Time out!
At some point, one might think that the teachers union would fire off a tart letter to Madison school superintendent Carlton Jenkins. Copy school board president Ali Muldrow.
“Dear Supt. Jenkins,” this missive from Madison Teachers Inc. would begin. “Please stop playing the race card on our member teachers.”
Because our Woke school boss confuses correlation with causation. Like all good critical race theorists, he’s big on disproportionality. If A doesn’t equal B, he goes all Al Sharpton.
Today’s subject is time outs in an empty room for troublemakers or, rarely, restraint. Restraint being just holding back a kid so he doesn’t bust another kids nose.
So here’s the math: Black students = 19% of enrollment but = 48% of the kids restrained or kept in an empty room — a room, btw, that is above ground, lighted, and is not dripping with toads. That rings Jenkins’ school bell.
“I don’t believe everybody out there is racist,” Jenkins says, before getting to the inevitable but — “but … when something’s racist, you got to call it racist. And we have some acts that are racist, point and blank.”
— Carleton Jenkins, superintendent of schools, Madison WI
Who is doing all this restraining and secluding? Madison’s unionized, Black Lives Matter, Rainbow Coalition, transgender-affirming educators! The MTI members who vote Barack Obama and Mandela Barnes. Whose union endorsed Ali Muldrow over David Blaska. Those teachers! Committing acts that are racist, point and blank.
That MTI union letter might point out that its members are merely trying to preserve order in the classroom, protect their students, and maintain a learning environment. The letter might instruct Dr. Jenkins that its members are trying to instill self-discipline — they key to success — in the disruptive students. A skill set apparently not taught in the home.
The Dane County Board is poised to lop another floor over the proposed new jail. They started with seven floors in 2019, took it down to six in March and now is down to five floors. At this rate, expect them to retrofit a food cart on Wilson Street.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Which is why we regret Tim Michels’ loss in Tuesday’s gubernatorial election. He promised universal school choice. Reflexively, Madison voted Democrat, thereby assuring the near-monopoly of government schools that prioritize social engineering over academics.
Blaska Policy Werkes 
30 responses to “Madison teachers union, take a letter”
Similarly, there is a minority group that commits the majority of crimes. Incarcerating them, is also r@cist. A least in Dane County, when incarcerated in the Dane County Bed and Breakfast, they are residents.
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AT least in Dane County, when incarcerated in the Dane County Bed and Breakfast, they are residents. (when is the Squire going to let us edit our posts?)
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Dear Mr. Jenkins
** I’M WHITE PRIVILEGE **
I’LL BE HERE TO BLAME FOR YOUR STUDENTS POOR LIFE CHOICES!!
Sincerely
White FOLK
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I get a kick out of NFL players who sport “End Racism” on the backs of their helmets.
Asians comprise .1% of NFL players.
Blacks comprise almost 60%.
End Racism indeed.
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The Gotch wants the Milwaukee Bucks and the 13 Time World Champion Green Bay Packers to look like him.
Is that a bad thing…?
The Gotch
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The Gotch was hoping you’d pick this up, Blaska; you didn’t (heh!) disappoint!
Anywho; the Pachyderm in the room?
These numbers reflect (READ: SKEW LOWER) how many years of pulling punches/metered discipline…I mean…responses to…um…behavioral instances in the service of the wildly popular BEP?
MONEY QUOTE: We know behavior education is complex work that happens in classrooms and cafeterias, on buses and playgrounds, and even offices and auditoriums.
Incuriously missing? PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT/RESPONSIBILITY and the steadfast refusal to even consider neither it nor the behavioral and cultural pathologies of certain demographics.
Why? Because that discussion would be RAYcist.
Paging Dr. Jeffrey Copeland; please pick up the whi…er…Rainbow-Colored phone in the lobby.
Anywho, coupla observations/studies you may want to peruse before they get cancelled:
The Impact Of ABSENT FATHERS The Mental Health Of Black Boys
Baseball Says It Wants More American Blacks In The Game, BUT CHOOSES TO IGNORE A Likely Reason Why they’re Not
The Gotch
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Just curious! When is Affirmative Action going to be enforced in the NBA- NFL and College Basketball!!
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Never! move along now.
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Dave you have it half right, but because of myopia that prevents you from seeing other peoples’ suffering, you are also half wrong.
Yes, MMSD’s Kendi-driven philosophy is crazy that any disproportionate outcomes, such as the higher proportion of blacks to theirs in the school population sent to seclusion rooms, must be the result of racism today by District teachers and administrators.
To your point, the makeup of the staff, and whoever’s still left after the last four years of turmoil, makes that vanishingly unlikely, and Dr. Jenkin’s and Ms. Muldrow’s racism charges against teachers scurrilous.
However, just stopping there ignores the deeper reality that it is the unfortunate conditions that these troubled kids were raised in of broken homes, poverty, neglect, and yes and racism by society, along with the result that they’ve never been taught to read, that is inseparable from why they exhibit antisocial behaviors that leave a teacher – the innocent person at the end of the line — who is left to “solve” it all.
To that, years of disrespect, low pay or no support from the District or administrators, and worse the District’s deliberate policies that have made maintaining discipline next to impossible, have depleted the schools of teachers who have the special skill-sets to, in some of the less extreme cases of disorder, to defuse the situation.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the primary source of the problem is these troubled kids impoverished upbringing, along with gross District mismanagement, and, until that is addressed, discipline will be more and more challenging. That is what you miss, namely our obligation to put the talent, skills and resources of our rich society to begin to turn that around.
In the meantime, of course, until that is done, just like you say, arbitrary limits on seclusion to avoid the appearance of disproportionate outcomes will only lead to more chaos in the classrooms, less learning for the rest of the kids, and accelerating flight from the district of families who value education, namely a death spiral like happened in Milwaukee.
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Pointing at poverty misses the problem. There is a cultural issue that unfortunately, can’t be discussed. Using recent census data, out of more than 10 million low-income working families with children, 39% were headed by single working mothers. For African Americans, it is 65%, compared with whites at 36%. Among all children living only with their mothers, 38.1% lived in poverty. In contrast, only 7.5% of children in two-parent families were considered poor. 57.6% of African American children have absent fathers vs.20.7% of Caucasians. Households without fathers are four times more likely to live below the poverty line.
In 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was 19 percent. Now, for all racial and ethnic groups combined, 39.6 percent of births in the United States are out-of-wedlock. The number for blacks is 69.4 percent; for whites, 28.2 percent; for Asian Americans, 11.7 percent. Children of fatherless households are twice as likely to drop out of school. 70% of America’s youth living in state-run institutions are from fatherless families.
So yes, there is poverty, but I’m not sure what can be done about it.
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Pointing at poverty misses the problem. There is a cultural issue that, unfortunately, can’t be discussed. Using recent census data, out of more than 10 million low-income working families with children, 39% were headed by single working mothers. For African Americans, it is 65%, compared with whites at 36%. Among all children living only with their mothers, 38.1% lived in poverty. In contrast, only 7.5% of children in two-parent families were considered poor. 57.6% of African American children have absent fathers vs. 20.7% of Caucasians. Households without fathers are four times more likely to live below the poverty line.
In 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was 19 percent. Now, for all racial and ethnic groups combined, 39.6 percent of births in the United States are out-of-wedlock. The number for blacks is 69.4 percent; for whites, 28.2 percent; for Asian Americans, 11.7 percent. Children of fatherless households are twice as likely to drop out of school. 70% of America’s youth living in state-run institutions are from fatherless families.
So yes there is poverty, but I’m not sure what can be done about it.
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Peter, Peter, Peter: No one gets impoverished upbringing more than Blaska. How many times have I said it’s easy to teach professors’ kids but not kids who’ve never been read to”? That is exactly WHY teaching discipline, self-restraint, stick-to-itiveness is so important. Carlteton Jenkins/Ali Muldrow are hurting the very kids they purport to care about.
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Dave and Tom Raschke criticize my point that, while disproportionate black seclusion is not, as Muldrow/Jenkins/Staff charge, ipso facto systemic racism, the legacy of slavery and racism in America has crippled African American family life to the point that an underclass has been created trapping generation after generation in it. Something must be done to extend those suffering a helping hand.
Dave and Tom respond that my argument is refuted because African Americans are not the only ones in poverty, and those other cultures have done quite well.
That misses my point. But, first, let me underscore theirs and interject one factoid. Yes, many S.E Asian immigrant families are horribly poor, yet their kids are eating the lunch of white American kids.
But, most of them come here with intact families who carry with them a strong work ethic that especially values education. The culture thing that Tom rightly focuses on.
Next, though, could I inject another factoid. New African immigrants, with far blacker skin that African Americans, perform just as well as any other recent immigrants. That should dispel any false idea that the “cultural” problem that Tom points to is a black issue.
Instead, the core of the problem is that for hundreds of years, American society did systematically tear apart and undermine the black family and then oppress and impoverish the generations that followed, only slowly abating in the last few decades, but even though most of the help extended has been to the middle class African American, who are most just like us, not those in the intractable underclass.
We, in the sense of our ancestors, willfully did that to them, and we have a moral obligation — just as we would have to anyone in need — to extend a hand to help them escape the terrible conditions that we forced upon them.
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You wrote that the undermining of the black family is “…only slowly abating in the last few decades… “. In the article below from 2014, Thomas Sowell writes the opposite, that it has been degrading since the 1960 civil rights movement. He states, “Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.” Sowell finishes by stating “liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.” One example of the continued decline: In the MMSD, 95% of black students are not at grade level or better. Again, I don’t think this will change without a cultural change.
See: https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/11/14/a-legacy-of-liberalism
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The causes of the fracturing of too many black families is complex, and, to your point, I would be the first to agree that government policies contributed to that breakdown. AFDC, urban renewal, suburban sprawl/white flight, disinvestment, drug laws, etc., did wind up combining in a deadly concoction for especially blacks migrating from the rural south after the war.
However, your implied suggestion that everything would have turned out hunky-dory for these migrants from the south if the government had just kept out is unsupported by Sowell’s facile gloss, which is no more accurate than those who conclude the correlation between storks and births in Holland show storks cause babies, and a gross failure to account for several critical interacting strands.
For THE cause of the social disintegration we see today in the black underclass has far less to do with government programs – unconstructive as they often were – and much more with two entirely different things.
As can be seen by the fact of the thriving black neighborhoods in the north before the waves of the Great Migration finished, the cultural problem you properly focus on had nothing to do with skin pigmentation. Instead of government programs per se, however–
1. It was the second wave of the Great Migration driven not by war jobs but by the new deployment of mechanization and chemical fertilizers that drastically reduced the need for most farmworkers and uprooted black share croppers from the deep rural south, where the impacts of slavery and Jim Crow had been most extreme on the family and culture. This wave of black migrants north suddenly uprooted into urban life brought with them enormous challenges.
2. The other was the response by society to this significant challenge was not to help but the opposite: to contort government policies to subsidize and facilitate racially driven white flight and disinvestment, leaving abandoned slums in their wake that fed on themselves creating generations of an underclass.
I work as a volunteer at One City Schools with these kids, Tom, and selfishly chose those in their pre-teen years when there is still possibility, before dysfunctional habits have become hard wired, to share with them the possibilities to succeed. Please, keep in mind, that none of them chose to be born into fractured families, and, if you or I had, and no one offered to extend a helping hand to create hope for us, we would ourselves also find ourselves trapped like flypaper in the underclass, generation after generation, from which it is next to impossible for anyone to escape.
I suspect when you look at the problem, you picture in your mind instead a black teenager, larger than you, who after 15 years without the strong family upbringing that you and I took for granted, can appear threatening, and, having become habituated to anti-social ways, now seems beyond the pale. It’s a frightening, discouraging image. Granted.
I invite you to explore the constructive, the Christian way, to confront this terrible crisis. Remember, beyond the human pain that should concern us all, a cancer inside will spread, just like we’ve seen drug rates and single parent family rates in the slums at one time later spread to and become common in the suburbs.
Thinking people, just like you, are needed to help make a better world.
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Bravo Indigo November Golf Oscar, TR!
To add (bolds/italics/caps added):
“Every community has experienced some form of discrimination in the past. Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and many other northern cities were the refuge of Blacks migrating away from their southern roots. These cities gave Blacks a solid foundation on which to build better lives. Unfortunately, government allowed those gains to be squandered because its ‘lets fix the past’ polices left many young Blacks bereft of the initiative needed to capitalize on the gains made by their fathers and grandfathers of the forties and fifties.
“THE PRIMARY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ETHNIC GROUP SUCCESS OR LACK THEREOF IS MASSIVE GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION. Each of the immigrant communities mentioned before 1970 did not learn to rely on big government programs. In fact, even THE BLACK COMMUNITY HAD HIGHER HOME OWNERSHIP RATES AND BUSINESS VENTURE RATES THAN TODAY. The Vietnamese immigrants struggled in the south especially around the Gulf coast where they plied their fishing trade. Their children studied and became professionals. The Vietnamese community coalesced to support one another. Ultimately, descendants of the original immigrants, be they Vietnamese, Italian, German or Jew expanded their markets to capture European clients. This is the assimilation and wealth building process. THE BLACK COMMUNITY HAS BEEN TAUGHT TO RELY ON BIG GOVERNMENT TO PROTECT THEM from having to compete and build wealth through value creation. IF SYSTEMIC RACISM EXISTS IT WAS CREATED BY THE VERY PEOPLE WHO CLAIM TO BE THEIR BENEFACTORS AND PROTECTORS. It is they who are limiting Black entrepreneurial progress.”
The Gotch
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START THE CLOCK…what are we waiting for? WisSC race is on. Mitchell, Protasiewicz are in. Kelly is a maybe. WE NEED SIGNS NOW. DONATE TODAY. Start a pool on how many millions will be spent on this race. My guess 24,000,000 + or – 3,000,000. Who will tRump back?
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Off topic, stupid, imbecilic, idiotically unfunny…the usual fare from the Blogge Idiot TROLT.
Run along now, the adults are talking and your cartoons are starting!
The Gotch
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So I’m off topic while talking about the WSC, but your yapping about the Bucks and those loser Packers. Priorities crothie; priorities. Idiot.
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What’s more important than the WSC with a 4-3 conservative advantage on the line? To you that’s unfunny and stupid? I’m talking the balance of the SC and you’re talking crap. Which proves you are nothing more than a loudmouth fool. Run along now before you miss out on the latest Alex Jones fake pecker med special.
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The Gotch
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Here is what I would like to see. The school district should have very good Black writers come in to each and every one of our schools to speak to
ALL the students of EVERY COLOR about the importance of reading, writing and doing math at grade level.
People like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Ward Connerly and others like them.
Not everyone will be an NBA, NFL, MLB star. Not everyone will take the prize of being a singing star.
A few people will go on to college. Most people will go to work with their hands like I have.
Showing all of our students that you can be of any color and if you are willing to put in the time to learn great thoughts by great people you can become a better person.
They can start by reading the Bible. Then read books like: Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. Reading “A Study of History” by Arnold Toynbee. Understanding the principles contained in and being able to almost cite by memory the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. “The Gulag Archipelago” by ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN. Bertrand Russel’s ‘A History of Western Philosophy’.
These books along with books by Thomas Sowell like “Basic Economics” or “A Conflict of Visions”. Or books by Walter E. Williams like “Race and Economics” or “Liberty vs. the Tyranny of Socialism”.
Those would be just a start. Do you have any suggestions on what great book and by what great author that people should read next?
I’d love to hear your opinions.
Thanks!
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GREAT IDEA, and the same with your line-up; many could be added, including, but not limited to, be Jason L. Riley and Jason Whitlock.
Regrettably, the inimitable Walter E. Williams , whom The Gotch goes out of his way to read, wouldn’t be able to make it as he passed 12/01/2020.
Mercifully, his brilliance lives on, not the least of which being:
Blind To The REAL PROBLEMS Of Black America
The Gotch
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Gotch,
I love your comments here. Walter Williams is a brilliant writer and a fine person. To bad our society tells us that we can only see a person by the color of their skin.
Many of the people of color that I work with are angels on earth, who are here so that they can serve their time, before their true job of serving God in Heaven.
When man serves his fellow man with the spirit of serving God, it is a spiritual moment that takes us beyond the individual that we are and puts us in the spiritual universe of all human beings.
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You’re too kind, BC.
Anywho, possibly of interest in the service of laying bare the ruination wrecked by despicable Lefty, the indefatigable Larry Elder:
bLack Victocrats…Seven figure salaried/eight figure net worth bLack Race Hustlers slobbering to other bLack people that they can’t succeed because of RAYcism.
Hypocrisy; thy name is Lefty!
The Gotch
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John McWhorter, professor at Columbia University, author of “Woke Racism.”
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The Gotch’ll see your John McWhorter Woke Racism and raise you Jason L. Riley’s PLEASE STOP HELPING US: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed.
The Gotch
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[…] is a school district contemplating dumbing down honors classes, renaming Jefferson middle school, ending time outs for unruly students — all in the name of racial […]
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David, Oh Yea, I love the idea of reading that book!
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Perhaps add these (also courtesy of the talented Dr. Sowell) to your reading list:
Seductive Beliefs I and Seductive Beliefs II
The Gotch
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