by
Walter E. Williams

Recently
by Walter E. Williams: Obama’s
Educational Excellence Initiative

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.

August
22, 2012

Walter
E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics
at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page.

Copyright
© 2012 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

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