LIBERAL COMPASSION: How Public Schools Have Become the Social Justice-to-Prison Pipeline
Does anything reveal the injustice of social justice better than inner city public schools?
Racial-grievance hitmen, like Attorney General Eric Holder, spew idiotic theories about an inherently racist system that funnels minority children from schools to prisons.
On planet earth, the exact opposite is true.
Dangerous neighborhoods controlled by criminals-at-large send swarms of juvenile delinquents to schools. School administrators bend over backwards not to expel them. Although hoodlums sabotage education for impoverished minority students who want to learn, liberals consider that fact to be a minor inconvenience. More students in the classroom mean more funding from taxpayers and more bureaucratic jobs for liberals.
In 2007, Little Rock, Arkansas, had the city’s first black majority school board and a black superintendent, Roy Brooks. Under Brooks’ leadership, academic performance improved and fiscal management became more efficient.
Nevertheless, Mr. Brooks infuriated black liberals by eliminating 100 jobs that were office and non-teaching positions. He also closed three schools.
Instead of celebrating Brooks for raising test scores while reducing bureaucracy, the school board’s black majority fired him.
Five years later, the Arkansas Times unveiled “a nightmare of abuse, bullying, and sexual harassment [perpetrated by black students on] Latino students” in Little Rock schools. On the bright side, the district’s bureaucracy was back to normal.
That same year, 2012, the Philadelphia Inquirer won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in honor of its series entitled an “Assault on Learning.” The coverage exposed shocking violence that was going unreported in Philadelphia’s schools. Two years later, a 17-year-old student knocked out a conflict resolution specialist employed by the district to keep juvenile delinquents off the police blotter. Once upon a time, competent principals specialized in resolving school conflicts. Before social justice was invented, police specialized in resolving violent assaults.
Environments outside schools create the dysfunctional behavior and values hoodlums bring. Public schools just need their bodies to create quasi-jobs for liberals.
Urban schools across the nation (and the Department of Justice) are scrambling to hide the lawless consequences of social justice. Meanwhile, teachers working in these liberal asylums are literally being diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Last week in Maryland, a white teacher suffered a brutal attack after a black student took offense at a word the teacher read in class. The media and the school will not confirm the classified word, but have suggested the student misinterpreted it.
Completely dysfunctional behavior like this plagues urban classrooms everywhere. However, this attack happened in the same district where — just last month — a middle school took eleven year olds to hear Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan call whites “crackers” and encourage blacks to “tear this goddamn country up!” No wonder the president of the Baltimore Teachers Union found it hard to believe that in 2013 only four assaults occurred every day on Baltimore school employees. Marietta English expected the number would have been higher.
Recently in Paterson, New Jersey, a 16-year-old freshman slammed and punched a 62-year-old teacher at John F. Kennedy High School. The teacher never attempted to defend himself. If he had, his self-defense might have ignited a Department of Justice investigation for civil rights violations.
Just five days before that attack, a student at the same school bit a security officer on the stomach. The officer was trying to subdue the student who was destroying the nurse’s office.
A retired teacher from JFK, Lee McNulty, blew the whistle on the school’s insanity one year ago. According to coverage of McNulty’s disclosure, “students regularly fought, had sex in stairwells, roamed the hallways and cut months of class but still graduated.” McNulty asserted that “the administration was far more concerned with presenting a veneer of normalcy…than it was in educating and controlling the mayhem.”
In response to McNulty’s leak, Superintendent Donnie Evans said, “[JFK is] a very different school today…because of leadership…and security changes and a relentless focus on improving student achievement.”
Apparently, JFK’s student body hasn’t read that memo.
Based on my own experience inside the walls of an urban high school, “normalcy” for my freshman English class included a 19-year-old freshman on parole for robbery, his pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend, a 15-year-old gang member sporting gunshot wounds and multiple arrests, a 17-year-old severe drug addict abandoned in foster care, a homebound 16 year old awaiting trial for murder, and about five female teenagers with no impulse control.
Whenever defiant kids were not suspended, they vacillated between begging not to be kicked out of class or pleading to be sent out of class. Either way, filling out the required documentation for stupid or hostile disturbances during class meant more wasted time for students who wanted to learn.
Body cameras could document all the evidence on video, but the civil rights of hoodlums might get violated.
No meaningful consequences exist anyway. Hoodlums are compelled to come to school, so they come to socialize, commit crimes, or cause disruptions. Social justice is synonymous with sharing misery. Denying minority children options to escape these insane asylums simply ensures paychecks for worthless public school bureaucrats. The sadistic liberals responsible for this injustice are the other criminals who belong in prison.
