During the daily MetaFilter cruise, I ran into a discussion of the strange case of Scott Phelps. Mr. Phelps is a science teacher at Muir High School in Pasadena who was suspended about a week ago after he wrote a long email to the school’s other teachers claiming that most of the behavioral problems at the school are causded by the African-American students. Ding ding ding!
Of course his email got out to parents and the media and this apparently hardworking (“the hours of volunteer work we did on saturday mornings last year on test prep), conscientious (“As I said in the Pasadena Weekly”) white teacher was suspended. Now he’s being reinstated though there is no reason given for it. I, of course, think the suspension was ridiculous but the school district brass, who are excoriated in the memo, were probably responding to comments like those made by civil rights attorney Bert Voorhees: “There are few things short of molesting a child that should be taken as seriously as making racist comments in a school setting.” Excuse me, Mr. Vorhees (you moron), but how does molesting a child come close to writing a memo asking to make a change for the better for the very group of people you claim are being insulted?
But was Phelps’ memo racist, or just reflecting the facts? After all, the school is 48% African-American and the memo does state that there are well-behaved African-American students as well. Seems to me that Phelps’ intention was to open a dialog that can find ways to help these underperforming students, a dialog that his district superiors did not want to have. If a problem really is concentrated in a specific group, and the common factor is their race–but not gender, since the memo points to both boys and girls–how else do you begin change if you cannot identify the group because of political correctness?
BillSaysThis 