Black families fight to get fair discipline for their children in schools | Hacker News Reader

Black families fight to get fair discipline for their children in schools

washingtonpost.com

22 pointsr0h1n21 comments

What an unusual front page HN story!

The preschool to prison pipeline is a phrase I hadn't heard before but I can believe it is absolutely a reality. The statistics are real and so is pernicious racial bias.

A child who throws a chair - twice - and spits on other students deserves a suspension.

Is the American education system really that different to the Australian system?

She's arguing that the punishment / discipline is not fair.

  One after another, white mothers confessed the trouble 
  their children had gotten into. Some of the behavior was 
  similar to JJ’s; some was much worse.

  Most startling: None of their children had been suspended.

And who are we to be skeptical of a motivational speaker's anecdotes?

Why would other mothers admit that their children were suspended?

It's entirely possible that unfair punishment is occurring but she needs a lot more than "the other mothers told me so" to prove it.

If they wished to conceal information, why admit to bad behavior on their child's part in the first place? On hearing of the suspension of the author's child, they volunteered information about their own children, including one story of a child that caused another to be hospitalized, but was not suspended for it.

You know, you cannot always expect evidence of the type that scientists or courts demand.

Specially when dealing with a victim of systematic injustice, you have to take their claims seriously. Not at face value, mind you, but seriously enough to get up and gather your own set of evidence to either confirm of refute the claim.

What you just wrote is a thought stopper. There is no hard evidence of discrimination, therefore there's no discrimination at all. Maybe it is that you, personally do not discriminate... but this attitude is exactly what enables the bigots amongst us to keep going with impunity.

Yes, I agree. Suspension was appropriate. I wish the article had described the "much worse" behavior of the white children. It's important to communicate this to make the author's point.

There is one example: “My son threw something at a kid on purpose and the kid had to be rushed to the hospital,” another parent said. “All I got was a phone call.”

Do you believe that the suspension is likely to result in a positive change in behavior of the child? If not, it seems completely misguided, favoring punishment over positive reenforcement.

Without commenting on this specific case, it's often a lot more difficult and nuanced than simply what is best for that individual child. If you're in a class full of around 30 children and one child is misbehaving to the extent that they're a danger to others around them, then sure, ideally you'd spend the time with that child and do what's right and best for them, but in reality you also need to think of all the other children in the class and what's right for them and often, the amount of time you'd need to spend with such a child would unreasonably distract you from helping out the other 29 children which simply isn't fair on them. Often, punishment in such cases is simply there to enable the teacher to continue teaching the rest of the class (with the limited resources at their disposal) so that at least the majority can learn and benefit.

Whether you believe that or not, the actual point of the article is that a white child behaving that way is much more likely to remain in school than a black child.

What exactly does suspension teach a four-year-old child?

It teaches the parents that they have to do something about their child.

Teachers aren't a magical fix for your misbehaving children.

This post was killed by user flags.

Indeed it was.

I appreciate your sharing that information, although it's a depressing outcome. Understanding how systemic bias can start so early offers important lessons for reducing it (and the economic waste attendant upon it).

It is interesting, but I don't really see it as HN material. It is too short and too content light to satisfy ones genuine curiousity and it has got nothing to do with tech.

It's 1100 words which seems about typical for HN submissions (based on a quick sampling of the current front page) and tech-related is not a requirement per the HN guidelines.

tl;dr Black preschool children are punished at much higher rates for the same offences than children of other races; unintentional bias is endemic among entrants to the teaching profession.

That is mess up beyond all rational belief.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com