Thomas Sowell addresses Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s and Justice Department chief Eric Holder’s crusade against statistics. A recent study found that black male students are disciplined more than other race-sex cohorts. The pattern follows the very familiar black-Hispanic-white-Asian progression. Sowell makes the simple argument:
If black males get punished more often than Asian-American females, does that mean that it is somebody else’s fault? That it is impossible that black males are behaving differently from Asian-American females? Nobody in his right mind believes that. But that is the unspoken premise, without which the punishment statistics prove nothing about “equity.”
The New York Times wrote on it:
Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.
And of course, boys of any racial cohort faced discipline and expulsion more than girls of the similar racial cohort. Which makes one wonder where is all of the outrage at the disparate impact on school age boys? As usual, these types of race-pandering analyses cannot handle the intersection of gender and race. Sowell looks at the political motivations:
What they are more fundamentally trying to protect are the black votes which are essential for Democrats. To that end, blacks must be constantly depicted as under siege from whites, so that Democrats can be seen as their rescuers.
Promoting paranoia translates into votes. It is a very cynical political game, despite all the lofty rhetoric used to disguise it.
And of course, men in general and white men in particular do not have such an organized or well-congealed voting bloc.
I wish discussions of biology would come up more. And I don’t necessarily mean innate racial differences – though such an argument should be borne out. But there is a good argument to be made that fatherlessness is the most important culprit. A study I linked to yesterday found that British boys whose fathers were absent from the home before the age of 7 experienced earlier incidents of sexual maturation. Reaching puberty earlier than classmates would manifest itself as relatively more of the behaviors that tend to get boys in trouble at school – rambunctiousness, fighting, etc. Kids who socialize with kids with similar household characteristics – and based largely on race similarity – double down on this effect of, essentially, testosterone.
Duncan and Holder interpret all of this as a type of racism, but it seems more a case of – if we want to speak in terms of discrimination against a group – misandry. The ideal solution is more fathers in the home, but the second-best solution is more strong-willed men in the classroom. And not just principals who dole out discipline but strong male teachers who serve as father figures to these young men.
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Holder and Duncan don’t want a solution – the status quo works perfectly for them. Sowell is correct, it’s about votes, party policy support and dependency.
You make a valiant attempt to re-frame the debate.
I don’t know if I buy Sowell’s cynicism about politics being at work here. This story is the kind of thing that gets Tweeted and Facebooked by lots of SWPL folks who are hardly operatives for Democrats. It’s just ideology at work.
Given the typically chaotic nature of most majority black inner city class rooms especially past the first few grades, and all the shoving and hitting and disruption that often goes on, I think the disparity in disciplining of black boys in public schools should almost certainly go up, rather than down.
See this on a liberal (but also pragmatic and non ideologue) guy’s blog.
http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2009/06/white-teacher-speaks-out-what-is-it.html
Here is a post in which he muses how to improve things for black students (partly by disciplining the disrupters more and if bad enough moving them to special schools so that don’t hurt the learning of other black (and unfortunate to be among them white ones as well).
http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-plan-to-close-achievement-gap.html
Has anyone ever seen a study of the negative impact on white school children of desegregation? That is on poor white children having to attend majority and especially large majority black or black and hispanic schools.
Doug,
to ask is to answer. but surely that can’t be too hard a study to conduct. compare test scores pre desegregation or forced bussing to test scores after.
Has anyone ever seen a study of the negative impact on white school children of desegregation? That is on poor white children having to attend majority and especially large majority black or black and hispanic schools.
I would imagine that white grades go up wherever you introduce large numbers of black students, who immediately drop to the bottom rungs of the grade ladder and cause the grading system(s) to be dumbed down.
“But there is a good argument to be made that fatherlessness is the most important culprit.”
This sounds right. When I was in my mid-20s, I spent a couple of years in prison for a variety of stupid drunken things that I did. The prison where I spent most of my time was at least 80% black and, based on my conversations with other inmates, regardless of race, I’d also estimate fatherlessness at about 80% for all inmates.
@Camlost: Maybe true. But it doesn’t really account for whites adopting black cultural values and emulating black behaviors (both of which, in my experience in public schools, definitely do happen).
Reminds of accusations of profiling black drivers on NJ Turnpike some years ago. So called “driving while black” got a lot people hot under their collars. A study that was commissioned showed that blacks were nearly twice as likely as other drivers to exceed 65mph limit. I doubt a trooper could tell driver’s color in a vehicle passing his parked car at 80mph, six lanes away. Naturally, study’s finding were questioned & quashed.
That is interesting about boys whose fathers aren’t around reaching puberty sooner. I wonder if the presence of an adult male makes him feel more secure, and therefore not needing to grow up so soon. Also, adult males will put a too aggressive younger male in his place.
I think black men might have trouble being good teachers. With the way teaching is today, there is a lot of rule following and paperwork.
Black men are very good at rule-following and paperwork, which is why the ones who can actually pass a basic aptitude test (ASVAB) do so well in the military in support/non-combat MOS’s.
And when a black man says it’s better for a black man to teach black boys than some (presumably useless) well-intentioned but weak white woman, white women get upset.
I say this makes a lot of damned sense. Get the useless white women away from the boys.
Gorbachev, most teachers of black boys are black women.
Black women should be better at handling them.
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