On the topic of race and school discipline
This paper, called “Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities,” is rather long. But it’s well worth reading. It critiques the sort of reasoning that is commonly used to justify leftist policies of “equity” that have little or no foundation in actual research findings.
The link seems to be broken.
Topo Gigio:
The link is to the abstract, and if you scroll down you can click on a tab that leads you to the article itself.
When something clearly contradicted by massive amounts of evidence (i.e. that white and black students are equally likely to be unruly and disruptive in class, or that black and white Americans are equally likely to commit violent crime) is accepted as axiomatically true, then it follows for “true believers” in what has been called the “dogma of zero group differences” that the only possible explanation for any disparity of outcome (and, of course, Asian-American success and under-representation in criminal activity are never a consideration) is the malevolence of the majority towards a supposedly vulnerable minority (“the legacy of slavery”, or “systemic racism”, or poverty, or discrimination, etc). The obsession of leftists with an absurdly unrealizable “equity” (identical statistical representation for all groups by all metrics) lies at the heart of the cult of “anti-racism” with all its pernicious CRT/BLM/1619 propaganda.
Neo, all I get is a “Sorry, that page is missing” message. Perhaps it’s my computer.
Topo Gigio:
If you’re right-clicking the link, as is my discipline, don’t. Try a straight left-click.
The major issue is children growing up without fathers. I am from rural America. The kids who were born to teenage mothers and who grew up without a father tended to be the badly behaved kids at school.
Single motherhood has skyrocketed. It’s astronomical amount black teen girls, but it’s pretty high in rural white America. It’s extremely low among Asians.
The sexual revolution was one of the worst things that happened to black America. Black ten pregnancy rates were higher than whites before then…
And the structure of the welfare system makes it “better” to be an unwed mother.
Huxley, I tried that too. No luck either way. Thanks, though.
Related: this article at Quillette describes the experiences of a white teacher at the college level trying to apply “white” standards of achievement, discipline, and general fairness, as traditionally understood, in an environment where progressive ideology rules. Race is not the only source of problems, but it’s a big one.
https://quillette.com/2021/07/07/how-all-my-politically-correct-bones-were-broken/
From a footnote, page 2 of the research paper:
The argument that rates of misbehavior in schools are equal across all races (despite differing rates at which teachers refer students for discipline and differing rates at which discipline is administered) is somewhat reminiscent of arguments concerning criminal activity. Some argue that racial disparities in arrests and incarceration are attributable in large part to race discrimination and not to differing rate of criminal activity.
They should consider this: If racial disparities in arrests were largely attributable to race discrimination, one would expect the greatest disparities to occur in connection with minor crimes, where the chance of getting away with a false accusation is greatest.
But the greatest disparities are at the other end of the spectrum. Murder, where the motivation for making a false accusation and the likelihood of getting away with one are at their lowest, is the best example. While African Americans are about 12.7% of the population, they are, according to FBI statistics for 2016, 43% of murder victims and 47.3% of offenders.
You can take newborn babies in the maternity ward and lightly constrict or reposition them.
Black Babies will protest too much.
White Babies protest Just Right 🙂
East Asians Babies will protest too little.
But seriously… there have been studies which have shown that babies of different races respond differently to environmental stimuli. Well strike me dead with a feather. Who woulda thunk it?
I’ve seen the world and seen Blacks / Whites / East Asians living as adults in high density environments — and guess how it pans out in terms of crime, environmental noise, general cleanliness and social friction?
Baked. In.
Culture is the Cake Tin.
Zaphod:
Amazing that you have the answers when researchers don’t have the answers at all. Amazing also that you know all of this without citing a single speck of research.
And I have no doubt that you can find some researcher or other who says almost anything. But the preponderance of research has not solved the nature/nurture question re race. There are people who are invested in proving either extreme, of course, and you’re welcome to believe whatever you believe. But that doesn’t make it so.
@Neo:
And amazing how many miles along so many byways some will wander in order to avoid the hard evidence in front of their eyes.
Race Exists. Racial Stereotypes describe observable facts about the +/- 1SD about mean (these pop dists are not skewed). Better and worse things happen in the tails.
Do you seriously think we would have made it as a species off the African Savannah if we didn’t have an accurate method of developing heuristics about populations of Other Animals/Tribes?
Acknowledging racial differences is the only way to mitigate inter-racial violence and injustice. It won’t be pretty. Nobody likes to be shown themselves in the mirror. But pretending differences don’t exist or that they are caused by X or Y other factor (— usually involving massive scapegoating of some group — hello, hello?) is a recipe for explosive horror show tragedy. Which is what the USA and some other Western Countries are barreling headlong towards.
Babies:
J. Philippe Rushton, “Ethnic Differences in Temperament” in Personality and Person Perception Across Cultures, ed. Yueh-Ting Lee, Clark R. McCauley, and Juris G.. Draguns (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999), 45-63.
PTSD: Highest in Blacks, Medium in Whites, Lowest in East Asians:
Chris Cantor, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Evolutionary Perspectives,” Australia and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 43(2009): 1038-1048.
Plenty more references in the excellent survey ‘Making Sense of Race’ by Ed Dutton. There is a preponderance of experimental work which shows that there are differences across races in all kinds of personality and mental characteristics — just as there are in athletic performance or other physical characteristics. This fervent need to believe that evolutionary adaptation stops at the neck is quaint.
The problem is government monopoly schools.
We should create an educational endowments for each K-12 student. Student endowment funds would pay out for students who achieved grade level knowledge. Instead of endless fights over charter schools, home schooling, etc. etc.
With an educational endowment, all students would become customers for educational services and be treated accordingly.
Providers for students who did poorly would not be paid, leaving twice the annual amount available next year to educators who could catch them up.
Instead of leaving dropouts to fend for themselves, the funds would remain on deposit indefinitely, allowing those who got their act together after some time in the adult world to get an education.
Troubled students would have teachers and mentors who had a financial stake in the outcome. The dramatic difference in quality based on differences in community income levels would end.
Let’s move to a free market.
There is some research which estimates the long-term impact of a single disruptive student on all the *other* students in the class, in terms of their lifetime career success and earnings. I’ll link it if I can find it.
All you need to do is hop on Gab or one of the Chans where there is no censorship and you will be able to find with little effort mountains of anecdote from thousands upon thousands of people who have had less than happy experiences with Blacks being bussed into their public schools and ruining their childhood and especially teen years when the violence and sexual predation really kicks in.
FFS Public School District class demographics are practically the prime driver of real estate market values in large parts of the country.
Everyone who is not Black pays extra to not be around Blacks. Hell, the Preachiest Blacks pay extra (out of what they have mostly grifted from Whites) to not live in Black neighbourhoods. And of course this goes too for the Preachiest Whites… The joke on the Right is that they Live Like the KKK and Vote Like the Black Panthers. Conservacucks might not vote like the Black Panthers, but again virtually all of them live in Lily White Enclaves from which they preach tolerance to the Benighted Bad Whites.
It’s not rocket science.
I don’t know what the cure is. Perhaps every Bad White who had his or her school life blighted could receive a voucher for one faculty dining room luncheon with Thomas Sowell at the Hoover?
@Dick Ilyes:
“Let’s give people Free Money (vouchers) and move to a Free Market”.
*autistic brain explodes*
OK… packed the wreckage back in my skull and moving right along…
Hmm…
Yeah… that’ll work.
Can Do isn’t quaint to cite two studies that buttresse his melanin-centric worldview and the fall back on “evolution” to explain human behaviour/misbehaviour. Quite the corpus of research. LOL
Can Do persists in his role propounding just a variant of Criminal Racist Theory. Did a durain drop on his head?
Are people serious in saying there is no racial basis in crime rates or school disruption stats?
If you think it’s (mostly) due to dysfunctional local culture, sure, maybe. But to believe it’s due to oppression from the dominant culture? Good luck with that …
Hello!
@ Dick Illyes, that’s an interesting idea about the endowments – I’ll have to consider that.
@ david foster, on the studies about disruptive student effects – would be very worth seeing that if you can find.
I’m finding much food for thought these days in the notion that issues of culture and class are often mistaken as issues of race. Taking school discipline as a culture-space concern, it strikes me that if we speak of a dominant culture (piggybacking now on JimNorCal’s last), that dominant culture may not in fact be dominant everywhere at all times.
In other words, one could conceive of a local problematic school district, for example, steeped in discipline problems and other such tumult, as being in a state of what in chemical terms we could describe as a local disequilibrium. Such things can exist and can sometimes be long-lasting depending on the nature of the overall system. Viscous liquids, for example, could be in a very non-equilibrium state for a long time due to the slowness of mixing.
Thus, if you have two or more cultures with radically different norms and so on mixed in one school, the problems could reach an equilibrium eventually – that is, the dominant overall culture ultimately asserts itself – but it could take a long time. And if there is in addition a sort of energy input into that system that is directed toward artificially maintaining the disequilibrium – ‘equity’ in discipline rates; permissive school safety attitudes; similar ideological things pushed by the ideologically driven types on the school board – then the disequilibrium could be maintained perhaps indefinitely until the energy source is either exhausted or removed.
@Philip Sells:
Or you could just try not to throw the Sodium in the beaker of Water.
Same yourself a whole lot of time and trouble.
Thinking back to my own school days, the worst problems with disruptive kids in class that I remember were actually in eighth grade, not so much in high school. I was on the receiving end of a couple of mild things, but that tailed off in high school, partly because I was in a number of AP math/science classes.
But some of the teachers and administrators that I liked the most were black. I remember Mrs. Clomon in sixth grade, Mr. Davis in ninth, Mr. Foster in eighth-grade science, and John Caldwell, who was the principal first at my junior high, and then moved up to my local high school not long after I myself started there. Those were rock-steady personalities, each distinctive, all good role models. That was back in the eighties; in that period, we were mercifully spared any major race issues in our city schools as far as I recall.
Oh, yes, and not to forget Mr. Miles in gym. We were all convinced that to cross him was to take your life in your hands. (This worked to my distinct advantage on one particular occasion.)
If you were to ask me what was the magic sauce that kept things from getting out of hand in school? Well, on one hand, those strong personalities; for another thing, the way the climate of race relations in my city had evolved; and for another, maybe that a good number of us white kids were probably more comfortable around blacks than might otherwise have been the case, since there was a cohort of us that lived in a decidedly non-wealthy mixed-race neighborhood for some time. And I think maybe in general the class and wealth disparities in our city were not so great as they could have been elsewhere. That probably helped. Even the local ghetto, while it was certainly poor as ghettos tend to be, lacked an edge of real violence at the time (though I understand it has since changed for the worse in that respect with the inevitable influence of drugs and gangs from the nearest large cities).
I’m probably romanticizing those days a little bit in retrospect, but I really don’t think I’m doing so to excess.
The major issue is children growing up without fathers.
Wringing your hands about that won’t tamp down school disorder. Sequestering the bad kids will.
I went to parochial school from 7th-12th.
I’ve said, and will likely continue to say, terrible things about that period of my life. But I will gladly acknowledge that discipline was kept and the trains ran on time. Behavioral problem students didn’t get too far.
My math teacher, Mr. C, had been a serious football lineman at Notre Dame. He blew out his knee and his chance at the pros, so he ended up teaching math and coaching football and track in high school.
I remember one lunch period where a troublemaker got out of line and Mr. C glared, then lifted him up with one hand on the tie, and pinned him to the gym door.
‘Course, you can’t do that sort of thing anymore.
@ j e (top of thread):
Well said!
Combine the high rate of fatherlessness with the left’s invidious attacks upon western culture and you have two of the determinate factors in the high rate of disciplinary problems and crime among blacks. Add to that a higher average racial testosterone level and you have the triumvirate of determinate factors.
But as Jorden Peterson points out, it’s the most aggressive at the end of the bell curve where the problem lies. The FBI statistic that African Americans @ 12.7% committ 47.3% of the murders is a bit misleading. The great majority of black murderers are young men, when testosterone is highest, when leftist fomented resentment is most influential and where growing up without a father bears its bitter ‘fruit’. They’ve had no parental role model of what being a man consists of, it’s no accident that the group most interested in Jordan Peterson’s lectures are young men.
In 1965 I attended Southeastern HS in Detroit’s lower east side. Southeastern was entirely black – well almost; there was me, my brother, several Arab Lebanese and a smattering of Koreans…and it was a big school in a rough neighborhood. From personal experience I can attest to the Paper’s premise that discipline is required for student’s to learn. What a riot! Most classes were a free for all with a small group of trouble makers making it impossible for any learning at all. I remember the young black English teacher breaking down in tears because she could not control the beasts. The beasts thought this was good fun and challenged each other with who could be first to break the teacher. I was somewhat amused by all of this as I had attended mostly catholic schools down south and could coast for the year. This was my first experience having black schoolmates. Luckily, I transferred to Denby HS the next year. I don’t recall any violence – I can’t imagine what it is like in those inner city schools now.
Life is unfair. That seems like an injustice – from God, or reality.
Brains, beauty, health – parents, homes schools.
All unfair, unchosen by the kids. Most unchosen by adults.
Injustice happens based on unjust decisions by humans. Actually it is “injustice”, the unjust decision by somebody, which comes first – “justice” is the social response only after an injustice. [My definition, not fully accepted]
Most of the CRT & PC crap is based on unfair reality being call injustice.
We need to separate “justice” from “fairness”. There is no just way to compensate those born, unfairly, with less than average levels of any metric.
We need to emphasize that life is unfair, and a lot, maybe most, of growing up is to accept the unfairness of life, and try to treat everybody fairly. And support justice actions, punishment for the guilty and compensation for the victims, in cases of injustice.
Punishing the innocent to help victims of unfair reality is not justice – but is what SJWs often want.
Glenn Loury talks to Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) who has new book coming out Facing Reality. Arnold Kling talks about the blogging heads episode.
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/charles-murray-and-glenn-loury/
Nobody knows the “optimal solution” – because it really IS unfair that some are smart and so many others are less so. We, as in different states, should be trying different things to see how well they work.
Paying kids to learn seems like an excellent thing to try, like @Dick suggests or thru many other possible methods.
What should “society” do with poor, low-IQ, boys without fathers in their lives (unmarried mothers) who behave poorly? Current government schools are NOT doing a good job.
We don’t have honest discussion about what “works” means, in terms of learning or behavior.
Pingback:Life is unfair – but not all unfairness is injustice – Tom Grey – Families, Freedom, Responsibility
Here is the paper I mentioned about the long-term effects of disruptive peers:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22042/w22042.pdf
I remember the young black English teacher breaking down in tears because she could not control the beasts.
Again, from the state commissioner of education down to the dean of students at that high school, the policy decisions made were to allow the beasts free rein. Change the policy and make sure every judge and public interest lawyer in the state knows they’ll suffer off the books if they try to run interference for the beasts.
Every county sheriff’s department should have a schools division. The fixed costs of the division should be financed by the the county’s general fund. The variable costs would be financed by capitations assessed on schools making use of the division’s services. Every school in the state, especially those serving slum clientele, would have a generous budget to pay those capitations. You’d have one capitation for the supply of armed guards to maintain order in the schools and another for each feral youngster remanded to the supervision of the division during the day. The division would have a motor pool and day detention centers where there charges would be locked up in isolation and let out in groups of six for remedial schooling. That would be for youths under the age of 14. At age 14, the schools are done with you. Find an employer who will take a chance on you or get used to prison when you’ve been caught.
Regular elementary schooling would focus on three basic subjects. All schools would have three to five tracks each with a pace adapted to the absorptive capacity of a particular segment of the student body. Secondary schools would be of three types: one devoted to basic schooling and life skills, one to vocational / technical disciplines, and one to academics.
There is this, on Page 10:
“These teachers understood fully that the federal government’s Obama-Era policy on school discipline was doing students, very much including minority students, no favors by pressuring schools to lighten up on discipline on account of its disparate impact on minority students.”
Trayvon Martin comes to mind as I remember reading a news article that stated his school found stolen property and tools typically used in burglaries in his locker. And the school officials decided to call it “found” property instead of stolen and NOT call them burglary tools (I can’t recall what they called them; but, not burglary tools)
At the time I recall thinking that this kid needed some real discipline and wasn’t getting it partly because the school officials were concerned about the “statistics that make black kids look bad” and now he is dead.
Fatherless homes, welfare checks, food stamps, home life consisting of violence-themed video games, hip-hop played at maximum volume, and zero reading matter makes for an unruly child ill-equipped to learn anything of redeeming social and intellectual value.
At the time I recall thinking that this kid needed some real discipline and wasn’t getting it partly because the school officials were concerned about the “statistics that make black kids look bad” and now he is dead.
He was raised by a pick-up team which included his father, his step-mother, his paternal-side uncle, his uncle’s wife, and his mother. His step-mother later averred that he lived with his father about 85% of the time. And other accounts had it that he was closer to his paternal-side cousin than to his brother. Not an optimal situation, but the bits and fragments which are known about his situation suggest that neither his mother nor his father were under any illusions about him and were pushing back against his feral impulses. One problem emerged in 2011 when his father and step-mother separated and his father took up with a woman in suburban Orlando. His step-mother had been his primary caretaker for a dozen years. Note, his father was a long-haul trucker, his uncle a retired army sergeant, his mother in the middle-management in one of the school districts around Miami. His brother trained as an IT tech at one of the colleges around Miami. His father’s new girl owned a townhouse in the gated subdivision where he was killed. Trayvon wasn’t a po’ boy.
A few observations about behavior and school, one of my cousins was a college football player, went on to be a coach and then a principal here in Texas. When he finally had enough points to retire he called his wife who was a special ed teacher and told her that if he did not retire at the end of the semester she would read about him in the paper when he decked a parent during a conference. He told me that years ago, he was an educator starting in the 1970’s he had control over his students, even the marginal ones who were not too bright making grades but loved to play sports could be kept in line by putting them on the bench, and then the ‘no pass, no play’ rules came into being and they sounded like a good idea but those kids who could not pass would give up, the law said they had to stay in school, even doing nothing but they were not allowed to play sports, or be part of other activities and there were no provisions for special needs and things started slipping away. The other means to keep students in line was actual busting their butts spankings and cousin said that at the first of the year each of the coaches was watching for a big, loud mouth, obnoxious boy to step way over the line messing up and then, this was in the days when class room doors were always open up and down the halls, the coach would take the boy out in the hallway using a paddle that was large and loud and give the boy about five licks with the sound echoing up and down the hallways. The recipient of the spanking understood what he had done and bore no grudge and usually avoided discipline situations for the rest of the year and all of the other kids were intimidated enough to try to stay in line, sometimes it took a couple of other loud examples but the students knew there were consequences both at school and in most cases at home when the parents were told about the behavior of their son. No matter the background the students and parents understood who was in charge in the old days.
What pushed my cousin over the line was the change that occurred when the parents would come up and yell and shout at the teachers and and principal because their sweet child could do no wrong and requiring detention which became the ‘go to’ discipline was no acceptable in the case of their son or daughter and after year 2000 things were much worse trying to keep any type of learning environment under control. I have six good friends who retired as school principals during the past 20 years, they worked hard trying to educate all youngsters, of all ethnic backgrounds and none of them would like to be working under the current conditions of public school education here in Texas.
I’ve always hated the hypocrisy and code words used by white liberals.
My family fled an integrated school district because a big black girl was making my sister carry her books.
All the White families that lived where we moved all came for the same reason. I felt that our new schools weren’t any better but had a a better student body.
We were inundated with how oppressive white America was and yet people talked in euphemisms- ie “ bad neighborhoods”- duh what made it bad. We all knew but were forced to pretend
Fatherless homes, welfare checks,
Less than 4% of the black population lives in households collecting TANF checks and the young among them are typically under 5.
“Life is unfair. That seems like an injustice – from God, or reality.” Tom Grey
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. Life’s essential unfairness is an absolute necessity and overall a huge positive. Without God’s inequality in blessings… individual genius with its incalcuable societal benefits would not exist. Nor would civilization itself or the accumulation of the funds necessary for entreprenuerial risk.
Most significantly of all, evolution’s driving mechanism is the ultimate inequality; individual beneficial adaptive mutations solely passed on to one’s descendents, without which life would never have surpassed the stage of the amoeba.
Perhaps… God knew what he was doing in creating this reality?
@Art Deco: “Welfare” != “TANF checks”. TANF is a subset of welfare and it doesn’t all come as checks but as other kinds of benefits. Medicaid, for example, is welfare, and most of it is authorized under TANF, but it’s not a “check”. I’m afraid your source for that stat is trying to mislead you.
2015 African American population: 42.7 M
2015 African Americans on Medicaid: 13.1 M (31%)
Or another way to put it, 12% of the general population is 20% of the Medicaid population.
“These teachers understood fully that the federal government’s Obama-Era policy on school discipline was doing students, very much including minority students, no favors by pressuring schools to lighten up on discipline on account of its disparate impact on minority students.”
I have used the analogy of the Penny in the Fusebox. Back before fuses were largely replaced by circuit breakers, everybody had a fusebox in their home, and idiots would respond to a blown fuse by putting a penny in the fuse socket. This would get the lights back on and the toaster toasting, but at the potential cost of burning down your house.
Present-day ‘liberalism’ and ‘progressivism’ are all about bypassing or disabling the circuit protection devices at all levels of society.
Related post: Coupling
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58361.html
Good anecdote Avi.
Head in Sanders could try a thought experiment of multiplying Avi’s story by a conservative 50M (low ball guestimate based on two generations) life-experiences involving Blacks in the forcibly integrated classroom — many of which experiences would be *worse*.
People Know. You can make saying it a firing offence and a marker of Out-castness… But we all Know.