Racist Teachers Part 798

We're here again.

Jamie Whyte in the Times on the 'London Schools And The Black Child' conference, and the pre-conference report, which inspired headlines like "Black boys betrayed by racist school system". Can you guess the newspaper ?

These results suggest that teachers do not have lower expectations of black students than white, that they do not show lower levels of care. When this was the only serious data available, how could anyone draw the opposite conclusion? It requires a scandalous degree of either stupidity or mendacity.

The victims of this fraud are not only the teachers falsely accused of racism, or the ratepayers of London, whose money has been wasted on this bogus research. It is anyone who genuinely wants to know why black boys are failing at school.

There was at least one dissenting voice at the conference.

BBC sports presenter and former Tottenham Hotspur striker Garth Crooks said there was a direct link between films and rap music glorifying violence and the drift of black boys away from education and into crime and violence.

'There is an epidemic out there, and it is killing some of our children. Do you think there could be a correlation between this and the growing dissipation of our cultural values?' he said.

Crooks joins Tony Sewell and Guardian journalist Joseph Harker in the awkward squad who think there may be factors other than the obvious racism of the average London teacher at work.

Sewell - The gospel I preach is a simple one. It asks black young men to look beyond the street and beyond immediate gratification. It asks some hard questions about their own responsibilities: homework, bedtime, respect for peers and adults, good manners, self-control and how to succeed in the system. Nobody is asking our boys these questions. We just get more politicians telling them they're victims of racism.

Harker - At the top of the list must surely be the breakdown of the black family: 50% of Caribbean mothers under 35 have never been married - five times the white figure - and the number is increasing.

The conference recommended that teachers should be paid differently according to their skin colour, and that black children should not be excluded for a first offence unless the offence involved a knife or a gun.

The latter recommendation soon flushed out the [irony]closet racists[/irony].

Behaviour management and discipline are a huge issue and the idea that a pupil should only be permanantly excluded on the first offence if he or she is carrying a gun or a knife is frankly terrifying. Words fail me at what teachers are expected to put up with in the name of inclusion.

God, that is just so blatant !


UPDATE - the Bunny isn't too impressed either. And let's hope this isolated incident didn't involve a knife or a gun. (No, Judge Hathorne, I wasn't implying anything about the ethnicity of the boy - just a comment on the exclusion rule ... what's that bonfire and stake for ?)