I am writing my posts in reverse order tonight, because I was gone over the weekend. So after previously writing about my first day back teaching today, now I need to backtrack to Friday when we had our staff meeting.
Near the end of the meeting, the Vice Principal came up with some overhead slides that showed some pretty depressing data that addressed our approximately 320 suspensions last school year.
The most depressing was a bar graph that broke down the suspensions by race. South Asians/Indians had something like 10 suspensions; Pacific Islanders had about 10 as well; the white kids had 32; the Hispanic kids had 37. Then, there were the black students:
231 Suspensions!
Imagine how that looked on a bar graph! Luckily, we didn't have time to go into a discussion of why our black students misbehave at such a disproportionate rate; my contributions to the discussion would probably not have been looked upon too kindly, especially the likelihood that most of our black students come from single-parent, female-headed households.
Naturally, our administration is in a bit of hot water with the district for suspending, "too many African-American students." The question of what to do when "too many of our African-American students" are choosing to misbehave and disrupt our school is always left unanswered by the detached and unaccountable bean counters at the Taj Mahal that is our district office.
By the way, the other breakdown of the suspensions was by sex:
Male - 256
Female - 70
I guess that will be have to be a discussion for another day!
Good Day to You, Sir
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson
2 comments:
The question of what to do when "too many of our African-American students" are choosing to misbehave and disrupt our school is always left unanswered by the detached and unaccountable bean counters at the Taj Mahal that is our district office.
You're just being deliberately dense. Clearly, all you need to do is pick students from the other racial categories at random for suspension. I'm sure they'll understand that it's in the interest of fairness.
George,
That is too funny. I would not worry about the statistics too much. Your job is to manage the classroom and to teach.
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