ANOTHER LOOK AT THE TAMIR RICE KILLING

Post by Maple Heights African American Gazette.

NEWSLETTER: CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND: THE OPPORTUNITY GAP

Newsletter - Children's Defense Fund

 

 

 

The Opportunity Gap

In the spring of 1954, like so many Black families, mine waited anxiously for the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. My father and I talked about it and what it would mean for my future and the future of millions of other Black children who were attending segregated but unequal Black schools. He died the week before Brown was decided. But I and many other children were able, in later years, to walk through the new and heavy doors that Brown slowly and painfully opened.     It was a transforming time that set into motion a spate of other challenges to Jim Crow laws and yet sixty years after that historic May decision the doors to true educational equality have never fully opened wide enough for millions of American children to walk through especially those living in poverty. The most recent findings from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), called the “richest, fullest” collection so far measuring education access and equity in our nation’s public schools, show many children are still receiving an unequal education.     This is the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement.     The new Office for Civil Rights data cover the 2011-2012 school year and are the first universal data collection since 2000, with information about all 97,000 schools in the nation’s 16,500 school districts serving 49 million students. Some information was collected for the first time, including one of the most startling findings: new data on preschool suspensions that show Black preschoolers are 18 percent of children enrolled in preschool programs in public schools, but 48 percent of children suspended more than once. While the data show only six percent of the districts offering preschool in public schools reported that they had suspended preschoolers, there is something terribly wrong when we are suspending any children from preschool in the first place. We now know Black children are more likely to be pushed out of school before they’ve even made it to kindergarten, and other numbers in the recent OCR release confirm those disparities do not go away.     Overall, Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than White students. Boys receive more than two out of three suspensions, but Black girls are suspended at higher rates than girls of any other race or ethnicity and higher rates than most boys. Students with disabilities (those served by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) also are more than twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension as students without disabilities. And inequities in school discipline continue right up through the most consequential responses: Black students represent 16 percent of student enrollment but make up 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement and 31 percent of school-related arrests.     These differences in discipline can’t be explained simply by differences in student behavior. The Equity Project at Indiana University has reviewed the research on the role of student behavior and characteristics in disparate suspension rates and found that in fact schools and districts that have taken seriously their responsibility to educate all of their students have seen significant improvements by adjusting the policies and practices of adults. Both Buffalo, New York Public Schools and Denver, Colorado Public Schools are heralded as examples of school systems’ ability to change to better serve students. The Children’s Defense Fund and AASA, the School Superintendents Association, have been funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies to work with ten school districts from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania whose leaders are committed to reforming their school discipline policies to reduce the use of exclusionary discipline and address racial disparities.     Children’s unequal chances in school go well beyond discipline. Black, Latino, American Indian, and Native Alaskan students have less access to experienced teachers than White students. While most teachers are certified, nearly half a million students nationwide attend schools where 60 percent or fewer teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements, and racial disparities are particularly acute in schools where uncertified and unlicensed teachers are concentrated. Black students are more than four times as likely and Latino students are twice as likely as White students to attend schools where 80 percent or fewer teachers meet these requirements. There are also teacher salary disparities: Nearly one in four districts with two or more high schools reports a teacher salary gap of more than $5,000 between high schools with the highest and the lowest Black and Latino student enrollments.     All students don’t have equal opportunities to take the most challenging courses to prepare them for college and career. While 81 percent of Asian American and 71 percent of White high school students attend high schools where the full range of math and science courses are offered (Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics), fewer than half of American Indian and Native Alaskan high school students have access to the full range in their schools, and Black students, Latino students, students with disabilities, and English language learner students also all have less access. Black and Latino students are also disproportionately less likely to be enrolled in at least one Advanced Placement (AP) course. The new data also show students with disabilities, English learners, and Black students are all more likely to be held back each year. Twelve percent of Black students were retained in ninth grade— about double the overall rate.     Six decades into the “post-Brown” era, will the doors of opportunity finally open wide or continue to stay half shut on our watch? Most students know the phrase “knowledge is power.” CDF is happy that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is taking new steps to expand the range of data about inequalities that still exist in our nation’s schools. But now that we have more knowledge—what are we going to do with it? If you are interested in learning more and taking action, you can find out how the schools in your community are treating their students at the Civil Rights Data Collection’s website, and you can find new guidance on school discipline and positive alternatives to suspensions and other exclusionary discipline practices at the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments’ website. It’s time to close the opportunity gap and fulfill the promise of education as a great equalizer and a strong pathway to opportunity for all of our nation’s children

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN SAYS AMERICA HAS A SPIRITUAL PROBLEM

Newsletter from the Children's Defense Fund

 

Numb - Spiritually Dead - Nation

Ka’Nard Allen has been shot twice in his 10-year-old life. On May 12 he went with his mother to the annual Mother’s Day second line parade in New Orleans. When two gunmen shot into the line of participants—men, women and children—Ka’Nard’s cheek was struck by a bullet. Eighteen other people were wounded including a 10-year-old girl. Less than a year ago, at Ka’Nard’s 10^th birthday party in his front yard, his five-year-old cousin Brianna Allen was fatally shot by an AK-47, and he was shot in the neck. 

Now, with his 11^th birthday coming up on May 29, Ka’Nard’s mother doesn’t know where to have the party. He wants to go to a hotel, swim in the pool, and stay overnight, he told a reporter for the Times-Picayune, but his mother said she can’t afford it. She doesn’t know where to let him play that will be safe, and he remains at risk because she can’t afford to move. 

I have written this before and I write it again now: The psychological and emotional toll of gun violence on children, whether they are bystanders or victims, can be overwhelming and last for years.   

A recent screening of 232 New Orleans middle school students who were part of a teen pregnancy prevention program found that 44 percent had someone close to them murdered, 29 percent had witnessed an assault with a weapon, and 14 percent had witnessed a murder. More than half the children classified concerns about “personal safety” as a source of worry, more than twice the number who worried about “being unloved.” “At least a third of our kids are experiencing symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which on a simple level means it is hard to attend school and do well,” said Dr. Denese Shervington, a psychiatrist who heads the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies that ran the program and conducted the screening.

John C. Raphael, the pastor of a church in the neighborhood where Ka’Nard lives, told Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Cass on assignment for the Children’s Defense Fund that children who regularly hear gunfire and see dead bodies on the street become acclimatized to violence and learn that violence is the way to solve conflicts. “They’re afraid but they can’t escape so they harden themselves to survive. They become numb to what should be emotionally disturbing and accept it as a norm, as the community does.” 

As a nation we seem to be hardened and numb to what should be emotionally disturbing when we cannot legislate the most modest and reasonable measures for national gun safety even after children in as seemingly safe a place as Newtown, Connecticut, far from an inner city, can be shot down in school. We are numb when the same child can be shot one year at his own birthday party and shot again the next year at a Mother’s Day parade and both shootings are just another day on our cities’ streets. Why are we not all calling our legislators and expressing outrage? How can we let the voices of gun dealers and manufacturers drown out the cries of children?

Pastor Raphael pointed out another consequence of rampant gun violence in places like New Orleans, Chicago, and Newark: Young men become locked into a situation where they feel they have to retaliate to protect themselves and to be respected. When a culture teaches its children that violence is a way to resolve conflicts, “if your brother or friend is shot, you think you have to strike back,” he said. “Sometimes, the family members or friends of the shooter assume you will retaliate and go after you preemptively.” 

Retaliation is said to be the motive for the Mother’s Day shooting. Police said that the brothers, aged 19 and 24, who are charged with the crime, were part of a loosely organized neighborhood drug gang and were shooting at a member or members of a rival group. The shooting was related to two previous ones, police said. The childhood experiences of the accused brothers have not been revealed, but it would take numbness to violence to shoot into a crowd with women and children. 

In Pastor Raphael’s view, New Orleans “has a spiritual problem. It is beyond criminal. It is a spiritual problem when in a high population area you see children and you shoot into them.”

America has a spiritual problem when it protects guns rather than children. Since 1963, more than 166,000 children and teens have died from guns on American soil—more than triple the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars combined. It is beyond criminal that we allow so many children to suffer and die. It is spiritual deadness. 

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GUN VIOLENCE AND MORALITY

Child Watch® Column: "What Killed President Kennedy and Trayvon Martin?"

Release date: February 22, 2013

"February 26 will mark one year since 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a gun wielded by self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman after he saw Trayvon walking home from a 7-Eleven with a bag of Skittles and bottle of Arizona iced tea.

 

 

Black children, youths, and families know first-hand that the killing of Black children by gun violence is not new but a relentlessly unreported and under-reported plague that has been disproportionately snuffing out Black child lives for a very long time. Fifteen percent of children and teens are Black but 45 percent of all children and youths killed by guns in 2010 were Black. Black boys 15 to 19 years old were 28 times more likely than White boys the same age to be killed in a gun homicide."

 

 

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CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND:

"Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind^® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.

 

 

Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post."

 

 

Related:

 

The Fifth Column dedicates page to Trayvon Martin

 

 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.