12-year-old suspended over toy gun seen in virtual class

Black conservatives like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have often decried that "affirmative action" is used by whites namely liberals to avoid fixing the issues with public education school systems that are in charge of so many black and brown kids.

THE ISSUES:

- Underfunding

- Disproportionate discipline

WHO IS TO BLAME?

- Conservative legislatures who push funding to rural areas over heavily populated liberal cities

- Democratic big city administrators beholden to teachers unions

- Liberal colleges who "focus on diversity at expense of all else"

WRITINGS:

- https://www.pilotonline.com/opinion/columns/vp-ed-column-wil...

- https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/07/18/college-...

First of all, not all kids are meant to go to college or university. Second, we’re teaching fewer useful skills that are needed to function in industry and society. We’re also teaching them dependence and less independence.

This is NOT true.

This kind of misinformation is especially harmful to black kids in particular when you erase any real issues that they might be suffering from, and externalize it all as racism.

The fact that black kids are simply less likely to have parents that have free time to spend with them, and are less likely to have a nutritious breakfasts can go a long way to explaining their disciplinary and performance problems. Other factors are that parents are less trusting of social workers, and so learning problems go untreated longer. Black kids are less likely to get glasses, and less likely to get treated for things like dyslexia.

These are IMPORTANT issues, and by blaming any disparate outcomes on racism, you are completely erasing these very real problems that can be addressed, and getting in the way of actually helping.

It is egregious that when there are kids who have very visible health problems from malnutrition, there are these consultants who are blaming everything on their teachers "unconscious racism", and wanting to put their teachers through these laughable unconscious bias apparatuses.

> QUOTE: "Black children do not misbehave more than their White peers, rather they are punished more. In fact, Black students are more likely than their White peers to receive a disciplinary action for a discretionary offense like talking back, violating a dress code, or being defiant. Black children are also more likely to be suspended out of school for their first offense."

I don't think your sources are very relevant. your csgjusticecenter.org link is 404.

The very fact that black kids tend to come from a different socioeconomic background means that they will not have exactly the same needs and behaviors as other kids, so it is unreasonable to assume that they will be disciplined exactly the same.

The article attributes it to https://web.archive.org/web/20200202151016/https://csgjustic..., but the closest I was able to find in that report was:

To address any suggestions that children of color in Texas simply are more likely to break school rules than their white counterparts, researchers included in their analyses a comparison between profiles for students whose behavior prompted a discretionary action and students who received a mandatory removal from school.

The "comparison between profiles" part is rather vague, so I can't figure out what exactly it is they did. As for the results of that comparison, I could only find the following:

While refuting some potential explanations why African-American students were particularly likely to be disciplined for lower-level violations of a school code of conduct, this analysis does not pinpoint the reasons for it.

And it might be more apt to compare vs. Hispanic students, since they are the largest demographic in Texas, as the report notes: the student population, which is 49 percent Hispanic, 33 percent white, and 14 percent African American, reflects a diversity that increasingly typifies many school systems in the United States.

Maybe because there's a societal benefit from people not getting a choice on how each one of their individual tax dollars gets spent... And maybe there's a societal benefit from people not being able to choose which public school they get put into. You're gonna deal with one of two evils: Tyranny of the majority or tragedy of the commons. Most places in the US seem to choose tyranny.

I believe the inner city schools already have been defunded (or more precisely have been underfunded from the start), which is part of the problem.