Triumph for a British selective school

 Alistair Brownlee, Britain’s gold medal-winning triathlete, has backed The Daily Telegraph’s Keep the Flame Alive campaign and revealed the critical role that was played by his former school, Bradford Grammar, in his journey to Olympic glory.

As the London Olympics approach their final weekend, the campaign aims to further increase the number of volunteers in sport and ensure that competitive sport is accessible to children in all schools.

Brownlee, whose brother Jonny also won bronze, doubts that he would have made it to the top of the podium at these Olympics were it not for the extracurricular, and largely voluntary, input of his teachers.

“So much comes down to chance,” said Brownlee. “I think one of the biggest things about legacy is that it’s not about money. It’s about the attitude. It’s about inspiring teachers at schools to go that little bit further to help their kids learn a sport. It’s about inspiring the kids themselves to try sport. It’s about inspiring parents to take their kids to the local club.

“It’s about giving people that attitude to give it a go, to enjoy doing it and wanting to compete. If anything comes out of the Olympics, legacy-wise, that is the most important thing.

"I wholeheartedly back the Telegraph’s 'Keep the Flame Alive' initiative. For a 'legacy' to be fulfilled we need the basic infrastructure in place to help achieve it and big components in making that a reality are attracting more volunteers in sport and to ensure schools include sport as a vital part of the curriculum.”

Brownlee, 24, feels fortunate that he and his brother had the opportunity to develop their rare athletic talent from a young age at Bradford Grammar. "I was lucky enough to go to a school which gave flexibility around education and sport," he said.

"We had a 1hr 30min lunch break and were able to train during this time. My school career was absolutely crucial to me. As an endurance athlete, some of the most important years are maybe when you are 16, 17, and 18. For me getting that right was very important and my school allowed me to do that.

“It was actually a French teacher who was really into running and he took groups of lads out running of a lunch-time. It created a culture where you could go running every lunch-time in the school. If that hadn’t have happened, I probably wouldn't have got into running that much and then never done that well at triathlon.

“It was also the attitude of the school – the fact that a teacher was willing to give up his lunchtimes and weekends to take groups of boys running.”

Brownlee added: “Schools are really, really important. It gives you access to every kid in the country. It gives you a massive pool of people to see who might be talented at different sports. It allows kids to try sports. Kids can be inspired all they want but if they can’t go out and try a sport then it’s no good. And the school should be the avenue to try those sports.

“In the same way as you have to inspire the parents and teachers of the next generation, you also have to inspire the officials and the coaches, the people who give up their spare time. One of the fantastic things about sport in this country is that you can go to local running clubs and find people who give up their spare time to coach children and adults.

“Everywhere I have been involved all through sport there has been hundreds of volunteers involved – people who give up their spare time for the love of the sport. But, to inspire more kids, you need to inspire more volunteers to help them.”

Kevin Riley, the head of Bradford Grammar, said that the school had tried to give equal encouragement to pupils, regardless of whether their sport was traditionally a mainstream activity.

“The school has always had this sense that if you are good at something, we will develop it,” he said. “The Brownlees, as good as they are athletically, you would have thought the school might have said, ‘never mind all this running around and swimming lark, you need to play rugby and cricket’. But it didn’t, the school developed their individual talent because it was very obvious from an early age and the school really encouraged that.”

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Obama Administration Hunts Phantom Classroom Racism
 
 In March 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that his department was “going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement” in the nation’s schools. What was the pervasive racial injustice that led Mr. Duncan to redouble such efforts? Black elementary and high school students are three and a half times more likely to get suspended or expelled than their white peers, according to federal data.

And so the Departments of Education and Justice have launched a campaign against disproportionate minority discipline rates, which show up in virtually every school district with significant numbers of black and Hispanic students. The possibility that students’ behavior drives those rates lies outside the Obama administration’s conceptual universe. The theory behind this school discipline push is what Obama officials and civil rights advocates call the “school-to-prison pipeline.” According to this conceit, harsh discipline practices—above all, suspensions— strip minority students of classroom time, causing them to learn less, drop out of school, and eventually land in prison.

The feds have reached their conclusions, however, without answering the obvious question: Are black students suspended more often because they misbehave more? Arne Duncan, of all people, should be aware of inner-city students’ self-discipline problems, having headed the Chicago school system before becoming secretary of education. Chicago’s minority youth murder one another with abandon. Since 2008, more than 530 people under the age of 21 have been killed in the city, mostly by their peers, according to the Chicago Reporter; virtually all the perpetrators were black or Hispanic.

Nationally, the picture is no better. The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.

Like school districts across the county, the St. Paul, Minnesota, public school system has been on a mission to lower the black suspension rate, following complaints by local activists and black parents. The district has sent its staff to $350,000 worth of “cultural-proficiency” training, where they learned to “examine the presence and role of Whiteness.” The system spent another $2 million or so to implement an anti-suspension behavioral-modification program embraced by the Obama administration.

Aaron Benner, a fifth-grade teacher in St. Paul, scoffs at the notion that minority students are being unfairly targeted for discipline. “Anyone in his right mind knows that these [disciplined] students are extremely disruptive,” he says. He overheard a fifth-grade boy use extremely foul language to threaten a girl. (“I wanted to throw him against the locker,” Mr. Benner recalls.) The boy’s teacher told him that she felt powerless to punish the misbehavior.

“This will be one of my black men who ends up in prison after raping a woman,” he observes. Racist? Many would so characterize the comment. But Mr. Benner is black himself—and fed up with the excuses for black misbehavior. “They’re trying to pull one over on us. Black folks are drinking the Kool-Aid; this ‘let-them-clown’ philosophy could have been devised by the KKK.”

The research base for the Obama administration’s claim that minority students receive harsher punishment than whites for “the same or similar infractions” is laughably weak. None of the studies alleging disproportionate discipline actually observed students’ behavior or examined students’ full disciplinary histories, including classroom interactions and warnings, teacher and counselor observations, and efforts at informal resolution that preceded more formal measures. A principal might have had two dozen conversations with a student before deciding to suspend him; none of those conversations would have been included in the researchers’ models.

Disproportionate rates of minority discipline were already ending school officials’ careers before the feds stepped in. Now that Washington has entered the fray, the pressure to bring those rates into alignment has grown even more intense. In Christina, Delaware, one of the districts under Education Department investigation, a six-year-old white boy faced expulsion in 2009 for bringing to school a Cub Scout tool (“a combination of folding fork, knife, and spoon,” reported a local TV station) with which to eat his pudding. After public outcry, the district removed kindergarten and first-grade students from its zero-tolerance policy for weapons.

Also in 2009, however, the Christina school district expelled an 11-year-old black girl after a box-cutter fell out of her jacket pocket. The girl said that she had no idea how the box cutter had got there, according to Wilmington’s News Journal. The U.S. Department of Education presumably chose Christina to investigate because it agrees with the girl’s mother, who brought a complaint to the Delaware Human Relations Commission, that only racism can explain why a school would distinguish a six-year-old’s possession of an improvised pudding spoon from an 11-year-old’s possession of a box cutter.

Might the school officials know something that federal bureaucrats do not regarding the girl’s previous run-ins with authority and the likelihood that she had no knowledge of the box cutter? Not in the eyes of a Washington paper-pusher, who takes his own omniscience as a given.

“Teachers are petrified to discipline students,” says a high school science teacher in Queens, New York, who blogs under the name “Chaz.” Students will tell a teacher to shut up or curse him when asked to open their notebooks, but the teacher’s supervisors will look the other way. The amount of insubordination now tolerated in New York schools is destroying them, says a former head of discipline for the city’s school system. Yet in June of this year, the schools chancellor proposed to officially ban suspensions for all but the most extreme infractions. Teachers would no longer be allowed to remove from class students who disrupted their fellow students’ ability to learn, engaged in obscene behavior, or were insubordinate. Advocates and the city council speaker, who is the leading mayoral candidate, complained that the changes did not go far enough.

The clear losers in all of this are children. Protecting well-behaved students’ ability to learn is a school’s highest obligation, and it is violated when teachers lose the option of removing chronically disruptive students from class. Nor does keeping those unruly students in class do them any favors. School is the last chance to socialize a student who repeatedly curses his teacher, say, since his parent is obviously failing at the job. Eliminate serious consequences for bad behavior, and you are sending a child into the world who has learned precisely the opposite of what he needs to know about life.

Though Barack Obama broached the taboo topic of personal responsibility on the 2008 campaign trail, now that he’s in the White House, he and his underlings have maintained a resolute silence on the behavioral components of inequality. Mr. Duncan’s public pronouncements have avoided any mention of what students and parents can do for themselves, such as paying attention in class, respecting your teacher, and studying, or monitoring your child’s attendance, homework, and comportment. Such an exclusive emphasis on victimhood plays well with Mr. Obama’s base, but it seriously distorts reality.

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Obama Administration Aggravates The Minority Achievement Gap, Increases Risk Of School Violence

The attempt to generate inter-group disharmony is of course pure Marxism.  It's deliberate, not foolish

If you want to fix the achievement gap between black and white students, you must first fix the behaviors that contribute to it, like the disorder and violence in inner-city classrooms that make it hard to teach or learn in such schools, and disproportionately affect the black students in such schools.

But the Obama administration is doing just the opposite, discouraging school districts from imposing meaningful discipline on violent or disruptive black students if they have already disciplined “too many” black students, as Heather MacDonald notes in the current issue of City Journal. Since more black kids come from high-crime areas, it is only natural that infraction rates are higher among black kids than, say, Asian kids (Asians have much lower infraction rates than whites, who in turn have much lower infraction rates than blacks, notes MacDonald).

So it is entirely foreseeable, and not the product of racism by a school, that more black kids than white kids get disciplined for misconduct in many schools. The Obama administration argues that higher minority suspension rates presumptively violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by constituting “disparate impact,” even though the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander v. Sandoval (2001) that such “disparate impact” doesn’t violate Title VI.

Such discipline is not racism, or something that is harmful to minorities in the long run; instead, discipline is a valuable form of instruction that both teaches students how to interact properly with others (a skill that a kid will need both to maximize his own learning, and to handle a job when he reaches adulthood) and also teaches them essential moral values.

Depriving disruptive or violent minority students of such discipline based on their race is itself a form of racial discrimination, since it deprives them of “equal access” to an essential educational “benefit,” namely, moral instruction and instruction in how to get along with others. See Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629, 650 (1999)(civil rights laws forbid denying students access to an educational “benefit” based on their sex or race). Employers require their employees to follow rules and get along with co-workers, and expect them to have “soft people skills,” all traits that are instilled through discipline in school and in the home.

But the Obama administration can’t see this, since it is wearing ideological blinders. Contrary to what it seems to think, it does not help a black kid if a school official is prevented from disciplining another kid for beating him up just because the kid who beat him up is also black. (Violence is usually committed against other members of the perpetrator’s own race.) Doing so is an example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that undermines educational achievement among African-Americans.

The State of Maryland plans to do something even more extreme, proposing a rule  that would mandate racial quotas in school discipline. As I previously noted, quotas in school discipline clash with a federal appeals court ruling that schools cannot use racial proportionality rules for school discipline, since that violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. See People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (7th Cir. 1997). That court ruling also said that a school cannot use race in student discipline to offset racial disparities not rooted in school officials’ racism (known as “disparate impact”).

Racial “disparities” in student discipline rates are not the product of racism by school officials, but rather reflect higher rates of violence and other disruptive conduct among African-American students. (The Supreme Court’s Armstrong decision emphasized that crime rates are not the same for different races, and that racial disparities in crime rates and conviction rates are not proof of racial discrimination.) Stopping school officials from disciplining black students who violate school rules just because they previously disciplined more black than white students is as crazy as ordering police to stop arresting black criminals just because they previously arrested more blacks than whites.

As the Manhattan Institute’s MacDonald notes,

Since 2008, more than 530 people under the age of 21 have been killed in the city [of Chicago], mostly by their peers, according to the Chicago Reporter; virtually all the perpetrators were black or Hispanic. In 2009, the widely publicized beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert by his fellow students sent Duncan hurrying back to the Windy City, accompanied by Attorney General Eric Holder, to try to contain the fallout in advance of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics (see “Chicago’s Real Crime Story,” Winter 2010).

Between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white ones were arrested at school, mostly for battery; black students outnumbered whites by four to one. (In response to the inevitable outcry over the arrest data, a Chicago teacher commented: “I feel bad for kids being arrested, . . . but I feel worse seeing a kid get his head smashed on the floor and almost die. Or a teacher being threatened with his life.”). . .

Nationally, the picture is no better. The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well. . .

Aaron Benner, a fifth-grade teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota, scoffs at the notion that minority students are being unfairly targeted for discipline. “Anyone in his right mind knows that these [disciplined] students are extremely disruptive,” he says. Like districts across the county, the St. Paul public school system has been on a mission to lower the black suspension rate, following complaints by local activists and black parents. A highly regarded principal lost his job because his school had “too many” suspensions of black second- and fourth-graders. The school system has sent its staff to $350,000 worth of “cultural-proficiency” training, where they learned to “examine the presence and role of ‘Whiteness.’ ” The district spent another $2 million or so to implement an anti-suspension behavioral-modification program embraced by the Obama administration.

Benner sees the consequences of this anti-discipline push nearly every day in the worsening behavior of students. He overheard a fifth-grade boy tell a girl: “Bitch, I’ll fuck you and suck you.” (“I wanted to throw him against the locker,” Benner recalls.) The boy’s teacher told Benner that she felt powerless to punish the misbehavior. “This will be one of my black men who ends up in prison after raping a woman,” observes Benner.

Racist? Many would so characterize the comment. But Benner is black himself—and fed up with the excuses for black misbehavior. He attended one of the district’s cultural-proficiency sessions, where an Asian teacher asked: “How do I help the student who blurts out answers and disrupts the class?” The black facilitator reminded her: “That’s what black culture is”—an answer that echoes the Obama administration’s admonitions to teachers. “I should have said: ‘How many of you shouted out in college?’ ” Benner remarks.

“They’re trying to pull one over on us. Black folks are drinking the Kool-Aid; this ‘let-them-clown’ philosophy could have been devised by the KKK.” . .school systems are jettisoning whole swaths of their discipline practices in order to avoid disparate impact. . .According to a recent hire, a Baltimore high school now asks prospective teachers: “How do you respond to being mistreated? What do you do if someone cusses you out?” The proper answer is: “Nothing.”

Predictably, disorder has arisen. A 34-year veteran of the school had to be taken from the premises in an ambulance after a student shattered the glass in a classroom display case.

At a widely-read education blog, a teacher describes the violence and disorder that occurred when her school adopted racial quotas in school discipline:

I was the homeroom teacher in an incident in a school that tried to implement just this criteria for discipline. One kid (scrawny 7th grader) had the {bleep} beaten out of him by a 6-foot, fully-muscled 7th grader – two different races. The little kid was suspended before his copious blood had been cleaned up off the floor. The big kid never did have ANY punishment – that particular ethnic group had been disciplined too many times.

Need I mention that it was a tough month, as word quickly spread that violence against the “under-disciplined” ethnic group was treated as a freebie?

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