Free Hits
Katherine Kersten on racial discipline quotas in schools – and their ugly consequences:
On [superintendent Valeria] Silva’s watch, the city’s high schools have become menacing places where gangs of out-of-control teens prowl the halls, and “classroom invasions” by students settling private disputes are commonplace. Today, fights that “might have been between two individuals” can grow into “mêlées involving up to 40 or 50 people,” according to Steve Linders, a St Paul police spokesman. Roving packs often attack individuals, and police have had to use chemical irritants to break up what they call “riots.” […] One high school has issued emergency whistles to teachers and assigned a guard to every floor. A teacher who was crushed into a shelf in a classroom invasion now instructs her students to use a “secret knock” to enter her classroom.
The discipline policies that gave rise to this chaos sprang from Silva’s embrace of “racial equity” ideology. In St Paul, as across the nation, black students as a group are referred for discipline at higher rates than their peers. Silva made eliminating this racial gap a top priority. In Silva’s view, the gap is caused by teachers’ racial bias and cultural insensitivity, not by higher rates of misconduct by black students. She mandated “white privilege” training for all district personnel, eliminated “continual wilful disobedience” as a suspendable offence, and shifted many special education students with behaviour problems — students who are disproportionately black — to mainstream classrooms.
As Silva’s new discipline regime took hold, reading and math scores dropped and headlines about assaults on teachers appeared with disturbing frequency. Yet instead of reconsidering, her administration moved quickly to control public relations damage. For example, district officials attempted to silence critics by accusing them of having “issues with racial equity,” one veteran teacher told City Pages. In December 2015, teachers threatened to strike over mounting safety concerns… Meanwhile, St Paul families of all races began flooding into charter and suburban public schools, taking millions of dollars in state aid with them.
What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else. Including, of course, children with browner skin who somehow manage not to indulge in routine fits of thuggery.
Readers may recall this rather startling article by Paul Sperry on how similar policies of racial favouritism in six other cities promptly resulted in six surges in violent classroom assaults. With apologists for the policies in effect claiming that “African-American boys” are more “physical” and “demonstrative,” and just can’t help punching teachers in the face, or groping them, or setting other students’ hair on fire. Because it’s how black Americans “engage in learning.”
Also relevant, the first item here and the links immediately following it.
Finally, on June 21, 2016, the school board announced Silva’s departure after buying out her contract at a cost of almost $800,000.
Why wasn’t this woman in court for endangering other people’s kids?
It’s about destruction, not education.
Obviously White Privilege is so pervasive and oppressive that even racial equity cannot overcome it. The only solution is to create POC-only schools, administered by POCs, where POC students may interact with other POCs without the threat of overt or micro-aggression by non-POC teachers, administrations, or other students.
This “Safe School” movement will doubtless see a surge of academic achievement by POC students as they embrace the peace and serenity afforded by the absence of Whitey.
I have to wonder, how many of these “special education students with behaviour problems” are not necessarily the result of something learned due to a complete lack of adult discipline (although that surely must have contributed – Lord of the Flies writ large), but the result of chronic drug and alcohol abuse by their mothers before they were born, such as fetal alcohol syndrome and what used to be known as “crack babies”?
Or is it considered “rayciss” to even bring up the subject?
I’d better get some of these on hot stand-by.
Uh-oh. {o.O}
Before I look, is it safe to assume that the reader comments at The Federalist resemble the flame war free-for-all that accompanied Jeff Goldstein’s “Alt-Right” article?
Norman, I think there are just too many contributing factors to disentangle how many individuals are the result of each.
But we can sure be problematic listing some of them. Let’s see, you mentioned lack of adult discipline, fetal alcohol syndrome, crack babies. I’d add terrible peer groups, unfortunate predispositions, and absent fathers.
With apologists for the policies in effect claiming that “African-American boys” are more “physical” and “demonstrative,” and just can’t help punching teachers in the face, or groping them, or setting other students’ hair on fire. Because it’s how black Americans “engage in learning.”
Its depressing to see how yesterday’s racist assumptions have become today’s traits worthy of celebration as authentic components of cultural identity.
New York state mandated similar policies in some of its school (Syracuse comes to mind), with similar results.
With apologists for the policies in effect claiming that “African-American boys” are more “physical” and “demonstrative,” and just can’t help punching teachers in the face, or groping them, or setting other students’ hair on fire. Because it’s how black Americans “engage in learning.”
New York state mandated similar policies in some of its schools (Syracuse comes to mind), with similar results.
If you can get past the sense of dismay that will most likely arise, the Paul Sperry article linked above is worth reading.
Finally, on June 21, 2016, the school board announced Silva’s departure after buying out her contract at a cost of almost $800,000.
This looks like a win for her; f**k up hundreds of lives – get $$$$.
I recall reading something similar to Sperry’s article before. We’re seeing some similar issues in higher education; a number of years ago, a colleague and I had ongoing problems with a couple of particularly difficult students. The situations were resolved (without formal punishment for either student), and perhaps because of our problems the administration held a seminar on “dealing with difficult students.”
The seminar focused on how we, as faculty members, had to adjust our expectations and teaching practices in light of the changes in student behavior. During the Q & A session, my colleague, who had had endured far more than I had, asked the facilitator if she had any suggestions that might help us mitigate with worst student behavior.
The facilitator could have assured us that the university was concerned about our safety or committed to a consistent code of discipline, but she said this instead:”act more professional.”
While race wasn’t a factor in our respective situations, it was readily apparent that the administration’s policies contributed to many of the disciplinary problems at the university—and that those in charge saw us as the root cause of the problems. Questioning these assumptions would lead to questions about our “classroom management.”
I was happy to leave that school. Most of the students were decent enough (it was a private university with a decent reputation), but I’ve never encountered an environment in higher education where so many professors were so frightened of their students.
I can empathize with those teachers who labor under the restrictions of “Restorative Justice” and can vouch for how awful it is to face the blame for a student’s destructive behavior—and teachers in public schools have to deal with far worse on a daily basis.
“Except everywhere it’s been tried, this softer approach has backfired.”
This sentence from the article David linked had me scratching my head for a bit.
I’m learnding!
Better unlock the portals to the Re-Education Shed…
unfortunate predispositions,
When you control for the other items in your list, there is ZERO racial component in delinquency.
ZERO.
have become menacing places where gangs of out-of-control teens prowl the halls
And yet, Leftists have been busy lecturing us that kids can be successfully raised by single moms – that “fathers” are patriarchal anachronisms that merely reinforce male hegemony.
How’s that working out, eh?
“Let’s see, you mentioned lack of adult discipline, fetal alcohol syndrome, crack babies. I’d add terrible peer groups, unfortunate predispositions, and absent fathers.”
And there’s the up 20x greater prevalence in blacks of the mutation of the MAOA gene that predisposes to extreme violence.
In most societies, blacks tend to sink to the bottom. When individual blacks succeed and prosper, they invariably have had a stable two-parent upbringing involving strong notions of respectability and deferred gratification. The afro-family ‘structure’ of single-never-married mothers and absent fathers is at the core of black under-achievement.
How’s that working out, eh?
The episode above is a marvellous illustration of leftist psychology given power – and by marvellous I mean ludicrous and horrifying. The policy is egregiously unfair, pathologically unrealistic, and results in everyone at the school, including the supposed beneficiaries, doing much, much worse, with parents and children trying to flee the policy’s effects, which of course were entirely predictable, and teachers left brain damaged and in chronic pain.
But despite the subsequent chaos and degeneracy – the fall in maths and reading scores, the rapid rise in assaults and classroom thuggery, up to and including actual riots – despite all this, Ms Silva and her associates doubled down, dogmatically, and tried to silence critics of the policy by smearing them as racists. Perhaps Ms Silva found comfort in having made “white privilege” guilt hustling mandatory. While terrified staff were consoled with free emergency whistles.
Still, it’s good to be reminded that the absurd and the sinister aren’t mutually exclusive.
When you control for the other items in your list, there is ZERO racial component in delinquency.
And when you control for height, pygmies are great at basketball.
From this article:
She said the district was still “recovering” from mistakes in implementation.
“I never was unrealistic or denying that we could have done things better,” she said, but “I don’t regret any of the policy changes we’ve done”.
‘Mistakes’ in implementation? Must be those wreckers and saboteurs that Stalin kept going on about.
and:
Her legacy, Silva said, will be focusing the city and school district on racial equity.
“We’re going to have a district that’s much more racially aware that we have areas where we need tremendous improvement,” she said.
It almost sounds as though increasing racial antipathy was the objective.
When you control for the other items in your list, there is ZERO racial component in delinquency.
ZERO.
Ah, deep wisdom from a profoundly honest and insightful thinker. And he said it twice so it MUST be true.
MUST.
Plus, I love that ironic use of Progressive Prose: “racial component in delinquency”. Progressive windbags never use one syllable when six are not unavailable in terms of the dictionary and/or lexicon.
Btw, have you seen the crypto-nazi Vox Day’s latest eerie photo-negativing of the identitarian left?
Über-eerie, ¿no? Not to mention utterly, utterly un-American and repulsively at odds with core Judeo-Christian values. The United States will collapse if follows policies like that.
Two or three years ago these thoughts would never have occurred to me, but as the evidence mounts up I’m beginning to wonder if shoving all these incompetent women into managerial and senior administration positions across society is not having some awful and permanent effect. I work with plenty of competent female engineers, but the results of a generation of women being parachuted into positions way above their competency level are becoming clear and it is not pretty. At this rate, I’m going to be a complete and utter misogynist within 5 years.
Silva made eliminating this racial gap a top priority.
It’s obvious her eliminating this racial gap was essentially controlling how the gap could be counted, not tackling any actual bad behavior.
Am I to believe she didn’t know that she was operating in bad faith?
I’ve moved to a place where the schools are good and behind the times, and it’s now a race to see if my brood can make it through before they are converged. It’s like a nature documentary, where the predators are the Left.
That’s kinda funny, until I recall that people are actually hurt, and nudging a dead child with my nose might be more devastating than watching a mommy and her lifeless cub.
the results of a generation of women being parachuted into positions way above their competency level are becoming clear and it is not pretty.
Ms Silva is the definition of mediocrity and tends to blather aimlessly, even in the softest of interviews. At no point does she acknowledge any downsides to her vision, beyond the fact that teachers are the ones who will have to adapt to this new learning environment. Instead, she coughs up a lot of fluffy boilerplate about the alleged benefits of “diversity” and “inclusion.” By which she means your kids may be stuck sitting next to violent morons. We’re told this arrangement is a chance for everyone to “learn” and be “enriched” by the “culture and language” of the aforementioned violent morons, who, she says, require “different incentives and strategies” to learn. “It’s a great opportunity,” says she.
These people should be chased out of town with nail guns.
The most destructive force on Earth is White Liberal Guilt.
I work with plenty of competent female engineers, but the results of a generation of women being parachuted into positions way above their competency level are becoming clear and it is not pretty. At this rate, I’m going to be a complete and utter misogynist within 5 years.
I could have written those exact same words 5 years ago…ok, maybe 10.
These people should be chased out of town with nail guns.
But there’s so much we could learn from violent morons. 🙂
I’ve moved to a place where the schools are good and behind the times.
I’ve commented before on these issues, but the groundwork for what we’re seeing now was laid thirty years ago. Because of my profession, I could see it from the inside and what I saw caused me to send my kids to parochial schools, cost be damned.
Know this: the madness will eventually reach your children’s schools. State certification of teachers requires that educators attend certain “accredited” institutions, take certain “social justice” courses and pass certain tests, none of which pertain to the actual content of the courses they will teach, i.e. math, science, language arts and so forth. New teachers have been indoctrinated in this philosophy and will bring it with them to every nook and cranny in the country. The only solution for parents is to remove their children from the system while they still can, though that option will probably be gone in the next decade or two.
@PCIL: You’re probably unaware, but not only is dicentra a regular and the furthest thing from a Progressive, but dicentra is also not a dude. Also, repetition for emphasis is not an unusual thing particularly due of mockery. It’s a good thing she didn’t say it three times, however, as *that* would be the clincher. Not twice – ask the Bellman.
How would you have phrased the same sentiment? “No racial basis for crime”? First, “delinquency” refers to the *exact* problem – criminal behavior in (particularly unsupervised) youth. “Component” refers to one element of multiple, as in a set of causes. No reason to accuse of logorrhea when the extra syllables make the statement precise – and it’s rather funny that you spent five sentences and a fragment to accuse someone of logorrhea in one sentence and a fragment.
Why the sudden pivot to Vox Day? You had the urge to criticise dicentra for (possibly) having a progressive view on race, but felt you had to balance out with a “BUT I’M NOT A RACIST SEE WHO I CRITICISE”?
The whole “genetic component” to violence business is yet another means to divide us into competing groups. Better to conquer and all that. Not to mention, it’s another way to avoid talking about personal responsibility and personal virtue. What’s fascinating to me is how much a lot of this talk echo’s the whole “white man’s burden” business which the Left normally abhors.
Tip jar hit, David, BTW. You deserve a good dry Bordeaux for having to deal with us.
Tip jar hit, David, BTW
May your sock drawer remain orderly even in times of crisis.
You deserve a good dry Bordeaux for having to deal with us.
Actually, I may blow it all on a full-length fur pimp coat.
What? Oh, come on.
As long as the full length coat doesn’t depend on having dalmatians about. I’m almost certain you couldn’t round up enough – even given appropriate contacts in the Guild of Evil.
Actually, I may blow it all on a full-length fur pimp coat.
Be honest. How long have you been saving that photo waiting for a right time to deploy same?
How long have you been saving that photo waiting for a right time to deploy same?
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up.
[ Searches Amazon for ‘pimp coat’. ]
May your sock drawer remain orderly even in times of crisis.
Thanks for that, but do you have something appropriate for dealing with a teen-aged son’s bedroom, under circumstances where post-soccer practices and general disarray lead to the following when entering his room?
Completely off-topic
“Does Hillary have a BODY DOUBLE? Bizarre conspiracy theory claims the pneumonia-stricken candidate has been replaced by a lookalike”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3787428/Does-Hillary-BODY-DOUBLE-Bizarre-conspiracy-theory-claims-pneumonia-stricken-candidate-replaced-lookalike.html
I do love her Agent Smith glasses though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik–kknwJrU
AnotherFred: (re your remarks about the seminar on school policy)
I’m afraid the whole sorry episode in general, and their attitude toward your your opinions specifically, can be explained by the fact that you and your colleagues represented costs on the school’s income statement, and the students (with attached tax dollars) represented incomes.
Or perhaps by ignorance. Or by malevolence. Or by the Peter Principle.
Sigh. Who the f**k knows anymore? Hardly a day goes by that I don’t feel grateful that my own kids graduated long ago.
I’m afraid the whole sorry episode in general, and their attitude toward your your opinions specifically, can be explained by the fact that you and your colleagues represented costs on the school’s income statement, and the students (with attached tax dollars) represented incomes.
The administration was deathly afraid of litigation, so this was certainly a part of it. In fact, they only took action, anemic as is was, when I started considering legal action against the student.
Administrators love things like restorative justice; it allows them to exercise their authoritarian impulses under the guise of empowering students (while infantilizing, thus perpetuating the cycle of victimization and ensuring the “need” for more deanlettes).
At this institution, incoming freshmen were encouraged to bring any and all concerns to the administration’s attention. The administrators were then quick to share these concerns with us; they’d pay lip service to academic freedom by acknowledging that most complaints were petty or baseless, but the subtext to those of us without tenure was quite clear, and it was readily apparent that they would side with the students.
Some of the faculty were partially to blame as well. In my case, the student I clashed with had a long history of obnoxious, inappropriate, and outright dangerous behavior, yet the department head and others turned a blind eye. They were apparently worried that holding the little darling to anything resembling behavioral standards might lead to an episode of self-harm—or worse.
I never saw anything like this as a high school student in the 80s, and I certainly didn’t expect to see it in a university years later. I can only imagine what it must be like for a teacher in a public school who faces a dozen such sociopaths every day, all while being demonized by those in charge.
I was thrilled to escape that hell-hole, but I’m afraid that they were simply ahead of the curve.
Speaking of “diversity.”
“We are a place that has figured out that diversity can be a source of strength not just a source of weakness and as I look at this beautiful room with the sisters upstairs, everyone here, the diversity.
A few lines later, he says,
“We were a country defined on shared values, values that go beyond religion or ethnicity or language, values that we all share, openness, respect, compassion, a willingness to work hard, a desire to be there for each other, a search for justice, for equality, for opportunity. And it is that challenge around opportunity that we see so much anxiety in the world.
Apparently gender equality, a topic conspicuously absent from his speech, is not one of Trudeau’s “shared values.”
There’s also this:
Patty Hajdu, Trudeau’s minister for the status of women, was not at Monday’s mosque event but said it was important to be respectful of traditions for different places of worship.
“So whether you’re in an indigenous community or in a community of faith or in a military community … there are a number of traditions and cultures and standards that the community upholds and I think the respectful thing is to understand that it might not be your practice but it is theirs.”
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/feminist-pm-defends-attendance-at-gender-segregated-event
Even if those values are regressive, illiberal, anti-feminist, and antithetical to those held by the vast majority of the host country.
…with the sisters upstairs…
It’s THIS kind of oily “I’m down with the cause” familiarity that makes me most want to vomit. What a cretinous fool.
It’s THIS kind of oily “I’m down with the cause” familiarity that makes me most want to vomit
God, he’s awful. The waffle about “different perspectives… coming together” and this being “our greatest source of strength” was particularly vacuous. Those differing perspectives – on the role and status of women – didn’t come together in any meaningful way and the issue had to be tip-toed around with lots evasive woolly guff precisely because they’re hopelessly dissonant and a cause of social fragmentation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/comments/509lqb/facebook_sjw_who_never_shuts_up_about_how_much/
There are thousands of teachers in America who act exactly like the post subject. The majority of them are teachers in impoverished areas. They’re the biggest trigger for anti-social minority behaviour (because, as with Melissa Click, they give an aura of legitimacy to any negative activity that the offender chooses to perform.)