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In a must read article, "Undisciplined: The Obama administration undermines classroom order in pursuit of phantom racism," Heather Mac Donald lays out how teachers are being blamed for racism rather than the parents and students for misbehavior. (Posted by Religio-Political Talk)
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...Black elementary and high school students are disciplined at a higher
rate than whites are. To Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, that disparity can mean only one thing:
schools [teachers] are discriminating...
...The feds have reached their conclusions, however, without answering the obvious question: Are black students suspended more often because they misbehave more? Arne Duncan, of all people, should be aware of inner-city students’ self-discipline problems, having headed the Chicago school system before becoming secretary of education. Chicago’s minority youth murder one another with abandon. Since 2008, more than 530 people under the age of 21 have been killed in the city, mostly by their peers, according to the Chicago Reporter; virtually all the perpetrators were black or Hispanic. In 2009, the widely publicized beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert by his fellow students sent Duncan hurrying back to the Windy City, accompanied by Attorney General Eric Holder, to try to contain the fallout in advance of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics (see “Chicago’s Real Crime Story,” Winter 2010). Between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white ones were arrested at school, mostly for battery; black students outnumbered whites by four to one. (In response to the inevitable outcry over the arrest data, a Chicago teacher commented: “I feel bad for kids being arrested, . . . but I feel worse seeing a kid get his head smashed on the floor and almost die. Or a teacher being threatened with his life.”) So when Duncan lamented, upon the release of the 2012 discipline report, that “some of the worst [discipline] discrepancies are in my hometown of Chicago,” one could only ask: What does he expect?
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....
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