Assumptions of Racism

I don’t understand you. You, the parent, voter, citizen, taxpayer. You think we teachers are all closet racists. A firestorm has erupted throughout the state about school suspensions a disciplinary tactic whereby disruptive students are sent home for a short period. African-American students make up about 6.5% of all California school children. Their percentage of suspensions? 19%. This all came from a new state database where every suspension is recorded and catalogued. Now they can tell you how many English Learners in Contra Costa County of Hispanic origin were suspended for assaulting a teacher or smoking dope in 2012. Or just about any other combination you could think of. Which is how the explosive numbers about African-American students became a cause celebre. No one has been so bold as to openly accuse teachers and administrators of racism but I think the message is there if you look. I was able to find a commentary by a young African-American attorney, Sarah Omojola. She is listed as “statewide education advocate for Public Counsel Law Center, the nation’s largest pro bono law firm”. (http://www.schoolleadership20.com/profiles/blogs/it-s-time-to-fix-school... ) Last week, reacting to the database statistics, Ms. Omojola wrote, “research has shown that students are frequently suspended on grounds of ‘willful defiance’ for behavior that is often related to having a disability, being culturally different from teachers or administrators, or because they are still learning how to respect themselves and others.” Willful defiance is a catchall that many schools use to cover any time a student refuses to follow instructions. We are not talking about me tossing a kid out of my room for throwing paper airplanes. We are talking about the most severe disciplinary problems. (Last year about one in sixteen California students received at least one suspension.) School suspensions, which are handled in the office generally after some kind of investigation, are, in my experience, more carefully considered than teacher referrals to the office. So when Ms. Omojola says we suspend kids because of cultural differences (IMO code words for racism) she is making a significant charge. The numbers have led to some important changes—and potential changes-- in the law. First came the Los Angeles School Board, which recently forbade schools from suspending students for willful defiance. They thought the term was too vague. A reasonable assumption is that LAUSD believes racist administrators are obscuring their own biases by refusing to specify exactly what the kid did to get suspended. They figure if school administrators are forced to give more specific reasons for suspensions that we will find out that, as Ms. Omojola speculated, White teachers and administrators can’t relate to Black children. Now the state legislature is about to act. Assembly bill 420 by Sacramento Democrat Roger Dickinson is making its way through the legislature. The bill would eliminate suspensions for grades K-5 and greatly restrict willful defiance actions in the upper grades. The details of the bill seem unimportant to me. What seems key is the belief behind all of this that schools are hiding a racial agenda behind vague terminology. I’ll make the obligatory stipulation here. We could all learn something about disciplining kids who are culturally different from ourselves. And there are some “positive” disciplinary measures that we could use that might reduce suspensions a bit. But if you think eliminating willful defiance will fundamentally change anything, you are wrong. This issue, like so many, seems to my eyes to support my contention that the schools are undermining their own positions in the community by discouraging citizen access to the schools. My solution to all matters like this is, get adults into the schools to really see what goes on. Only then would you all find out if we are all closet racists.