Minneapolis Schools: Fire white teachers first

Hi I’m the Minneapolis school supervisor and we’re underrepresented in minority teaches by over 50% but we are gonna fire mostly underrepresented minorities because they have the shortest tenure.

Yep. That’s very non-racist.

 

The 14th Amendment has allowed for racial preferences where it remedies past discrimination. If you fire based on seniority and discriminated against teachers of color in hiring until relatively recently, guess who is going to be disproportionately less senior?

 

No, I married a white German woman that I met while I was on a military tour many years ago. I honestly don't even know her politics, as she is completely uninterested in any of this stuff. The other day she legit asked my why Trump is on the news channels I watch all the time if he's not the President anymore.

 

They will get sued to the Stone Age once white teachers start to get fired.

 

So many assumptions.. all made to “strengthen” whatever argument the person is making.
1. Do we know there was racists hiring practices until recently? Please define recently. Most teachers burnout in five or less years.
2. Teachers with experience are often far better at their job than brand new teachers just trying to survive.
3. All things being equal.. race being the determining factor is in fact racists.
4. I’d be curious to see the breakdown of applicants applying for jobs in Minneapolis schools.

 

The school district ITSELF admitted the past racially discriminatory hiring practices:

And it led to staff that is disproportionately white when compared to their student base:


Numerous reputable studies have found that students of color perform better when they have teachers of color.
Teachers, race and student achievement in a randomized experiment | Center for Education Policy Analysis
But hey, it's so fun to see a bunch of white people whining about a school district voluntarily agreeing to a policy with a (very white) union to avoid disproportionately laying off teachers of color if they need to reduce staff size because the seniority system is biased due to the school district's admitted past discrimination in hiring. It's the same hare-brained arguments we see Republicans make against any policy that strives to achieve true equality by giving marginalized groups an upper hand to remedy the effects of discrimination.

Michael Harriot offered a great analogy for why those complaints should fall on deaf ears:
"Imagine if 10 people put money into an investment account for years. Every year, the fund manager distributed the earnings to 9 of the investors but left 1 guy out.

Even if the 9 dividend recipients didn't know, they STILL benefitted from splitting the profit 9 ways instead of 10.

When the 10th guy realizes he hasn't received his share, the fund manager can't make things whole by just refunding the guy's money or agreeing to split profits 10 ways going forward.

Because–intentional or not–the other guys BENEFITTED from 1 guy being excluded. Equity can only be achieved by taking money from THE NINE GUYS.

You can't have equity without redistributing resources. After all, white America has been redistributing Black people's wealth for years."

(Much of this post was borrowed from Michael Harriot's great thread on this issue, see below.)

 

I was just looking at some of this data. Wasn't sure exactly which school district this was, as I presumed Minneapolis would have multiple districts, but the city proper has a single district. The school district map is identical to the city map.

At first glance, it's easy to see the disparity between teacher and student demographics. Consider though, that this particular cutout of Minnesota is wildly more diverse than any other part of the state. Just look at the low percentage of white students and the relatively high percent of black/Hispanic students. Those numbers aren't only disproportionate for the state; they are disproportionate for the U.S.

And who do you think are filling those jobs? The teacher applicant pool is not coming from the city of Minneapolis, it's coming from the universities in the state and region. Who attends those universities? (See some of my previous notes about demographics in MN)

With this, I think we can see the challenge faced by admins who have a pool of candidates that are disproportionately white, while serving a pool of students who are disproportionately black and Hispanic.

 

Which is fine. Nobody is saying these things need to align perfectly. But when you know this mismatch exists and you know that the district's past discriminatory hiring practices have created a seniority system where people of color are even more disadvantaged, it makes perfect sense to write in a provision that allows you to protect educators of color from layoffs, thereby protecting your diversity, if you need to reduce staff.

 

Good luck on that, most would have to take a huge pay cut..... unless they put a high value on warm weather.

 

So you are good with by color? Explains many things.

 

Staff demographics are very close to that of America in general.
School board admits discrimination in hiring practices in the past. When in the last? Most teachers don’t last five years. Where these practices happening in 2017?2012? 2007? If not then the teachers being affected did not benefit from discrimination.
What does the hiring pool look like. How many black teachers are applying vs how many white teachers. Again, the demographics of the school staff are very similar to demographics of the country. If there isn’t a large pool of black qualified teachers to choose from then that is another facet to this problem.

 

I have to believe even the Minneapolis School Board has a procedure in place to rate and evaluate teachers. Assuming that is the case, it would be an injustice to the students if a higher rated white teacher is let go just because of the color of his or her skin.