-proficiency" training sessions where they learn about "whiteness." At one of these sessions, an Asian teacher asked: "How do I help the student who blurts out answers and disrupts the class?" The black facilitator said: "That's what black culture is." If a white person made such a remark, I'm sure it would be deemed racist.
Some of today's black political leaders are around my age, 76, such as Reps. Maxine Waters, Charles Rangel, John Conyers, former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, Jesse Jackson and many others. Ask them what their parents would have done had they cursed, assaulted a teacher or engaged in disruptive behavior that's become routine in far too many schools. Would their parents have accepted the grossly disrespectful public behavior that includes foul language and racial epithets? Their silence and support of the status quo represent a betrayal of epic proportions to the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors in their struggle to make today's education opportunities available.
We’ve found ourselves back in the antebellum South, where Dems are again decreeing that it is illegal to teach slaves to read & write.
Unlike 1860, this doesn’t seem to bother anyone (until the feral youth escape and go “Nat Turner” on some honkies)...
Modern liberalism IS the new Klan. The more cynical want to keep minorities down on the plantation, but instead of harvesting cotton, they're harvesting votes.
The rest of them patronize minorities as unable to achieve or fend for themselves (a redesigned "white man's burden").
Ping for later.
Your post could not be more accurate
btw - Thanks for posting the articles that you do - they’re always reliable, informative, and relevant.
Good observations.
Another great column by Dr. Williams, whose ability to get through the din and expose the fallacies of the tyrannical "progressives" who, in their determination to propagandize and control a ready pool of voters, are destroying opportunity and hope for youth.
This is not a new problem.
After reading Walter Williams' conclusions herein, please refer to a document from 1886, written by a man named Zacharias Montgomery.
Montgomery's conclusions about the consequences of what he called the "anti-parental" system of education being promoted in America in 1886 were shocking for that time--and even more pertinent today. The statistical data he provided from that day parallels Williams' summary of today's tragic consequences of what passes for "education policy."
Read Montgomery's "Poison Drops in the Federal Senate": The School Question, from a Parental and Non-Sectarian Stand-point," here.
Readers will find some shocking similarities between Montgomery's analysis in 1886 and the problems of today, multiplied exponentially.
Thanks; it is a shame they are embraced by those they suppress...
Is Professor Williams or the copy editor being sarcastic with the title? There is not adjectival form of “education” as the noun can be used to modify another noun. The proper word here is “pedagogic.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.