* The idea that they’re not devoting enough time to raising awareness about racism at a school of education is gut-bustingly funny. My ex-wife described having to listen to hours and hours of lectures about racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, whatever-ism — there was very, very little actual discussion about “education.” She had one teacher who was radical lesbian who used to spend basically the entire class talking about how awful her life was trying to live as a lesbian. She’d break down and cry in class while talking about all the crazy lesbian drama in her life — the entire class was just a giant farce, an excuse for this crazy teacher to inflict her psychoses on a captive audience of students.
* The New York Times seems to gleefully point out that southern states have higher suspension rates. I bet most states with a substantial black population would show the same disparity. I included a link below that shows that in Minnesota 40 percent of suspensions are black students even though they are under ten percent of the population, and they are ten times as likely to be suspended as white students.
The big problem is that many school administrators and education officials have never been (or in the past 20 years) in a classroom and have no idea of the reality of dealing with unruly students. My mother was a teacher and was breaking up a fight between two black males, and was knocked to the floor pretty violently. amazingly enough, these two kids were not suspended because the district was complaining about black suspension rates. The principal later got an award for reducing black suspension rates even though the school was considerably less safe then before, but the important thing was that the school board could pat themselves on the back.
