September 13, 2010

Ducks on the pond

Virginia Heffernan pointed out that the in-thing among bloggers is to "show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody ... setting off excerpts so they play as parody..." 

Yes, but it's getting to be like shooting fish in a barrel.

So, without further ado:
by Sam Dillon
New York Times

In many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys, according to a new study, which also found that black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls.

School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites.

The study analyzed four decades of federal Department of Education data on suspensions, with a special focus on figures from 2002 and 2006, that were drawn from 9,220 of the nation’s 16,000 public middle schools.

The study, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

The co-authors, Daniel J. Losen, a senior associate at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Russell Skiba, a professor at Indiana University, said they focused on suspensions from middle schools because recent research had shown that students’ middle school experience was crucial for determining future academic success.

One recent study of 400 incarcerated high school freshmen in Baltimore found that two-thirds had been suspended at least once in middle school. 

44 comments:

Anonymous said...

I spotted that article earlier. I knew you'd bite!

LOL.

Eric said...

Obviously this is the pernicious result of conscious and unconscious racism! What else could it be?

Anonymous said...

published by the Southern Poverty Law Center


Which is about as credible as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Anonymous said...

from the st paul public school 2006-2011 strategic plan:
Evaluate and adjust administrative transfer, suspension and expulsion process to address over-identification of specific student groups and an equitable application of consequences.

http://www.spps.org/StrategicPlan.html

you betcha

ben tillman said...

How smart does one have to be to understand that correlation does not equal cause?

Anonymous said...

Just as expected I guess.

According to Fed stats if you're African American you're 6.5 x as likely as a white person to be currently incarcerated, Hispanic ~3x as a likely, and Asian 1/5 as likely.

If minimizing poor behavior is the nation’s goal, it would need to be comprised of an Asian citizenry.

Anonymous said...

The public education system's intractably pro-Asian, while simultaneously anti-NAM, bias strikes yet again!

CJ said...

"One recent study of 400 incarcerated high school freshmen in Baltimore found that two-thirds had been suspended at least once in middle school. "

400 incarcerated high school freshmen? Good God. I attended a relatively large district high school that wasn't exactly Beverly Hills High. To the best of my knowledge there were no incarcerated high school freshmen the entire time I was there.

Anonymous said...

This hits close to home. Two years ago, the NAACP accused our high school of discrimination against black students, citing the "inequities" in the percentage of referrals written for black students vs non-blacks.

Unable to come right out and tell teachers not to write as many referrals on black students, lilly-livered administrators have tried to employ other tactics to keep the numbers down-- lose many of the referrals once they reach the front office and the vice-principals' desks, and their favorite tactic, delay taking action on the referral, hoping the classroom teacher will simply forget they have written up the student.

Over the course of the housing boom, our particular school and district out in the suburbs were inundated with kids from the rough sections of Richmond and Oakland and, to a lesser degree, Vallejo.

Many behave like the thugs they are; others, a goodly number, while not violent, are rude, disruptive, loud, vulgar....you name it.

A handful of black citizens claim that these black youth should be treated differently than other students: ("After all, they have a different culture and they learn differently, and they come from loud homes so you teachers should understand that" and blah, blah, blah.)

Site administrators, not wanting to lose a battle with district administrators, who
fear the Board of Education, who fear the NAACP, do their best to go easy on the bastards.


The older teachers keep writing the referrals; the young ones are cowed by all this.

La Raza is making noise now about the low graduation rate of our Hispanic population.

I say do away with all public education.

Sylvia said...

Steve, I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the Koran burning saga that captured the world's attention last week.

jody said...

those rates already factor in that the authorities are far more lenient with students who are not european. the real disparate suspension rates would be even higher if the adults in charge applied the rules evenly to everybody.

euro american boys in particular are singled out to be steamrolled. the hammer comes down fast and hard on them. many school districts deliberately try to turn them into weak, compliant wimps, while letting the other boys do almost whatever they like. this is endemic to modern US society.

in many school districts, the euro american boys are also conditioned by the curriculum, a battery of instruction and lessons designed to make them hate themselves and revere the other groups.

l said...

The solution to a low black male high school graduation rate is more 'resources', says NPR - uncritically repeating what some lefty foundation says. No analysis.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129815332&ft=1&f=1013

Anonymous said...

Wow... whites acting like whites, blacks acting like blacks, asians acting better than everyone (naturally cohesive culturally), etc. This IS breaking news. But I like the irony meme. I wonder if the MSM is too stupid to be aware of the implication that all their hard work has risen to no more than intertube fodder... probably.

Snippet said...

"Evaluate and adjust administrative transfer, suspension and expulsion process to address over-identification of specific student groups and an equitable application of consequences."

Ah, yes.

Priorities. Priorities.

Education will happen by some miracle in its own good time, but for now, priorities.

We used to live in St. Paul. We moved to the suburbs.

Because, of course, we are racists who hate equality.

Richard Keefe said...

The ironic (read: "hypocritical") thing about the Southern Poverty Law Center is that NOT ONE of its top ten, highest paid executives is a minority.

http://wp.me/pCLYZ-67

In fact, according to the SPLC's hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, despite being located LITERALLY in the back yard of Dr. Martin Luther King's home church, the SPLC has NEVER hired a person of color to a highly paid position of power.

Some "experts"

Snippet said...

"He said the district was using several strategies to reduce suspensions."

There's that or ....

Suspend more white kids, and Asians of course. Make it illegal to join the math club, or play any classical music instrument.

Equality is coming to us all.

Anonymous said...

Let's see, if on
iq asians>white>black and on
Aggression asians>white>black and on
Impulsivity asians>white>black,
what results would we expect?

Robert said...

For young black males, the probability of them being disciplined for misbehavior is significantly lower than for white males. So there's an incentive to act out. And because of lower intelligence, they are less likely to calculate properly the line they have to cross to incur any punishment, which will be less onerous for them as well. And they can blame any punishment on racism. So what real incentive do they have to behave? You can act out all you want and still get to be President, or at least a multi-millionaire football star.

eh said...

The solution to a low black male high school graduation rate is more 'resources', says NPR -

They've come to the same conclusion in England, so it must be right.

BBC: Ofsted says schools using special needs too widely

Thousands of pupils are being wrongly labelled as having special educational needs when all they require is better teaching and support, Ofsted has said.

They have bad schools and bad teachers in England as well.

Big Bill said...

Great stuff, Steve. It's even funnier when you actually read the report.

In Table 1 of the report -- their very first table, which is placed front and center to get your attention, you see the greatest "disparities" are between black males and ... wait for it ... white girls!

Even funnier, the worst offender, the school district at the top of the disparities list, is Palm Beach, which (in case you didn't know) is wallowing in Haitian refugees.

And, no, those refugees are not white girls.

You gotta love it.

Bottom line:

Blacks in primary and secondary schools are suspended at three times the rate that white kids are (15.0% versus 4.8% in 2006).

Blacks are expelled at five times the rate as white kids (0.5% versus 0.1% in 2006), just as Griffe du Lion would anticipate.

Stop the presses, Virginia, we now know that black men are way more violent that white girls.

Anonymous said...

have any of the researchers or people who are surprised by this ever been outside?

none of the above said...

Joeseph: Easy. They just copied the Jews, who follow a similar pattern.

One nice thing about this story is that the numbers and facts are reported straight up. This makes it very easy to see the possible explanations that are being carefully omitted.

A bit if Steve-bait here is the Griffe-du-lion-esque increase in racial differences in suspensions at the same time as increasingly widespread zero-tolerance policies. Gee, what could possibly explain such a phenomenon?

Brother Mouzone said...

"One recent study of 400 incarcerated high school freshmen in Baltimore found that two-thirds had been suspended at least once in middle school."

Wouldn't this fact suggest that the higher rates of school suspensions in Baltimore were prescient, justified and even artificially depressed by our contemporary reign of PC terror?

Or were these all convicts simply innocents who were radically criminalized by having to sit at home for a few days while suspended from school.

The Tappit Brothers said...

The solution to a low black male high school graduation rate is more 'resources', says NPR - uncritically repeating what some lefty foundation says. No analysis.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129815332&ft=1&f=1013


Speaking of NPR, what has happened to it recently? Has there been a change in staffing at the top driving it's lowered quality?

I surfed over to hear some dim leftist ideologue claim the Chilean mining accident is emblematic of all that is wrong with the capitalism, the world and Chile. The NPR announcer, Neil Conan, let this moron blather on with ridiculous claims: this mining accenting is the defining event of our times, there are no mining safety standards, more workers are dying in mines and workers in general than ever before, etc.

I was initially embarrassed for the Conan, until I realized he was probably nodding his head all along.

Sideways said...

Always funny to see them complaining about zero-tolerance policies having racial differences in effects.

Chuck said...

Well,

This fits perfectly with the non-PC version of evolutionary psychology. Say, Penke, 2010. Bridging the gap between modern evolutionary psychology and the study of individual differences

carol said...

It would seem that at least some of the ones who should be suspended but aren't will get their social promotion (diploma) and move on to JC or state U..wheels greased by the counselors with provisional this and that of course.

If so, how is the behavior there?

Omnivore said...

Can you get the link to the Heffernan observation?

No one believes this sh#t anymore Steve. Everyone knows it is official dogma. Everyone. Even the left knows. Even Sharpton knows. It's like the last years of the Soviet empire, when even the most deluded old Bolshevik knew that the balloon was collapsing.

They just don't have the vocabulary to express a dissenting thought.

Anonymous said...

Number one, what Jody wrote is exactly correct.


Number two, remember when I wrote the phrase "Racial Communism"?
Thats not really far from the logical extension of this.

Rules like this divide "man against man" in ways that produce smoldering resentments that last a lifetime.

BTW---Your average NPR listener (who isn't childless) sends their kids to private schools or very white schools out in suburbia. We shouldn't care about what these people think about public education. Those same people bemoan homeschooling, the only way poor people in poor areas can give their own children a first rate education.

The elites, as usual, are the enemy in education. They can take their self-esteem programs, whole-language (non)reading, new math, diversity celebration, and multicultural history and shove them.......

Le Mur said...

Related (tho the "gene frequencies" part is pretty light):

National IQ Means Transformed from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Scores, and their Underlying Gene Frequencies
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/14600/1/MPRA_paper_14600.pdf
...we confirmed brain gain and brain drain in a number of nations during recent decades.
...
In 2000 the PISA score of the United Kingdom was 529, but in 2006 only 495. This would mean a PISA IQ of 104 in 2000 and 99 in 2006, but we had to set this 104 and 99 to be the “Greenwich IQ” of 100. As it seems, it could be that the average IQ of the United Kingdom was or is actually declining (compare Flynn, 2009), and it is not reasonable to calibrate the IQ of the world to the waterline of a single leaking ship.

Le Mur said...

Related (tho the "gene frequencies" part is pretty light):

National IQ Means Transformed from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Scores, and their Underlying Gene Frequencies
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/14600/1/MPRA_paper_14600.pdf
...we confirmed brain gain and brain drain in a number of nations during recent decades.
...
In 2000 the PISA score of the United Kingdom was 529, but in 2006 only 495. This would mean a PISA IQ of 104 in 2000 and 99 in 2006, but we had to set this 104 and 99 to be the “Greenwich IQ” of 100. As it seems, it could be that the average IQ of the United Kingdom was or is actually declining (compare Flynn, 2009), and it is not reasonable to calibrate the IQ of the world to the waterline of a single leaking ship.

Dutch Boy said...

Hmmm, crooks are more likely to have been suspended in school than non-crooks. Who woulda thunk it?

alonzo portfolio said...

I just walked out of a McDonald's in Marin County. They've spruced up the driveway with some colorful flowering plants. A 65-year old black woman gets out of her car in the hdcp. zone, ambles over, and picks a bunch of the pink blossoms. I'm guessing she wouldn't understand why her (great?)-grandson got suspended from high school.

BamaGirl said...

"Jody-those rates already factor in that the authorities are far more lenient with students who are not european. the real disparate suspension rates would be even higher if the adults in charge applied the rules evenly to everybody."

Yep. I was in high school three years ago and can assure that this is true. My high school was about 1/4 NAM and in order to "equalize" discipline referrals teachers wrote a disproportionate amount of uniform violation referrals for the white students. Black students despite being out of uniform more frequently seemed to avoid those sort of referrals and generally only got written up for being disruptive, back-talking, etc..Also despite the fact that both the white kids and black kids skipped class a fair amount only the white ones seemed to actually get suspended for it.

SGOTI said...

Quick, somebody organize some midnight basketball!

Svigor said...

Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites

That's the stuff that SPLC puts into their studies but rookie journos aren't supposed to quote, I think.

Anonymous said...

>Speaking of NPR, what has happened to it recently?<

It used to be agreeable in the car, if you didn't listen for content. But now it's 90%+ dumb females whispering sotto voce, as unbearable as iron nails raked down a chalkboard.

coldequation said...

I would have expected more than a 3X disparity. As someone else pointed out above, the disparity is about twice as much for violent crime, so why wouldn't it be similar for suspensions? There's probably a tendency to go easier on blacks and harder on whites to avoid appearances of racism, as Bamagirl says. The alternative explanation would be that black troublemakers are more likely to drop out.

This, by the way, is why HBD is important. In an HBD-free world, this story would indicate discrimination against blacks by evil whites, but in light of HBD it's more likely that whites are being discriminated against, if there's any discrimination at all.

Anonymous said...

BTW---Your average NPR listener (who isn't childless) sends their kids to private schools or very white schools out in suburbia.

Your average NPR listener is childless.

It used to be agreeable in the car, if you didn't listen for content. But now it's 90%+ dumb females whispering sotto voce, as unbearable as iron nails raked down a chalkboard.

So you don't tune in for the content, but, instead, you tune in for the sound effects and the background music?

I.e. you're a connoisseur of "production value"?

Well, I guess it takes all kinds.

[SMH.]

Anonymous said...

I just googled the search query "african inventor". Google responded by "Did you mean "american inventor?"". Several of the google links to real africans on the 1st page referred to white south africans.

There you go.

Anonymous said...

I remember when I was in high school (Clarke Central High School in Athens, GA), a heavily mixed school (about 50/50 black and white), the school administration was scared to death of being perceived as biased. The result of that was what you'd expect, that white kids would get in-school suspension merely for showing up to class late, while black kids would get away with some pretty amazing stuff.

It was actually pretty scary. As a white kid (especially one who was not in the all-white "college-prep" classes), you were in constant fear of getting beaten up by blacks. In one case I was choked in class by a black guy, while the teacher sat there and did nothing.

I'm definitely glad to be out of there!

Curvaceous Carbon-based Life Form said...

"In one case I was choked in class by a black guy, while the teacher sat there and did nothing.

I'm definitely glad to be out of there!"

Your story is so disturbing, and so typical.

Please homeschool your kids.

There's tons of resources out there today that didn't exist 30 years ago.
Teach them to read with Englemann's "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons," and either the Singapore Math workbooks or Saxon Math textbooks are great for elementary math. Amazon often has them used.

For high school, for Algebra, Trig, PreCalc, Teaching Textbooks is great. The DVDs are developed specifically to teach higher math to your homeschooled teen, even if you feel personally unqualified. Then enroll them in jr. college part-time when they're sixteen.

Museums have tons of programs for science / art / history / music ed., and the local rec centers can meet the need for phys ed.

There's boy scouts / t-ball and Little League / swimming lessons at the public pool for socialization.

If your school district has a Gifted and Talented program, the coordinator can often give you brochures for great, free programs, even if your kid isn't gifted.

If you're worried about prosecution for truancy, join this:
Home School Legal Defense Association
http://www.hslda.org/about/

Truth said...

"In one case I was choked in class by a black guy, while the teacher sat there and did nothing."

I'm sick of you guys lying and exaggerating about your interactions with black people! Tell the damn truth for once; while he choked the life out of you with his right hand, the teacher loudly exhorted him to add in some hard left hooks to the temple.

CuChulainn said...

Progressive science at its finest, covered by progressive journalists. Of course, what those students DID to get themselves suspended, and whether black males are engaging in considerably more (and more serious) acts of misconduct in school than White females, is of course ignored. Without that, we are left to just assume teachers must be picking students at random to suspend and send home, and despite all the liberal indoctrination drilled into the teachers' heads growing up (with an extra dose as an Education major in college), they must be rabid anti-black racists (but curiously pro-Asian).