Posted on 12/13/2012 3:24:45 PM PST by Altura Ct.
“Students of color, students with disabilities and male students” are suspended at a disproportionate rate to their peers, in “potential violation of civil rights laws,” an official from the U.S. Department of Education said at a congressional hearing Wednesday on the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.
“We are alarmed by the disparities in disciplinary sanctions, particularly for students of color, students with disabilities, and male students,” said Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the Education Department.
In written testimony, Delisle said such disparities are a “potential violation of civil rights laws.”
“When African-American students are more than 3 ½ times as likely to be suspended or expelled as their white peers, or students with disabilities are more than twice as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions as their non-disabled peers, as they are today--it raises substantial concerns,” Delisle told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“These concerns are reflected in our department’s enforcement efforts and in the stories we’ve heard from the field, which demonstrate too often that students face disciplinary actions on the basis of their race,” she said.
For example, Delisle noted that an African-American student in kindergarten was suspended for five days for setting off a fire alarm while a white student in 9th grade in the same district was suspended for one day for doing the same thing.
Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said at the hearing that he and the CBC have “advocated vigorously for over a decade that the federal government should lead the effort to address the over-disciplining of youth--a key factor involved in the educational crisis of African-Americans and especially African-American men.”
“I am much more likely to be suspended, not just because I am male or just because I am African-American, but because I am an African-American male,” said Davis.
“We must focus on the early years as well. It is unacceptable that African-American male preschoolers are expelled at almost nine times the rate of African-American girls with white preschool boys being expelled at almost four times the rate of their female peers,” Davis added.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Mich.) also cited statistics on the disparities in discipline in the nation’s schools. He said African-Americans are three times more likely to be suspended and four times more likely to be expelled than their white peers. Also, more than 70 percent of students arrested in schools are African-American or Latino.
He said disparities also exist with students identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
“What’s more, the disparities extend beyond race," said Durbin. "Nationally, students with disabilities are suspended at more than twice the rate of students without disabilities, and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth are more likely to be disciplined and arrested than their peers."
“Suspensions, expulsions, and in-school arrests lead to kids being out of the classroom and a troubling increase in the number of people in the juvenile justice system,” Durbin said.
“This school-to-prison pipeline has moved scores of young people from classrooms to courtroom. A schoolyard fight that used to warrant a trip to the principal’s office can now lead to a trip to the booking station and a judge,” Durbin said.
“Sadly, there are schools that look more like prison than places for children to learn and grow. Students pass through metal detectors, and police roam the halls. Suspensions, expulsions, and in-school arrests lead to kids being out of the classroom and a troubling increase in the number of people in the juvenile justice system,” Durbin added.
To make sure all students are “treated equitably as a nation,” Delisle called for “a multi-prong strategy that encourages educators to pro-actively monitor their discipline practices for disproportionality, assess for root causes where disproportionality exists, and engage in a broad-based community effort to develop an action plan to root out discrimination in the administration of discipline.”
As usual liberals misidentify the problem. The problem is the 9th grader should have gotten a two week suspension because he/she knew better.
What a racist thing to say!
It would be horrid ~ expulsion for a couple of days AIN’T NO THANG!
Even there ~ deaf kids stand a pretty high chance of being murdered by school employees. I’ve known one ~
dennis prager said today that, while he usually thinks people are smaert until proven stupid, anyone with an education degree he ythinks is stupid until proven smart. and usually they won’t be proven smart.
education degrees are worthless, just another way to employ individuals to teach eduction classes because they would fail in the real world.
They did this in the early 80’s. You could have a black thug who murdered someone in his neighborhood attending your school.
Misbehaving with violence was common. Beat downs, theft, and on and on. School became an even more dangerous place.
Hopefully if start this crap, they will put a nail in thecoffin of public school and we can get the power to change the system to vouchers and see a bunch of innovative and useful schools pop up.
This should have been done in the 80’s.
I’m writing this as my sophomore students are busy writing an essay about the character of Odysseus for their final. I’m so very glad I’ll be retiring soon.
Most of my students are Alaska Native. I’ll bet they’re disciplined more than the white students are. They’re also more likely to be outwardly racist, more likely to avoid schoolwork, more likely to be using tobacco, alcohol, or other drugs, and more likely to skip school. They’re more likely to miss class for a whole variety of reasons. They’re more likely to also come from homes missing one (or both) parents.
So the unequal academic outcomes that stem from all those behaviors and environments are supposed to be balanced in my classroom to reflect a racial percentage in the community. Of course, this is insanity. It’s apartheid with a happy face. It’s the segregated south as designed by northern intellectuals. It’s the scientific method and statistics as applied to utopian idealism. It’s the age-old concept of “one drop of blood” as imposed on human beings, in which kids with a white dad and a Yup’ik mom are Native, and a kid with two white parents and a Yup’ik grandparent are Native.
So here’s how it will be enforced in my classroom and school. We’ll have a new requirement to keep records of discipline and classroom management based on race and gender and sexual orientation. (God knows how the “sexual orientation” thing will work itself out.) Every time I ask a kid to spit out the gum or sit up straight or put away the headphones, I’ll be required to documentation of the action, the time, the disciplinary cause, the remediation, and, or course, the race, gender, or orientation of the student. My superintendent will produce a neat little chart at the start of the year. State officials will fret. Occasionally an angry parent will threaten a lawsuit when little Johnny pulls a knife or slashes my tires.
The end result, of course, will be that schools will proudly be able to report that the percentage of (fill in your minority) offenders disciplined is approaching equality, while the schools themselves become living hellholes.
By all means homeschool. I would love to see vouchers or complete privatization, but I don’t think I’ll live to see the day. In the meantime, I cry for the students in my room and their children.
God help us.
I’m writing this as my sophomore students are busy writing an essay about the character of Odysseus for their final. I’m so very glad I’ll be retiring soon.
Most of my students are Alaska Native. I’ll bet they’re disciplined more than the white students are. They’re also more likely to be outwardly racist, more likely to avoid schoolwork, more likely to be using tobacco, alcohol, or other drugs, and more likely to skip school. They’re more likely to miss class for a whole variety of reasons. They’re more likely to also come from homes missing one (or both) parents.
So the unequal academic outcomes that stem from all those behaviors and environments are supposed to be balanced in my classroom to reflect a racial percentage in the community. Of course, this is insanity. It’s apartheid with a happy face. It’s the segregated south as designed by northern intellectuals. It’s the scientific method and statistics as applied to utopian idealism. It’s the age-old concept of “one drop of blood” as imposed on human beings, in which kids with a white dad and a Yup’ik mom are Native, and a kid with two white parents and a Yup’ik grandparent are Native.
So here’s how it will be enforced in my classroom and school. We’ll have a new requirement to keep records of discipline and classroom management based on race and gender and sexual orientation. (God knows how the “sexual orientation” thing will work itself out.) Every time I ask a kid to spit out the gum or sit up straight or put away the headphones, I’ll be required to documentation of the action, the time, the disciplinary cause, the remediation, and, or course, the race, gender, or orientation of the student. My superintendent will produce a neat little chart at the start of the year. State officials will fret. Occasionally an angry parent will threaten a lawsuit when little Johnny pulls a knife or slashes my tires.
The end result, of course, will be that schools will proudly be able to report that the percentage of (fill in your minority) offenders disciplined is approaching equality, while the schools themselves become living hellholes.
By all means homeschool. I would love to see vouchers or complete privatization, but I don’t think I’ll live to see the day. In the meantime, I cry for the students in my room and their children.
God help us.
No gangsta left behind. Thank you, George Bush!
Again with the poor African-American BS.
If those kids behaved themselves they wouldn’t get suspended, but a-holes like this want to punish white kids for minor infractions to keep the stats looking good,
What an idiot.
Bookmark for later abuse.
Uhmmmmmm......I know this is probably a waste of bandwidth; but consider this if you please.
For these poor, discriminated-against, disadvantaged segments of our society to continue to exist; there must be a corresponding or greater number of responsible, law-abiding and ethical persons willing to follow the rules of
civilized society, to work, to produce and contribute to that society.
In short, most of you who support Communist/Marxist, Liberal Progressive “tolerance” of what has always been intolerable in humankind( and instinctively in the animal kingdom) are doomed. You will perish simply because of your lack of ability to produce progeny that can sustain themselves. You exist today precisely because of people who aren’t like you and don’t live according to your ideology. When those people are gone or refuse to sustain you any longer; you will adopt their ethics and principles or else starve.
Keep in mind that the youth whose shabby morals, inability to practice self control over impulse and refusal to participate in any order of society or rule of law are your future. Do you really think any of them are going to mature into the “rich” people you are fleecing and demanding to pay their “fair share” so the voluntarily indigent can continue to collect their stipend? It’s not likely.
Barrack Obama loves to decry the “mess” he inherited from George W. Bush. Liberal Democrats seem to have no idea what a “mess” the perpetually dependent voting base they have created for themselves is going to make when there are no more hard-working, law-abiding Americans willing to be robbed to support it.
So go ahead and foster your “special” minorities who think they have a right to behave abominably and to take what doesn’t belong to them. They will ultimately starve but not before they turn on the government that rendered them incapable.
The obvious conclusion, is that if a large segment of society is either incapable or unwilling to conform to the rules of a civilized society, then the solution must be that the definition of crime does not apply to them.
That damned pesky 14th Amendment, again...
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