Racism - or wouldn't it be nice if the kids had a clue what that meant

A local columnist writes that we need to educate black males. I agree. I doubt she will be hit with charges of racism as she is a black, liberal, female.

But I find it rather ironic.

Earlier this week a friend (white) was visiting a classroom (not hers) where the teacher was also white and mentioned that one of the indicators that the state and federal government look at to determine whether a school has passed AYP is whether black males have passed certain tests.

This was immediately met with cries of racism.

So, it doesn't matter that black males do worse on the tests than white males, we should not segregate people by identifiable characteristics to help each group attain the same end result - we should just blindly keep on doing it the same unsuccessful way we have been going about it for years. If it helped to group people by height to determine how to teach them, I am all for it.

To be fair - these students are like my own students who are convinced that it is proof of the racism in our county that there are proportionately more whites in this county than in the state (and hence, proportionately fewer blacks). It pains me that they haven't grasped the idea of mathematical averaging and cannot understand that there are other counties in this state with proportionately more blacks than the state average. And that isn't racism either.

Part of the fall out of crying racism constantly, besides demeaning the concept, is that if a teacher corrects a student of another race for behavior that violates school policy and is inappropriate whether you are black, white or purple - and the student accuses the teacher of racism - the entire lesson (about appropriate behavior) is lost.