Dr. Abdullah-Johnson says Special Education is being used as a weapon of mass destruction particularly against Black boys in schools, setting up a situation of premature incarceration.
“Once they get diagnosed with that learning disability or that mental retardation or that emotional or behavioral disturbance, once that label gets put on them, they are automatically deemed repulsive to the school’s environment. Once they’re deemed repulsive all of the teachers, all of the staff, all the faculty in that building is going to treat them in such a way that it makes him feel like he doesn’t belong there. That leads to dropout,” explains Dr. Abdullah-Johnson.
In many school districts whether Black students make up the racial majority or minority, they are still more likely to get suspended for minor or major infractions moreso than White students. According to the Education Department’s Civil Rights division in 2009-2010 in New York City Public Schools, Blacks made up 30 percent of enrollment but 46 percent of suspensions; in Chicago 45 percent of enrollment but 76 percent of suspensions and in Houston, 26 percent and 45 percent respectively.
Community Asset Development Redefining Education (CADRE), a Los Angeles-based grassroots organization of parents along with dozens of other community groups have banded together as part of the Solutions Not Suspensions campaign, calling for a moratorium on out-of-school suspensions that disproportionately affect Black and Latino students. The campaign, launched August 21 is led by the Dignity in Schools Campaign and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign.
School districts must develop and implement strategies with the help of parents and the community focused on keeping children in school and in classroom instead of pushing them out Rob McGowan, associate director of organizing for CADRE told The Final Call.
“In the high schools that we were working closely in, we saw that African Americans comprised of 19 to 20 percent of the population, but yet represented 51 to 54 percent of the suspensions,” says Mr. McGowan who along with CADRE has been tackling this issue for years. “The disproportionality is a huge thing for us to deal with. We feel like people don’t understand what’s happening in our communities, don’t understand the reasons why kids act out, why kids do the things that they do. If you don’t understand the community, where they come from and the issues that they’re dealing with at a very young age, then you will see some of their actions as being disrespectful, being defiant,” said Mr. McGowan adding that the main reason for suspensions in Los Angeles is “willful defiance”.
Mr. McGowan says willful defiance can be “anything” from not having a pen, pencil or paper for class, not wearing a school uniform and talking back which can lead to suspension.
Dr. Abdullah-Johnson says, there are other contributing factors responsible for the academic failures of Black children that are community based and family centered. Black parents are guilty of academic neglect whether they are rich, middle class or poor, he says.
“With the poor Black parents they’re so busy struggling to keep the bills paid and I can’t knock them for that. They often don’t schedule enough time to sit down with the kids and talk about school, talk about life, check the homework, go to the report card conferences. For the poor Black parents, they’re just straight up stressed out,” says Dr. Abdullah-Johnson. Emotional deficiencies in the home or environment lead to poor academic outcome in school, he adds.
In “readiness to learn” criteria, Black children were twice as likely to live in a household in which no parent had fulltime or year round employment in 2008 notes the Dept. of Education Civil Rights Division. In 2007, one out of every three Black children lived in poverty compared with one out of every 10 White children.
That still does not underestimate the importance of a safe, challenging and caring school environment with teachers that want to truly educate Black children.
“Just because a teacher is a nationally certified teacher and great in math does not mean she can teach “Mike Mike” math very well. There is a cultural relevance component of this that gets beyond what they’re learning in the college of education,” says Dr. Chandra Gill, author, educator and founder of Blackademically Speaking.
There is often an expectation by both White and Black teachers that Black students are not meant to excel academically, she continued.
How do we deal with this issue of low expectation? Dr. Gill asked. “We have to deal with this thing understanding that a lot of our teachers are still siding with the societal norms that suggest African American students are still inferior based off of these fallacies of African Americans not being good enough,” she says.