Kids reacting to Trump bring fear and loathing to our schools

‘The Trump Effect’: Hatred, Fear And Bullying On The Rise In Schools

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center shines a light on a disturbing trend.

04/13/2016

• Christina Wilkie 
  The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON - It was only a matter of time before kids started picking up the aggressive, divisive language that’s become a hallmark of the 2016 presidential campaign.

According to a new report by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center titled “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on our Nation’s Schools,” the race is stoking fears and racial tensions in America’s classrooms.

...The report identified two troubling trends: more openly racist and vicious bullying of minorities, and more fear and anxiety among immigrants and minorities about what would happen to them if certain candidates for president are elected.
The survey did not name specific candidates, but teachers named Trump, the Republican front-runner, in more than 1,000 comments — five times more often than they mentioned any of the other candidates.
And for good reason: Trump’s xenophobic, populist rhetoric has brought the nation’s political discourse to new lows. When he’s not indirectly bragging about his genitalia or mocking disabled people, Trump has proposed banning Muslims from entering the country, embraced the use of war crimes to deal with terrorism suspects, and has accused Mexico of sending “rapists” to the United States.
The SPLC report also illustrates how American schoolchildren are adopting Trump’s overall tone — which so often includes name-calling and scapegoating. More than any specific policy proposal, teachers said, kids were expressing more hatred for more people.
“So many of my students have begun to show hatred towards refugees, low-income and poverty citizens, and there has been an increase in religious bias,” one teacher wrote. Scores of educators shared similar sentiments in the survey comments.
“There’s a sense that if someone doesn’t agree with you, it’s acceptable (even encouraged) to have hatred and anger towards them,” wrote another.

I can be neutral about Democrats and Republicans, but not about racists. Teacher’s comment to the Southern Poverty Law Center survey

Best known for tracking and combating hate groups and extremists, the SPLC has also expressed alarm about the support that Trump’s campaign is receiving from white nationalist groups.
Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke endorsed the real estate mogul earlier this year. Rather than denounce Duke outright on national TV, Trump hemmed and hawed, saying he would have to research Duke’s beliefs before commenting. Many viewed this as a dog-whistle appeal to conservative Southern voters, some of whom are still skeptical of racial integration.
Against the backdrop of such a venomous presidential campaign, teachers told the SPLC that they’re struggling with how to teach children what it means to debate respectfully, especially as the GOP race devolves into name-calling and trading insults about the rival candidate’s spouse.
The report also revealed how teachers feel torn between wanting to use the presidential election to teach civics and worrying about expressing personal political opinions to their students.
More than 40 percent of the teachers who filled out the survey said they were “hesitant to teach about the election.”...

America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform

Apparently Atlanta is a lot like San Diego. When illegal activity happens in a school, local officials handle the issue in two very different ways. When the wrongdoer is an adult with political connections, taxpayer money is poured into that person's defense, and the schools go into cover-up mode. On the other hand, if the wrongdoer has no political connections, the school goes after him or her with a vengeance. The justice system stands ready to support schools and other public entities. You're fighting an uphill battle when you want justice from a pubic entity. See Depraved in Poway and series of posts about shenanigans in Poway.  Adults in San Diego County schools usually misbehave with impunity, but kids who do the same thing are called "depraved." There was an amazing case at Guajome Park Academy where teachers improperly changed grades, but instead of censuring the teacherd, the school sued a whistle-blower kid who hacked the school computer to prove the wrongdoing.
 
See also my comparison of the Atlanta cheating scandal and the bizarre color-coordinated indictments of school officials in San Diego.


America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform
Our educational system stacks the deck against Black children -- now we're throwing their teachers in jail Brittney Cooper
Wednesday, Apr 8, 2015
Salon 

Former Atlanta Public Schools school research team director Tamara Cotman, center, is led to a holding cell after a jury found her guilty in the Atlanta Public Schools test-cheating trial, Wednesday, April 1, 2015, in Atlanta. (Credit: AP/Kent D. Johnson)

Last week, an Atlanta jury convicted 11 teachers and school administrators of racketeering in a system-wide cheating scandal. Yes, you read that correctly. Teachers and administrators inflating student scores on standardized tests is now considered “organized crime” in this country, and is punishable by more 20 years in prison, in these cases.

I am an educator. I am a Black woman who may someday mother a Black child. I have taught other Black mothers’ children. Much of my educational success in elementary school is directly attributable to high performance on standardized tests that caused my white teachers to notice me and intervene on my behalf to get me “tracked” into higher-achieving classrooms. I believe all children deserve access to a good, high-quality, public education.

Therefore, I don’t have to condone cheating in any form (and I don’t) to assert that what has happened in Atlanta to these teachers is a travesty. The pictures that emerged last week of handcuffed Black schoolteachers being led out of Southern courtrooms in one of the country’s largest urban Black school systems were absolutely heartbreaking.

Scapegoating Black teachers for failing in a system that is designed for Black children, in particular, not to succeed is the real corruption here. Since the early 1990s, we have watched the deprofessionalization of teaching, achieved through the proliferation of “teacher fellow” programs and the massive conservative-led effort to defund public education in major urban areas throughout the country. There is no longer a consensus that a good public education — a hallmark of American democracy — should be considered a public good.

Black children have for generations been the primary victims of this continuing social mendacity about the national value of education. More than 51 percent of children who attend public schools live in poverty. In Georgia, the percentage of Black children living in poverty hovers right around 39 percent. For Latino children, the number is consistently over 40 percent. Nationally, the number for Black children is 39 percent, according to most recent data, and 33 percent for Latino youth...

Read more at http://www.salon.com/2015/04/08/america_is_criminalizing_black_teachers_atlantas_cheating_scandal_and_the_racist_underbelly_of_education_reform/?source=newsletter

Stanford's Jennifer Eberhardt wins MacArthur 'genius' grant

Stanford's Jennifer Eberhardt wins MacArthur 'genius' grant 

By Geoffrey Mohan contact the reporter

LA Times

Sept. 16, 2014 

For her studies of race and perception, Eberhardt was awarded the MacArthur Foundation fellowship

Jennifer Eberhardt is fascinated with objects. It may seem an incongruous fixation for a social psychologist, but it helped the Stanford University associate professor land a spot among the creative and academic elite Wednesday, when the MacArthur Foundation awarded her its "genius" fellowship.
Eberhardt, 49, was cited for her efforts to examine how subtle, ingrained racial biases influence not just how we view people, but the objects of our daily world — and how those perceptions skew institutions such as the criminal justice system. She has transferred that work from laboratories filled with brain-scanning machines to police precincts, where she has advised cops about the ways their own minds can lead them onto perilous ground.

Society is dictating how those brain structures are responding. There are certain things about society that we can improve and change. - Jennifer Eberhardt, Stanford social psychologist and MacArthur award winner

"Most people know that African Americans are associated with crime and that they're stereotyped as criminal — in fact it's one of the strongest stereotypes of blacks in American society," Eberhardt said. "My work focuses on how that association might matter at different points in the criminal justice system and how this association can then affect us in surprising ways."

It matters because people can transfer associations from people to objects and places.

Eberhardt likes to use the example of the watch her late father, Harlan Eberhardt, gave her when his mother died. That watch had been her grandmother's prized possession. As she put it on her wrist, Jennifer Eberhardt was overwhelmed by the power of her own associations, now invested in the old timepiece. "I could see my grandmother alive again," she recalled in one of her lectures.

But the apparent ease with which the human mind shifts associations from people to objects and back can lead to trouble, Eberhardt's research has shown. White people who viewed fleeting images of black faces, for instance, were able to recognize the fuzzy outline of a gun more quickly than their peers who were exposed to white faces.

When Eberhardt reversed the experiment, the association between blacks and crime moved the other way. She subliminally exposed subjects to crime-related objects, followed by a longer-lasting screen showing a black face and a white face. Afterward, subjects were asked to quickly identify where a dot flashed on a blank screen. Their reactions were much quicker when the dot appeared on the side where the black face had been. The same held true when police officers took the test and saw crime-related words such as "capture" or "pursue" instead of images of weapons.

Eberhardt believes these free-flowing associations can infect the judicial system with bias. Her statistical studies have shown, for example, that having stereotypically black facial features correlates with tougher jury verdicts, longer prison terms, more death sentences and erroneous identifications by police.

Sometimes, her lessons come home. When her oldest son was in the first grade, he wondered whether blacks might have an invisible force field around them. After all, he told her, white people shied away when a black man came into the local Safeway.

The same son (she has three), now in high school, was pulled over recently in an affluent neighborhood for allegedly speeding on his bicycle. Eberhardt and her husband, Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks, have had to have "the talk" that African American parents routinely have with sons, about how interactions with police can quickly escalate to force, sometimes with deadly consequences...

Who Gets to Graduate?

In other words, a half-hour online intervention, done at almost no cost, had apparently cut the community-college math dropout rate by more than half.

Who Gets to Graduate?
By PAUL TOUGH
New York Times
MAY 15, 2014

When you look at the national statistics on college graduation rates, there are two big trends that stand out right away. The first is that there are a whole lot of students who make it to college — who show up on campus and enroll in classes — but never get their degrees. More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.

The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation...

In 1999, at the beginning of the fall semester, Laude combed through the records of every student in his freshman chemistry class and identified about 50 who possessed at least two of the “adversity indicators” common among students who failed the course in the past: low SATs, low family income, less-educated parents. He invited them all to apply to a new program, which he would later give the august-sounding name the Texas Interdisciplinary Plan, or TIP. Students in TIP were placed in their own, smaller section of Chemistry 301, taught by Laude. But rather than dumb down the curriculum for them, Laude insisted that they master exactly the same challenging material as the students in his larger section. In fact, he scheduled his two sections back to back. “I taught my 500-student chemistry class, and then I walked upstairs and I taught this 50-student chemistry class,” Laude explained. “Identical material, identical lectures, identical tests — but a 200-point difference in average SAT scores between the two sections.”

Laude was hopeful that the small classes would make a difference, but he recognized that small classes alone wouldn’t overcome that 200-point SAT gap. “We weren’t naïve enough to think they were just going to show up and start getting A’s, unless we overwhelmed them with the kind of support that would make it possible for them to be successful,” he said. So he supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered TIP students two hours each week of extra instruction; he assigned them advisers who kept in close contact with them and intervened if the students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work with the TIP students one on one, as peer mentors. And he did everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the TIP students a new sense of identity: They weren’t subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving scholars.

Even Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started giving them the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,” he said. “And when the course was over, this group of students who were 200 points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades as the students in the larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This cohort of students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned for their sophomore year at rates above average for the university as a whole, and three years later they had graduation rates that were also above the U.T. average.

Two years ago, Laude was promoted to his current position — senior vice provost for enrollment and graduation management. His official mission now is to improve U.T.’s four-year graduation rate, which is currently languishing at around 52 percent, to 70 percent — closer to the rates at U.T.’s state-university peers in Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill and Charlottesville, Va. — and to achieve this leap by 2017. The best way to do that, Laude decided, was to take the principles and practices that he introduced 15 years earlier with TIP and bring them to the whole Austin campus.

One complicating factor for administrators at the University of Texas — and, indeed, one reason the school makes for such an interesting case study — is that U.T. has a unique admissions policy, one that is the legacy of many years of legal and legislative battles over affirmative action. After U.T.’s use of race in admissions was ruled unconstitutional by the Fifth Circuit in 1996, the Texas Legislature came up with an alternative strategy to maintain a diverse campus: the Top 10 percent law, which stipulated that students who ranked in the top tenth of their graduating classes in any high school in Texas would be automatically admitted to the campus of their choice in the U.T. system. (As U.T. Austin has grown more popular over the last decade, the criterion for automatic admission has tightened; Texas high-school seniors now have to be in the top 7 percent of their class to earn admission. Automatic admits — Vanessa Brewer among them — make up about three-quarters of each freshman class.)

At high schools in the wealthier suburbs of Dallas, the top 7 percent of students look a lot like the students anywhere who go on to attend elite colleges. They are mostly well off and mostly white, and most of them rack up high SAT scores. What sets U.T. apart from other selective colleges is that the school also admits the top 7 percent of students from high schools in Brownsville and the Third Ward of Houston, who fit a very different demographic and have, on average, much lower SAT scores.

The good news about these kids, from U.T.’s point of view, is that they are very good students regardless of their test scores. Even if their high schools weren’t as well funded or as academically demanding as schools in other parts of the state, they managed to figure out how to learn, how to study and how to overcome adversity. Laude’s experience teaching Chemistry 301 convinced him that they could succeed and even excel at the University of Texas. But when he looked at the campuswide data, it was clear that these were the students who weren’t succeeding.

“There are always going to be both affluent kids and kids who have need who come into this college,” Laude said. “And it will always be the case that the kids who have need are going to have been denied a lot of the academic preparation and opportunities for identity formation that the affluent kids have been given. The question is, can we do something for those students in their first year in college that can accelerate them and get them up to the place where they can be competitive with the affluent, advantaged students?”...

Though Laude is a chemist by training, he spends much of his time thinking like a psychologist, pondering what kind of messages or environmental cues might affect the decisions that the students in his programs make. He’s the first to admit that he is an amateur psychologist at best. But he has found an ally and a kindred spirit in a psychological researcher at U.T. named David Yeager, a 32-year-old assistant professor who is emerging as one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of education. In his research, Yeager is trying to answer the question that Laude wrestles with every day: How, precisely, do you motivate students to take the steps they need to take in order to succeed?

Before he arrived at U.T. in the winter of 2012, Yeager worked as a graduate student in the psychology department at Stanford, during an era when that department had become a hotbed of new thinking on the psychology of education. Leading researchers like Carol Dweck, Claude Steele and Hazel Markus were using experimental methods to delve into the experience of students from early childhood all the way through college. To the extent that the Stanford researchers shared a unifying vision, it was the belief that students were often blocked from living up to their potential by the presence of certain fears and anxieties and doubts about their ability. These feelings were especially virulent at moments of educational transition — like the freshman year of high school or the freshman year of college. And they seemed to be particularly debilitating among members of groups that felt themselves to be under some special threat or scrutiny: women in engineering programs, first-generation college students, African-Americans in the Ivy League.

The negative thoughts took different forms in each individual, of course, but they mostly gathered around two ideas. One set of thoughts was about belonging. Students in transition often experienced profound doubts about whether they really belonged — or could ever belong — in their new institution. The other was connected to ability. Many students believed in what Carol Dweck had named an entity theory of intelligence — that intelligence was a fixed quality that was impossible to improve through practice or study. And so when they experienced cues that might suggest that they weren’t smart or academically able — a bad grade on a test, for instance — they would often interpret those as a sign that they could never succeed. Doubts about belonging and doubts about ability often fed on each other, and together they created a sense of helplessness. That helplessness dissuaded students from taking any steps to change things. Why study if I can’t get smarter? Why go out and meet new friends if no one will want to talk to me anyway? Before long, the nagging doubts became self-fulfilling prophecies.

When Yeager arrived at Stanford in 2006, many of the researchers there had begun to move beyond trying to understand this phenomenon to trying to counteract it. In a series of experiments, they found that certain targeted messages, delivered to students in the right way at the right time, seemed to overcome the doubts about belonging and ability that were undermining the students’ academic potential.

Yeager began working with a professor of social psychology named Greg Walton, who had identified principles that seemed to govern which messages, and which methods of delivering those messages, were most persuasive to students. For instance, messages worked better if they appealed to social norms; when college students are informed that most students don’t take part in binge drinking, they’re less likely to binge-drink themselves. Messages were also more effective if they were delivered in a way that allowed the recipients a sense of autonomy. If you march all the high-school juniors into the auditorium and force them to watch a play about tolerance and inclusion, they’re less likely to take the message to heart than if they feel as if they are independently seeking it out. And positive messages are more effectively absorbed when they are experienced through what Walton called “self-persuasion”: if students watch a video or read an essay with a particular message and then write their own essay or make their own video to persuade future students, they internalize the message more deeply.

In one experiment after another, Yeager and Walton’s methods produced remarkable results. At an elite Northeastern college, Walton, along with another Stanford researcher named Geoffrey Cohen, conducted an experiment in which first-year students read brief essays by upperclassmen recalling their own experiences as freshmen. The upperclassmen conveyed in their own words a simple message about belonging: “When I got here, I thought I was the only one who felt left out. But then I found out that everyone feels that way at first, and everyone gets over it. I got over it, too.” After reading the essays, the students in the experiment then wrote their own essays and made videos for future students, echoing the same message. The whole intervention took no more than an hour. It had no apparent effect on the white students who took part in the experiment. But it had a transformative effect on the college careers of the African-American students in the study: Compared with a control group, the experiment tripled the percentage of black students who earned G.P.A.s in the top quarter of their class, and it cut in half the black-white achievement gap in G.P.A. It even had an impact on the students’ health — the black students who received the belonging message had significantly fewer doctor visits three years after the intervention.

Next, Yeager did an experiment with 600 students just entering ninth grade at three high schools in Northern California. The intervention was 25 minutes long; students sat at a terminal in the school computer lab and read scientific articles and testimonials from older students with another simple message: People change. If someone is being mean to you or excluding you, the essays explained, it was most likely a temporary thing; it wasn’t because of any permanent trait in him or you. Yeager chose ninth grade because it is well known as a particularly bad time for the onset of depression — generally, depression rates double over the transition to high school. Indeed, among the control group in Yeager’s experiment, symptoms of depression rose by 39 percent during that school year. Among the group who had received the message that people change, though, there was no significant increase in depressive symptoms. The intervention didn’t cure anyone’s depression, in other words, but it did stop the appearance of depressive symptoms during a traditionally depressive period. And it did so in just 25 minutes of treatment.

After the depression study, Yeager, Walton and two other researchers did an experiment with community-college students who were enrolled in remedial or “developmental” math classes. Education advocates have identified remedial math in community college as a particularly devastating obstacle to the college hopes of many students, especially low-income students, who disproportionately attend community college. The statistics are daunting: About two-thirds of all community-college students are placed into one or more remedial math classes, and unless they pass those classes, they can’t graduate. More than two-thirds of them don’t pass; instead, they often drop out of college altogether.

Clearly, part of the developmental-math crisis has to do with the fact that many students aren’t receiving a good-enough math education in middle or high school and are graduating from high school underprepared for college math. But Yeager and Walton and a growing number of other researchers believe that another significant part of the problem is psychological. They echo David Laude’s intuition from the early days of TIP: When you send college students the message that they’re not smart enough to be in college — and it’s hard not to get that message when you’re placed into a remedial math class as soon as you arrive on campus — those students internalize that idea about themselves.

In the experiment, 288 community-college students enrolled in developmental math were randomly assigned, at the beginning of the semester, to read one of two articles. The control group read a generic article about the brain. The treatment group read an article that laid out the scientific evidence against the entity theory of intelligence. “When people learn and practice new ways of doing algebra or statistics,” the article explained, “it can grow their brains — even if they haven’t done well in math in the past.” After reading the article, the students wrote a mentoring letter to future students explaining its key points. The whole exercise took 30 minutes, and there was no follow-up of any kind. But at the end of the semester, 20 percent of the students in the control group had dropped out of developmental math, compared with just 9 percent of the treatment group. In other words, a half-hour online intervention, done at almost no cost, had apparently cut the community-college math dropout rate by more than half. ...

HIGH SUSPENSION AND EXPULSION RATES DRIVEN BY INEFFECTIVE SCHOOL POLICIES AND PRACTICES, NOT "BAD KIDS"

A student reads at a school in New Jersey. One in four black students were suspended in 2009-10, compared to one in fourteen white students. (AP Photo/Jose F. Moreno.)

Punishing Students For Who They Are, Not What They Do
Chloe Angyal
The Nation
April 17, 2013

Until last month, I had never seen a stop-and-frisk happen. Despite the amount of attention devoted to the controversial New York City policy in the last year, despite the protests, and despite having lived in the city for almost four years, I had never witnessed a stop-and-frisk. And then, a few weeks ago, I watched as two policemen stopped middle-aged black man on 98th Street, and frisked him. I wondered, not for the first time, what it would take for those same policemen to stop and frisk me. Controlling for all other factors—location, time of day, behavior—what would it take for the cops to stop and frisk a pretty white lady on the Upper West Side?

Somewhere in America, there’s a politically aware white high school student asking himself the same question, not about stop-and-frisk, but about school suspension. How much would I have to misbehave to run the same risk of suspension as my black classmates?

If you’re a white middle or high school student, and you don’t have a disability, your odds of being suspended from school are one in fourteen. If you’re a black middle or high school student without a disability, your odds are one in four. According to a new study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, a quarter of black students were suspended in the 2009-2010 school year. A quarter. For students with disabilities, the odds are one in five. And for black girls, the numbers are a stark demonstration of what happens when two forms of discrimination intersect: Black girls are more likely to be suspended than black boys or white girls. And, to the surprise of absolutely no one, when you add a third axis—disability—the figures get even worse. Black girls with disabilities are suspended at a rate sixteen percent higher than white girls with disabilities.

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Schools, under-funded and over-populated, are suspending students for minor infractions like cell phone use or loitering (or for violating dress codes, which are problematic for a host of reasons), and being suspended dramatically increases your chance of dropping out altogether. One Florida study found that a single suspension in ninth grade doubled dropout rates, from sixteen percent to thirty-two percent. And though suspension rates are unnecessarily high, they’re disproportionately high for those students who are already marginalized.

There are ways to bring down the number of suspensions across the board, as the study notes. Changes to codes of conduct, implementing positive behavioral supports, better training and supporting teachers, and implementing principles of restorative justice, are all ways to reduce the number of suspensions. But that reduction in raw numbers will not be enough unless schools also address the disproportionate punishment of minority students.

Punishment rates in schools mirror the rates in the “real world” – though what could be more real than entrenched discrimination in our schools? – and in fact, contribute to those real world figures. The Civil Rights Project report notes that the abuse and misuse of suspensions can turn them into “gateways to prison.” Even if that were not the case, even absent a school-to-prison pipeline, the situation would be grim enough. What this report reveals is a disregard for the wellbeing of marginalized populations that, were it directed at other groups, would never be allowed to stand. If a quarter of white middle school boys were being suspended every school year, and if pretty white ladies were being frisked on the streets of Manhattan, there’d be uproar.

What would it take for the police to stop and frisk a pretty white lady on the Upper West Side? What would it take for a school to suspend a young white man with no disability? These are important – if upsetting – thought experiments. But the real question is, what will it take for us to fix this system that punishes students and citizens for no other reason but their membership in marginalized groups?

HIGH SUSPENSION AND EXPULSION RATES DRIVEN BY INEFFECTIVE SCHOOL POLICIES AND PRACTICES, NOT "BAD KIDS"

Research Collaborative Identifies Promising Initiatives To Address

Discipline Gaps by Race, Gender, Disability and Sexual Orientation

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 13, 2014 - A group of 26 nationally recognized experts from the social science, education and legal fields - assembled three years ago with the backing of two large philanthropies - has compiled and analyzed a huge body of recent research that challenges virtually every notion behind the frequent use of disciplinary policies that remove students from the classroom.

The group, known as the Discipline Disparities Research-to-Practice Collaborative, found clear evidence that students of color, particularly African-Americans, and students with disabilities are suspended at hugely disproportionate rates compared to white students, perpetuating racial and educational inequality across the country. LGBT students also are over-represented in suspension.

The Collaborative further determined there is no evidence to support the premise that "bad kids" should be removed from the classroom in order to ensure that "good kids" can learn.

"Far from making our schools safer or improving student behavior, the steadily increasing use of suspension and expulsion puts students - especially students of color and other targeted groups - at an increased risk of academic disengagement, dropout and contact with juvenile justice," said Russell J. Skiba, the Collaborative's project director and a professor at Indiana University.

"And we are never going to close the achievement gap until we close this discipline gap," added Daniel J. Losen, a member of the Collaborative and the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA. "All schools see a wide range of adolescent misbehavior, but school responses vary dramatically. Some schools see an educational mission in teaching appropriate behavior and are successful at improving behavior without resorting to suspension and expulsion."

Citing data from the U.S. Department of Education, the Collaborative said more than 3 million students in grades K-12 were suspended during the 2009-10 academic year, reflecting a steady rise since the 1970's when the suspension rate was half that level. According to the Collaborative, the increase has occurred because school leaders either are so overwhelmed with money and testing demands that they gravitate toward what they perceive as "easy" discipline solutions, or else they really believe that their school environment will improve if they can just get rid of trouble-makers.

"Discipline has become a management strategy for schools pressured by financial constraints, high concentrations of struggling students, substantial numbers of transient teachers/long-term substitutes and severe accountability mandates," the Collaborative wrote. But there are promising alternatives that when embraced by school leaders and teachers, can effectively reduce both the need for discipline and its disparate effects, the group added.

Prevention programs that build "trusting, supportive relationships between students and educators" can be applied school-wide to reduce the likelihood of conflict. And when misbehavior does occur, it can be addressed through constructive and equitable "restorative justice" policies that reduce unnecessary discipline. These strategies focus on problem-solving instead of just handing out penalties.

"Student accountability is achieved when students take responsibility for their actions, recognize the impact of their actions on others and offer ways to repair the harm," the experts added.

The Discipline Disparities Collaborative was launched in 2011 through The Equity Project at Indiana University with funding from the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Open Society Foundations. The Collaborative has met frequently since then around the country to compile and review recent discipline research. It also is funding other researchers to study unexplored aspects of the school discipline problem.

In releasing its findings, the Collaborative published three briefing papers, each addressed to a different audience: policy recommendations for district, state and federal officials; effective discipline alternatives for school personnel, and a description for researchers of recent studies and urgent, unanswered questions that should be addressed. Among the findings:

There is no research support for the theory that schools must be able to remove the "bad" students so the "good" students can learn. "In fact, when schools serving similar populations were compared, those schools with relatively low suspension rates had higher, not lower, test scores."
Disparities in school suspension are worsening, meaning that some students are being pushed out of school more than others. For example, a study published this year found that three out of every four black middle school boys with disabilities in Chicago had received an out-of-school suspension.
Given the extreme differences in suspension rates across different groups, the researchers concluded that unintended teacher bias is a real possibility. "Several studies indicate ... that racial disparities are not sufficiently explained by the theory that black or other minority students are simply misbehaving more."
New longitudinal studies at the state and national levels indicate that suspension is associated with a heightened risk of dropping out of school. Researchers "found that even being suspended out-of-school once was associated with a two-fold increase in the risk of dropout." The increased risk of dropping out, in turn, increases the risk of juvenile delinquency.
There is a dramatic disconnect between educational and juvenile justice systems. Their practices are, at times, even contradictory. For example, in many communities students who have been expelled are by definition violating juvenile delinquency laws and subject to arrest.
Putting police in schools more often than not leads to the criminalization "of what might otherwise be considered adolescent misbehaviors." The best available evidence "suggests that police presence in schools, particularly armed police, should be a very last resort in school discipline strategies."

In addition to the main briefing papers, the Collaborative today published a set of three supporting papers providing research documentation addressing certain key issues:

A focused review of the evidence does not support the commonly held belief that racial disparities in school discipline are due to more serious or severe behavior on the part of black students.
A review is provided of efforts to explore "implicit bias," the subtle and often unconscious beliefs and stereotypes concerning race and difference that may contribute to disparities in school discipline.
A review is provided of common myths regarding the over-representation of students of color in school discipline and the facts that call these common beliefs into question.

Contact: Norman Black
The Hatcher Group
301-656-0348

Giving Up on 4-Year-Olds

Giving Up on 4-Year-Olds
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
New York Times
MARCH 26, 2014

A new report released by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, examining the disciplinary practices of the country’s 97,000 public schools, shows that excessively punitive policies are being used at every level of the public school system — even against 4-year-olds in preschool. This should shame the nation and force it to re-evaluate the destructive measures that schools are using against their most vulnerable children.

Black students, for example, are suspended at three times the rate of white students. Minority children with disabilities fare worst of all; the race effect is amplified when disability comes into the picture. More than one in four minority boys with a disability — and nearly one in five minority girls — receive an out-of-school suspension. Students with disabilities make up 12 percent of the student population, but 25 percent of those are either arrested or have their disciplinary cases referred to the police.

This is distressing enough when it happens to adolescents. But the new data show that disparate treatment of minority children begins early — in preschool. For example, black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment but nearly half of all children who receive more than one out-of-school suspension.

The fact that minority children at age 4 are already being disproportionately suspended or expelled is an outrage. The pattern of exclusion suggests that schools are giving up on these children when they are barely out of diapers. It runs counter to the very mission of early education, which is to promote school readiness. It harms children emotionally at an age when they are incapable of absorbing lessons from this form of punishment. And it places those children at greater risk of falling behind, dropping out or becoming permanently involved with the juvenile justice system. Federal civil rights officials do not explain why minority preschool students are being disproportionately singled out for suspension. Regardless of the causes, there are ways to combat this crisis. Walter Gilliam of Yale University, who has studied the expulsion problem extensively, has suggested several ways to minimize it. Among other things, Mr. Gilliam has called for: limiting enrollment to 10 students per preschool teacher (preferably less) so that teachers have adequate time with the students; making sure that those teachers work reasonable hours; and giving them access to children’s mental health consultants who can assist them with the occasional difficult case. Young children with challenging behaviors should not be thrown out but should be assessed to see if a more therapeutic environment might better suit their needs. The goal should be to do everything possible to bring them into the mainstream.

The Obama administration has taken some steps to end practices that disproportionately and unjustifiably subject minority students to suspension, expulsion or even arrest for behavior that should be dealt with by the principal. It has ramped up civil rights investigations and forced some districts to modify their policies.

Earlier this year, it issued extensive guidance to school districts on how to recognize and avoid discriminatory practices, and it called for more training for teachers in classroom management. School districts need to re-examine how they discipline students, especially the youngest and most fragile in their care.

Race, ethnicity could be considered in college recruitment, admissions; Voters may get to alter Prop. 209

The San Diego Union-Tribune asks: Should college applicants or students receive preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity or gender?

So, are we assuming that it's NOT preferential treatment to rely so heavily on test scores? Medical students, for example, should be screened for attributes such as a sense of obligation and concern for others. Lawyers should be screened to make sure they have a certain degree of honesty. Does the public benefit from providing expensive educations to people who may do well on certain tests, but are limited in their innate desire to contribute to the healthy functioning of our society? And are we really serving our society by creating a system that creates domination by Europeans and Asians in certain fields? Or are we sowing the seeds for future conflict?

Certainly, until we have a system that accurately matches prospective students with appropriate careers, race and ethnicity should be used as a check to make sure we haven't got things out of balance.

IQ does not account for the vast differences in membership in certain occupations between different ethnicities. In fact, we clearly have smarter people OF ALL RACES AND ETHNICIGTES being shunted aside to make way for those who have characteristics other than high intelligence, including culture and family support.

Voters may get to alter Prop. 209
Race, ethnicity could be considered in college recruitment, admissions
By Karen Kucher
SDUT
Feb. 18, 2014

The Legislature is poised to give Californians a chance to vote on a highly emotional and politically charged issue that has divided people across the country for decades — affirmative action in higher education.

A proposed state constitutional amendment, dubbed SCA 5, would repeal portions of Proposition 209 that have banned the consideration of race, ethnicity and gender in public colleges’ recruitment, admissions and retention programs since 1998.

The Senate approved the measure last month, and the Assembly — which also has a Democratic supermajority — is set to consider the legislation soon. Passage in Sacramento would mean that voters could weigh in late this year or in 2015.

California became the first state to ban the use of race and ethnicity in the admissions process for public colleges, as well as in state hiring and contracting, when voters approved Proposition 209. Other states followed with similar policies.

State and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have issued numerous rulings on this issue over the years. They have sometimes been at odds, with their legal arguments reflecting the main points of public debate: Critics of affirmative action said colleges should assess applicants on academic ability because that’s the fairest and most objective standard, while supporters said the higher-education system has been biased against certain minority groups and needs to better value students who have overcome special hurdles in life to pursue a college degree.

The latest constitutional-amendment proposal was introduced by state Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina. He has written similar bills in the past, including one vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010 and another vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2011. This time, Hernandez wants voters to decide the matter. His co-authors include Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego.

Hernandez said Proposition 209 has resulted in less diversity as fewer underrepresented minority students are admitted and enrolled in the California State University and University of California systems. The senator said he personally benefited from recruitment and scholarship assistance that targeted minority students when he attended an optometry school in Indiana.

“I am not proposing quota systems or preferential treatment,” he said. “SCA 5 simply allows our public colleges to identify achievement gaps, such as a lack of women in the (science, technology, engineering and math) fields or even a lack of men, especially men of color, in teacher-credentialing programs. … Any program a college adopts to consider these factors would have to be narrowly tailored, consistent with all the Supreme Court decisions that already limit the use of race- or gender-conscious programs.”

Backers of Proposition 209 said the law has actually increased representation of underrepresented minority groups. They also said taking racial preferences out of the admissions process has helped minorities succeed more in college — and graduate in larger numbers — because their academic credentials are better matched with the campuses they attend.

“It is not good to send a student where his or her academic qualifications are going to be lower than the average students’,” said Gail Heriot, a University of San Diego law professor who was co-chair of the Proposition 209 campaign in 1996. “To some people, it would seem like they are doing a favor to the student who is getting the preferences, but it ends up being the opposite.”

RELATED COMMENTS

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

So, are we assuming that it's NOT preferential treatment to rely so heavily on test scores? Medical students, for example, should be screened for attributes such as a sense of obligation and concern for others. Lawyers should be screened to make sure they have a certain degree of honesty. Does the public benefit from providing expensive educations to people who make do well on certain tests, but are limited in their innate desire to contribute to the healthy functioning of our society? And are we really serving our society by creating a system that creates domination by Europeans and Asians in certain fields? Or are we sowing the seeds for future conflict.

Bob Giramma · Follow · Top Commenter · UCLA

It's fair to discriminate on the basis of merit, but (almost) nothing else. How does one test for a sense of obligation or honesty?

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

[To] Bob Giramma, Good question. Perhaps a personality test? Can we at least try to keep sociopaths out of medicine and law?

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

[To] Bob Giramma: Remember the discussion about the psychiatrist on the Sopranos series who treated James Gandolfini? Experts were saying that she was wrong to teach him how to understand and manipulate people more effectively. Certainly we shouldn't be training sociopaths to be psychiatrists!

G Ma Donovan · Bridgeport engineering Institute

Merit based societal filtering is de-basing. This limits [ this subjective sifting of meritocracy in society] rewards to persons who respond with the 'answers' for which the testers are looking. Sometimes these answers are patently wrong or myths. This response can reward dishonesty. For example, I use spellcheck so much that I am forgetting most of the basic grammar rules of spelling and its exceptions. I would now fail many intelligence tests, well to tell you the truth, i always failed them...to those who say, we must have standards. Standards that stick in the 1800 or 1900 milieu ...why do you suppose Wikipedia is so helpful? The standards are just so low as to be meaningless. Laughable when one travels.

Michael Dew · Top Commenter · University of Utah

To follow my comment, wouldn't you WANT those to be educated? It's better to educate than allow to fester.

Michael Dew · Top Commenter · University of Utah

From my perspective it's a sad reality that we have such huge discrepancies but efforts to address it have definitely helped. I honestly don't feel sacrificing a small percentage of slots to address a societal problem is a bad thing. The socioeconomic benefit of minorities and women going to school to the neighborhood they come from is strong. Many kids do want and opportunity but don't feel it's there for them, for whatever reason. We can blame the students parents but lets think about why they're there in the first place. It's not always laziness, maybe higher ed wasn't an option for Mom or Dad, maybe there was an unexpected pregnancy. Once the student is admitted they still have to pass the tests, do the homework, and make it as any other student using resources available. It is still up to the candidate to finish college, getting in is the first step. A lazy student will quickly find themselves outside the classroom making room for another stronger candidate.

Karen Haney Logan · Top Commenter

Yes, that is my point. If acceptance is based on anything other than GPA or placement exam scores, then the students being accepted under those other terms are being set up to fail. Nobody is being served by using anything other than GPA or placement exam scores to determine acceptance to college.

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

Karen Haney Logan: Did you know that the average high school drop-out has a higher IQ than the average high school graduate? I'll bet the same is true for college. (Bill Gates is an example.) So perhaps GPAs and test scores aren't measuring ability so much as educational support received by a student over his or her lifetime.

Karen Haney Logan · Top Commenter

No Maura Larkins....I did not know that. How to apply ones IQ to the expected knowledge base to enter college would be tricky, but possible perhaps. My point(and I am a current student) is there are many different levels of of intelligence, but if a person cannot even meet the minimum requirement of whatever knowledge base the school requires, why should that person be allowed to enter because of race, ethnicity or gender? As someone else below pointed out, they will just wash out when they are unable to keep up with the work-this seems cruel to me. Just my opinion.

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLAV To Karen Haney : Do you see that we have a problem? Our society is NOT developing the intellects of those with the most ability. Instead, we provide the knowledge necessary for success to those with family advantages.

Gary Swenson · Top Commenter

White, black, brown, yellow, red, purple, green....bring the GRADES and you're in! Nobody deserves to cut in line for ANY other reason.

Shanna McFaddin · Follow · Deckhand at Lilley Pad Charters

I agree. Equal and fair treatment for all. My only caveat is that Veterans should get priority registration, due to the time limits on GI Bill.

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

Shanna McFaddin: Students don't get equal treatment BEFORE taking the SAT, and BEFORE taking high school classes. Until we fix that, we should find a way to level the playing field.

Michael Dew · Top Commenter · University of Utah

I think it's a good thing where you have educational discrepancies. Often those kids become role models for future generations, sustainability is of issue. I don't see an issue with planting some seeds in areas in desperate need of attention. It's not like their talking 30% of all admissions. California has been doing this and I can say it has benefitted low income minorities, also in ways that can't be quantified. There was and still is a problem with few minorities pursuing or even being accepted to a higher ed program, often we have to make decisions to correct societal woes; these actions do improve our society, even if one can't see it directly.

Donna Rogers · Top Commenter · Webster University

Why didn't they include legacies in the question? College students should not receive preferential treatment based on WEALTH or connections either.

Ted James · Follow · Top Commenter

Public universities, no. Private schools, I guess it's there call.

[Maura Larkins: Private universities often receive huge public grants for research. Obviously, the government should not be giving public money to institutions that undermine the public.]

Mike Seneca · Top Commenter

I voted NO... because your skin color places you neither behind nor ahead of my skin color. It's too bad progressives feel race and gender reflect our level of neediness.

Lee Phillippi · Top Commenter

It was never based on "level of neediness". It wasn't long ago that discrimination was legal and discrimination didn't end when the laws were over turned.

James Palen · Follow · Top Commenter · Reporter for San Diego Daily Transcript at The Daily Transcript / San Diego Source

Lee Phillippi Discrimination will never end, and it will always be multi-directional (obviously not by all, but by a portion of the population). There is no such thing as parallel instances of racism and reverse racism (a ludicrous term, as if one race holds the patent on racism); there is only racism, from every direction to every direction. That's why trying to correct racism through policy like preferential admission only winds up bringing those enforcing that policy closer to racism themselves, by denying something to those who aren't allowed to check that box on the application. it becomes an endless spiral which despite its intentions, continues racism.

Bob Harris · Top Commenter · Palm Springs, California

Socioeconomic status: includes everybody who has been exposed to the realities of modern racism and bigotry, INCLUDING women of all races, poor white trash along with the rest of the "socially repressed."

Ted James · Follow · Top Commenter

Ms. Larkins, I don't understand what you are getting at. You want to test college applicants on their levels of empathy and honesty? To what end? Do you believe that when a 19 year old kid is applying for school he or she is going to be as caring or honest as he or she will be at 40? Honestly, if my doctor was a huge jerk but was great at healing me, I could live with that. I don't need him to empathize with me or to show me sympathy, I need him to diagnose my condition and treat me. Maybe empathy is part of that but having a scientific mind is too. I don't need my lawyer to be "honest" (I'm not quite sure what you mean by that), I do need him to be an expert in the law and then advise me on my best course of action. The California Bar Association has provisions for disbarring its members if they are found to have acted unprofessionally or unethically. Also, not everyone who goes to law school becomes a lawyer. Why would you need to be an "honest" person to go to law school? It's a feel good concept but I don't see much value in it.

Bob Giramma · Top Commenter · UCLA

Maura Larkins, I've never seen the Sopranos. I don't watch much TV. But your kind of testing sounds like it would get the government involved in yet another area for them to ruin. My kind of testing it through the free market, where each person chooses what's best for him or her. Government is just a bunch of busybody idiots.

February 20 at 8:01pm

Zhiyuan Zhu · Seattle, Washington

How does that have something to do with skin color this poll is about? Are you suggesting something else?

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

Zhiyuan Zhu I'm suggesting that the unequal K-12 educations that American children receive are very consistent with skin color. Black and brown children overwhelmingly miss out on the opportunities provided by a good basic education.

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

Ted James If lawyers always advised their clients to obey the law, our justice system wouldn't be having an extreme budget crisis. Instead, lawyers very often use unethical or illegal tactics to help their deep-pocket clients get away with whatever they want. That's how most lawyers accrue all those billable hours. The lawyers control the Bar Association, which protects the system. They only go after a few token small-time crooks. The legal profession in general abuses the court system for financial gain. Society would be better off if it boosted a few ethical applicants over those who are just trying to get rich. Why should society roll over and play dead while greedy, unethical people shove others aside in their quest to get rich? That is NOT in society's best interest.

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

Bob Giramma Each person chooses what is best for him? That is NOT the system that we have. People with undeserved advantages choose what is best for themselves, and leave the crumbs for the rest. You don't need to watch the Sopranos to think about whether or not we should be training sociopaths in how to manipulate others more effectively.

COMMENTS from Voters may get to alter Prop. 209:

Jeremy Merrill · Top Commenter · San Diego, California

Bob Giramma - You can dance around it all you like, but the quote you posted is from a member of the "dominant majority" and you yourself are a member of the "dominant majority" in this nation. That same "dominant majority" has lately taken on the persona of the oppressed every time an attempt is made at leveling the playing field. It's tiresome and intellectually dishonest to pretend that you don't have an advantage as a White American male.

Rex Smith · Top Commenter · College of William and Mary

Here's an idea. How about we recruit on merit and the ability to learn?

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

Sadly, it's hard to measure merit and ability to learn since grades and test scores measure socioeconomic level. In the most miserable places, IQ is completely overshadowed by other factors when it comes to academic success. Experts say there is almost NO correlation between academic success and intelligence in racial ghettos.

Basketball players suspended from game for hand signals popularized by Boehner, Dekker: why are school administrators so dumb?

See John Boehner's hand signal? It means his team scored a three-pointer.


See these hand signals? It means these kids are suspended from their high school game.

Some school administrators do more harm than good. Is their bad behavior a result of just not being very smart? Well, sure, at times, but many of them also have an urge to punish that they simply can't control. I think that frequently the wrong people are suspended.

Wisconsin School District Suspends Black Teenagers for Celebrating While Black
by Grizzard
Daily Kos member
Jan 17, 2014

Certain activities in the United States are lethal or criminal based solely on the racial composition of the person doing them. Driving while black, for instance, prompts suspicion across the country. Walking while black has earned teenagers a death sentence in certain Florida neighborhoods, and seeking out police help while black has proved a dangerous task for former football players in North Carolina.

Now we have a particularly toxic confluence of bad American ideas in a bigger than small Wisconsin community. The over-policing of American high schools often produces results where standard stupidity lands students suspension or worse. And sometimes, when the pre-disposition in a community is toward scrutinizing the scary, inherently suspicious black youths which make up a small percentage of the community's minority base, students have the lives sidetracked for doing basically nothing at all.

That's what's happened in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, where two students from Sheboygan Falls High Schools were suspended after a newspaper article showed them "flashing" what some police chief "confirmed" as "gang signs."

If you knew absolutely nothing about basketball, then you'd still be wrong for thinking that any of these three smiling, innocuous young men should be suspended from school for what took place in that picture. After all, the picture was only discovered when the local newspaper ran a positive public interest piece on the players in que

But I'm a Wisconsin basketball fan, and because of that, I have a slightly different take on this situation. The young man on the left, Jordan Jackson, explained that he was simply throwing up three fingers, a common basketball expression for players who just made a three-point basket. The young man in the middle appears to simply be pointing at the camera, a pose that I made in probably 100 pictures when I was in high school.

There's more to this, though. The Wisconsin Badgers are currently ranked third in the country, and they've lost one basketball game this year. Last season, they made the NCAA basketball tournament. Over the last decade, Wisconsin has been one of the best, most consistently good programs in the country. This is important because, like they did Tuesday night and will do against Saturday night, the Badgers often play on ESPN and other national networks. And if you spent even a few minutes watching Wisconsin basketball this year or last, then you'll quickly recognize the "gang sign" that got Jackson in hot water.

Below, you will see Sam Dekker, the disputed best player for Wisconsin and a graduate of Sheboygan Lutheran High School. Two years ago, he led his high school to the Wisconsin 5A state championship and was unarguably the best high school player in the state. A five-star recruit, he signed with the Badgers and is expected to someday forge a career in the NBA. One could easily imagine young men like Jackson emulating Dekker, and for good reason.


Next, you'll see the entire Wisconsin bench. When Wisconsin buries a three-point shot - which is often, as the Badgers shoot it from outside more often and more effectively than almost anyone - the Badger bench throws up "confirmed" gang signs.

As you can see in the picture, one of the players is even using three fingers to form a pair of glasses. Those who watch Badger basketball can attest that that particular move will soon turn into three fingers raised high, just as the other players are doing.


While the easy first response is to laugh at police chiefs and school administrators who are so far removed from their own local reality and so pre-disposed against their own students that they don't even recognize basketball players doing something they've seen on television from the most successful basketball team in the state, the more pressing question is why we immediately assume that three otherwise law-abiding and unassuming black children are suspicious while players for the state's flagship basketball team have been throwing up the same signs with impunity for more than a year without prompting the suspicion of, well, anyone.

It's a sad indictment of the reality faced by young black kids in America and especially in American schools. The default setting, it seems, is criminality, and these kids are burdened by an act first, ask questions later mentality that makes them prove that they aren't members of dangerous gangs. It must have been comforting to the many who complained to the school district about the picture to learn that the three teenagers in question were not a part of some Blood sleeper cell operating quietly in 95-percent white Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Those people should take a step back and ask themselves why, when young black kids from their community make these hand motions, they assume the worst, while when Sam Dekker does it, they likely celebrate with a fist pump or excited yell. Young boys of all races should be able to emulate their sports heroes. In fact, Sam Dekker - a guy with a lot of game and seemingly clean record - wouldn't be a bad guy for a kid from Sheboygan to look up to. The reality in America, however, is that young men like Jordan Jackson must look twice before doing most anything, including celebrating a made three-pointer.

Maura Larkins comment: Here's what happened when poor people were given a stipend. The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Can we save middle class kids by saving poor kids?

In this tragic story, neither the school nor an angry student felt an obligation to respect the rights of others

This school didn't single-handedly turn a kid toward violence. But it sure didn't help that the school ignored basic fairness when it punished a boy severely while ignoring the fact that another student had earlier victimized him in exactly the same way.

An innocent boy, Christopher Lane, is now dead.

The school played politics. My guess is that Christopher Lane isn't the last victim of a system (and I'm not just talking about the school) that ignores fairness. It will surely take many years before the final victim in this story is taken down. It turns out, you can't protect the golden boys and girls when you allow the kids on the wrong side of town to grow up impoverished, deprived of opportunities, neglected and/or abused.

Darkness in August
Vanity Fair
By Buzz Bissinger
February 2014

...If there was anything keeping [James] Edwards in high school in the fall of 2012, his freshman year, it was wrestling. This was the only sustained time he did his homework and kept his grades up so he could stay eligible. He wrestled at 160 pounds on the varsity as a freshman, and had the twin gifts of quickness and strength.

But one day a classmate took a picture of him on the toilet and posted it for a while on Facebook before deleting it. Edwards sought revenge. He made a video of the classmate at a urinal and posted it on Facebook, too—a typical tit-for-tat prank.

The kid didn’t care, but his father did. He complained to school officials, and Edwards got suspended for cyberbullying. He returned after roughly a month but then was kicked out for the rest of the school year for doing something similar.

Edwards was never the same after that initial suspension. It curtailed his wrestling season, the only positive outlet he really had. He felt that a double standard was being applied. As he told an adult friend, “This white kid. He did the same thing I did. And he did it first. And I get kicked out of school.”...


Sarah Harper, the girlfriend of Christopher Lane, the Australian baseball player who was shot and killed while out for a jog in an Oklahoma neighborhood

'My heart just broke right there': Girlfriend remembers Okla. ballplayer killed in random shooting
By Randy McIlwain and Becky Bratu
NBC News
Aug. 21, 2013

The girlfriend of the Australian baseball player who was senselessly shot dead while jogging in Duncan, Okla., said he was a kind and charismatic 22-year-old who could light up a room and who loved to travel.

"He had done more things in his life than I ever thought I could even imagine doing. He's traveled so many places, he's seen so many things," Sarah Harper told NBC News. "He's already so worldly at 22 years old but yet he still had dreams to go and see everything and be everywhere and know everything."

The ballplayer, Christopher Lane, was a native of Australia and a catcher for an Oklahoma college baseball team. He was gunned down Friday in an apparently random shooting.

Harper, an American who attends Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond, said she remembered everything about the moment when police broke the news of his death to her...

...A woman who called 911 after the shooting told the dispatcher that Lane fell into a ditch, had blood on his back, turned blue and then stopped breathing.

The slaying has dominated news reports in Lane's home country, leading former Australian deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer to call on Australian tourists to boycott the United States.

“It is another example of murder mayhem on Main Street,” Fischer told CNN on Tuesday night...


A POLITICIAN RESPONDS TO THE TRAGEDY


Steve Fair

Steve Fair on murder of Christopher Lane in Duncan
MuskogeePolitico.com
August 23, 2013

I am sure you have heard of the recent shooting (Friday) by some teenagers in my hometown - Duncan, OK - of a young Australian baseball player. This was reported as a 'random act of violence' and that there was no connection/reason/motive for the shooting other than the thugs 'were bored.' Already some folks from Australia and U.S. liberals are condemning our state and nation for allowing citizens to have guns to protect themselves. I want to point out three things:

First, this shooting is not representative our our community, county or state. The real problem wasn't the gun the young man used - it was the heart of the shooter. Sin and wickedness are in the heart before they are in the hand. Please pray that God will regenerate dead hearts in young people not only in Duncan, but across our nation. I fear we have danced around the real issue in America: the inherent wicked, depraved nature of man. The hope of America is the regenerating gospel of Jesus Christ...period.

Second, my wife taught two of the young men charged with this heinous crime. She says both were discipline problems in elementary school. She wasn't surprised to learn both were involved in this shooting. She said the parents were uninvolved in their kid's life. This points out another problem in America.

We have children raising themselves and parents justifying their kids' every action.

[Maura Larkins' comment: this last bit about parents justifying their kids' every action would seem to apply to the parent who demanded that James Edwards be suspended, while his own son was not suspended for initiating cyberbullying.]

When you teach rebellion, you reap rebellion. The fruits of that rebellion are anarchy (no government) and antinomia (no law).

Third, we ask for your prayers. God is sovereign and He is in control. I don't understand why He allowed this tragedy in our area, but I do know it has a purpose. I am thankful for our District Attorney Jason Hicks and our Sheriff Wayne McKinney. Both are godly men, both Republicans, who are unafraid to stand on principle. Pray for them as they work through this case...

Steve Fair
National Committeeman - Oklahoma

But perhaps Mr. Fair is not being totally honest when he claims that "this shooting is not representative our our community, county or state."

The Vanity Fair article notes:

...The people of Duncan could act with beautiful hearts, as they did last May, sending multiple volunteer crews when the Oklahoma town of Moore, 75 miles to the north, was decimated by a tornado. But there was an undertow in the community and surrounding county, a simmering violence that did not explode very frequently but was horrific when it did. More often than not, it involved the young.

In the early-morning hours of June 10 in Duncan, 16-year-old Michael Ray, disconsolate that his 14-year-old girlfriend, Alyssa Wiles, had dumped him, broke through the back door of her home and stabbed her to death with the knife he was carrying, according to the police, who said he also stationed a 14-year-old friend outside to alert him if her parents or anyone else came to the house. (Ray has pleaded not guilty.)

Five months before that, in January of 2013, a home invasion had taken place in nearby Comanche. According to police, two men shot Mark Roebuck twice, bound his wife, robbed the safe, and then shot Roebuck again on the way out. Roebuck survived; two suspects were later arrested and are awaiting trial.

In June 2012, in neighboring Velma, a 16-year-old girl, Braylee Henry, had gone into the Tee Pee Totem convenience store to get a soda. She encountered Miles Bench, a 21-year-old man who worked there. Bench, apparently infatuated with Henry, allegedly beat her to death with a blunt instrument, dumped her body, and then was arrested driving her car. (Bench has pleaded not guilty.)

People in Duncan and surrounding towns were shocked by the brutality of such crimes. They responded with admirable largesse for the families of the victims. But the crimes were passed off as aberrational blips. On the morning of August 16, nobody thought violent crime was trending up...

See also:

Severe and unequal school discipline preceded the killing of innocent bystander Christopher Lane

Why the Wealthy Favor Harsh Punishment — for Criminals and Errant Schoolchildren (discusses "class essentialism")

Basketball players suspended from game for hand signals popularized by Boehner, Dekker: why are school administrators so dumb?

Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior

Maura Larkins comment: I don't want innocent children like Christopher Lane to die because other innocent children are "raising themselves." Wouldn't it be better for society to help kids who have a parent in prison or on drugs, to prevent those children from becoming violent, than to merely "stand on principle" after horrible crimes are committed? Mr. Fair points out that this crime could have been prevented. But if waiting until a crime has been committed and then meting out punishment were a successful tactic, we'd have the most crime-free nation in the world.

Clearly, suspending students and imprisoning their parents hasn't solved our problems. Is it perhaps time to try something new? Perhaps Mr. Fair could do something more concrete than merely exhort his fellow friends to "pray that God will regenerate dead hearts in young people."

Amazing! Here's what happened when poor people were given a stipend. The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Can we save middle class kids by saving poor kids?


James Edwards

Vanity Fair notes that James Edwards wrote this private message to a woman who was a surrogate mother:

I’m fighting a mental battle of success and failing. And I’m running out of options. I have little help! … And I’m at the point where I have no choice but go out and hustle. I’m going to look for a job 2marroo But that won’t do much cus I’m 15.

Jackson wrote back, warning him that he was flirting with prison, that the “hustling” life was “no place for you!”

Edwards’s reply:

Yes mam correct. And I am wrong for it I know.… And I gotta get in where I fit in. Take me in if you don’t want me like this. You feed me. You help me get shoes. Oblivious I’m looking for help. #this is the part where everyone says the can’t. And say love u bye.… Next year ill still be a crip and years after that until grave! Wat choice do I got.