Tucson schools create race-based system of disciplineIt has been a busy summer for our friends running the Tucson Unified School District.
As always, the annual Institute for Transformative Education summer seminar, hosted by TUSD's amply funded Mexican/American raza-studies program, was fun. So much racial bitterness to obsess over.
Tim Wise, the ultra-angry Tulane University poli-sci grad who has made a great living finding racism under every doormat, was the featured speaker. Everyone was wowed.
Tim Wise is America's foremost Uncle Tim.
In a year in which hundreds of district teachers received pink slips, meanwhile, TUSD spent thousands on recruiting teachers from out of state. And it hired a coordinator at $80,000 per annum to lead the effort.
The recruiting was prompted by what is fast becoming the consuming passion of the TUSD governing board and its allies - to establish a corps of teachers that precisely mirrors the racial make-up of its heavily minority student population.
... This summer, the TUSD board adopted a "Post-Unitary Status Plan" that it expects will help the district escape a decades-old federal desegregation order. The plan includes increasing the number of minority teachers - per the summer hiring spree, which netted 14 special-education teachers and one math-science teacher.It also includes a vast expansion of the district's controversial Mexican-American studies program. Despite the budget-enforced closing of school libraries, the shuttering of arts and music programs and the layoff of teachers and counselors in other disciplines, the Post-Unitary Status Plan calls for a vigorous expansion of the program run by TUSD's happy band of unrepentant political leftists.
The board's plan also calls for changes intended (however counterproductive those plans may be) to improving the lot of minority students.
It wants to see more minority students enrolled in advanced-placement programs, for example - a laudable goal, certainly. But consider one significant part of the plan for "improving" the academic status of TUSD's Black and Hispanic students:
The board is calling for a two-tiered form of student discipline. One for Black and Hispanic students; one for everyone else.
With the goal of creating a "restorative school culture and climate" that conveys a "sense of belonging to all students," the board is insisting that its schools reduce its suspensions and/or expulsions of minority students to the point that the data reflect "no ethnic/racial disparities."
From the section of the 52-page plan titled "Restorative School Culture and Climate," subhead, "Discipline": "School data that show disparities in suspension/expulsion rates will be examined in detail for root causes. Special attention will be dedicated to data regarding African-American and Hispanic students."
... Offenses by students will be judged, and penalties meted out, depending on the student's hue. ... Some behavior will be met with strict penalties; some will not. It all depends on the color of the student's skin.
It is an invitation to chaos.
The funny thing is that after a number of years of disparate impact-based discipline, there won't be anybody except blacks and Hispanics left in the Tucson Unified School District.
Don't we need to de-unify school districts? Look how the San Gabriel Valley east of LA has prospered in recent decades because it has its own small school districts, while the more conveniently located San Fernando Valley has floundered under the control of the LAUSD.
One noteworthy feature of the Los Angeles Unified School District is that you can look up online every single school's suspension and expulsion statistics by race. For example, here is Canoga Park HS in the west San Fernando Valley. I wonder if this feature was dreamed up a discrimination lawyer and imposed as part of the settlement of a discrimination suit to make it easier to troll for more lawsuits? (The extremely deep pockets of LA's huge public institutions such as the LAUSD and the LAPD, combined with LA's many legally favored minorities and LA's swarms of LA Law-style Arnie Beckerish sleazy attorneys, such as the late Johnny Cochran, has made suing for discrimination a favorite retirement plan out here.)
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
I used to substitute teach quite a bit in city schools. I tried to keep telling myself, "Today I will see that kids from different races/ethnic backgrounds, on average, behave the same. White kids don't necessarily behave better than minorities." Reality always bit me on the tush, however...
ReplyDeleteI used to agree with Steve when he poked fun at Tim Wise, until i read this article:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/monstersandvampires.html
The guy is sincere, not to mention a great writer.
This is just making de jure what I'm sure is already de facto in many school systems. My mother was a high school teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan from the 60's into the 90's, and one of her complaints was that the black students could get away with a lot more than the white students, because if you treated them the same too many black students would be suspended or expelled, and the black parents and their allies in the administration (the student councilors in particular), would cry racism, and all sorts of hell would break loose (Ann Arbor being a liberal university town and all). I went through the same school system myself, and it certainly seemed to be true that black students were pretty much immune to discipline for all but the most serious offenses.
ReplyDeleteMy mother, like all the teachers, did her best to teach everyone who came into her classroom, but she had an interesting observation. She said that her best students tended to fall into two categories: those who did well because they worked their asses off, and those who were so smart that they didn't have to work hard, but could just cruise right through (something that wasn't necessarily going to serve them well in later life!). I'm sure everyone here can see this coming from a mile away, but while good students who were white or Asian could fall into either category, the good black students were always very hard workers.
Maybe its time for some white parents in Tucson to file a Ricci-style disparate treatment lawsuit end stop this nonsense right now.
ReplyDeleteThe board is calling for a two-tiered form of student discipline. One for Black and Hispanic students; one for everyone else.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't entirely accurate to say this is a new plan. The same policy has been in effect for every major school system in the US for quite some time now. The difference is in this case the board is stating outright what has been the de facto plan, because the "unwritten" rule wasn't effective enough in equalizing outcomes.
One more thought. It strikes me how the civil rights movement has finally achieved the antithesis of its founding objectives.
ReplyDeleteThe conflict with Affirmative Action and Dr King's vision of judging based on content of character instead of color of skin is often pointed out. But that parallel is weak compared to this decision to literally have different standards of character by race.
Then there is the recent case where a white was refused a seat on a bus by blacks. It is like Rosa Parks in an alternate universe.
I almost forgot government sanction of black thugs with clubs guarding polling places to intimidate whites from voting.
All of the powerful images of injustice from the civil rights movement now are being recreated in reverse. All that seems missing is footage of blacks using fire hoses to stop peaceful white protest.
> literally have different standards of character by race <
ReplyDeleteThis seems to have been the norm during most of human history that we know of, until about 60 years ago.
They were all wrong, those stereotyping bastards!
"This seems to have been the norm during most of human history that we know of, until about 60 years ago.
ReplyDeleteThey were all wrong, those stereotyping bastards!"
Good point. The conservative cause would be helped a lot if smart folks of today spent more time reading the classics. They don't even have to be exclusively Western classics. During the 5000 years since the invention of writing no culture has ever come up with anything resembling PC until the 20th century. From the modern point of view Aristotle, Plato, Confucius, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe, etc, etc. were all raging racists, sexists and other kinds of haters.
Every single culture that left any records - the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Mayans, the Persians - can be shown to have been "racist", "sexist", etc. if judged by modern standards. Writing was invented by humanity at least 3 separate times, civilizations started from scratch on separate, inaccessible by the rest of humanity continents, and they all ended up sharing the same "wrong", "hateful" and "discredited" assumptions about gender and ethnicity. Pure coincidence, right? Across these vast expanses of space and time, they all must have been wrong in exactly the same way about exactly the same things.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being debated in the US Senate, Barry Goldwater said that he was going to vote against it because it would surely lead to quotas and double standards. Hubert Humphrey, a sponsor of the bill, said, that if this ever happened, he would eat a copy of the bill. Well, if Hubert were still with us, I'd buy the hot sauce.
ReplyDelete"Dalrock said...
ReplyDeleteOne more thought. It strikes me how the civil rights movement has finally achieved the antithesis of its founding objectives."
Wrong. It is still pursuing its founding objectives. What makes you think that its real objectives were the ones they told YOU about?
The guy is sincere, not to mention a great writer.
ReplyDeleteThe guy is a third-rate hack. His writings on race are full of half-truths and even outright fabrications.
And since when is sincerity the measure of a man? Is being a sincere hater something to be proud of? Wise is one of the most virulent anti-white racists writing today.
I don't think "Uncle Tim" really fits Wise, however. Uncle Tim implies race traitor, and Wise isn't a traitor.
The one good thing about this is that now average white kids can feel the same justice in schools as ultra-high-IQ white kids did in the 1945-1985 "golden age" of public education.
ReplyDeleteKarma is a bitch, isn't it?