The War on White Educators

The State of White America-2007: Education: Pseudo-Pedagogy, Real Hatred

Release Date: April 5, 2007

Prepared by and for the National Policy Institute by Nicholas Stix, Project Director

By Nicholas Stix


I. Introduction

V. Education: Pseudo-Pedagogy, Real Hatred; Part I: The Autum of White America?

Part II: Black School Violence: Where's the National Guard When You Need It?


The War on White Educators

If millions of white urban public school students must face a daily race war, they are not alone. For over forty years, racist blacks (and more recently, racist Hispanics) have sought, using harassment and violence, to run all white staffers, faculty, and administrators out of urban public schools.

Hartford, CT. A July 17, 2005 Hartford Courant report on the Hartford public schools, told of one white principal who was run out of her school by racist blacks before her first year was over. And a white music teacher at Hartford’s Simpson-Waverly Classical Magnet School was terrorized by three black colleagues who encouraged black students to act out in her class, and was set up with an absurd racism charge by black parents and students that claimed that she had said she despised “black music.”[i]

Although (or because) Hartford’s schools have long practiced affirmative action hiring, “Michael C. Williams, [black] vice chairman of the board of education, is pushing hard for an aggressive affirmative action plan to drastically increase the number of minority teachers. The way he sees it, the achievement gap is inherently a racial problem. ‘We need a race-based solution,’ said Williams…

“Williams is adamant that the education of Hartford children would improve if more teachers shared their race and culture. He said that white teachers may have lower expectations for children of color …”

The fact of the matter is that, beginning in the 1960s, when urban blacks began violently running whites out of public schools, black children’s achievement collapsed.

During New York City’s Ocean-Hill Brownsville, Brooklyn “community control” debacle (1967-1970), the black supremacists who took over the district claimed that once they had run out the experienced white teachers, black students’ achievement soared. In fact, students’ achievement had declined precipitously.

The black supremacists who took over Ocean Hill-Brownsville refused to give their charges reading tests. At their racial stronghold, J.H.S. 271, when students were finally tested after the ouster of the nationalists, “only 5.5 percent of students were reading at or above grade level. All eight district schools registered lower reading scores in 1971 than in tests taken in 1967, before the experiment began.”[ii]

No white teacher could possibly have lower expectations of black children than the typical black teacher. And the more nationalistic the black teacher is, the lower his expectations of black children typically will be.

As Conor Cruise O’Brien has written, 1960s black leaders had to choose: Either improve black children’s education using predominantly white educators or demand that their education be controlled by blacks, and give up on academic improvement. They chose the latter.[iii] (Note, however, that black supremacists have no problem with blacks controlling white children’s education.)

New York City. In 1994, Michael Johnson, the founder and principal of Brooklyn’s Science Skills Center, drove a white teacher off his predominantly black staff. While permitting black teachers to participate in grading their black and Hispanic students’ state Regents exams, Johnson froze out the white teacher. He then graded her students’ exams according to a much higher standard, in order to make the teacher – not to mention her students – look bad.

In a 3,800-word puff piece on Johnson in the New York Times Magazine, writer Sara Mosle scrambled the discrimination incident into a concoction that included, among other things, school officials’ forked-tongued alibis for Johnson, which did not address his racial discrimination at all, and Mosle’s rationalization that somehow Johnson’s faults can all be forgiven, because he cares so much about black and Hispanic kids.[iv]

Had Johnson been white, and his victim black or Hispanic, he would have been fired, and there would have been no scrambled sophistry or puff pieces on his behalf.

Johnson’s racism is not surprising to those who know that his pedagogical heroine is black supremacist educator Adelaide Sanford, who is now Vice President of the New York State Regents, who as a Brooklyn principal during the 1960s and 1970s, routinely got away with running off white teachers,[v] and who was a staunch ally of black supremacist extortionist-kidnapper-murderer Sonny Carson aka Sonny Abubadika Carson aka Mwlina Imiri Abubadika (1935?-2002).

St. Louis. In 1992, when white, national award-winning, 20-year teaching veteran Cecilia Lacks began teaching eleventh grade English and journalism in a new school in her St. Louis district, she “validated” her students’ culture, as black educators and white progressives have for decades demanded. Like many of her black colleagues, Lacks permitted her students at black-dominated Berkeley Senior High School to use obscenities in plays they wrote, performed, and videotaped in class. In 1995, her black principal, Vernon Mitchell, complained about Lacks to black district superintendent, Dr. Robert Fritz, who recommended that the school board fire her for permitting students to use obscenities. The all-white board complied. Principal Mitchell and Dr. Fritz had undertaken no action against black teachers who had permitted their students to use obscenities in student plays.

Although Lacks won her federal lawsuit charging racial discrimination and violation of her First Amendment rights, which gained her reinstatement to her job and cost the school board over $1 million in damages and for Lacks’ attorney’s fees, the school board appealed, and won a reversal.[vi]

New York City. Also in 1995, black parents and staffers in Jamaica, Queens’ P.S. 80 – followers of black supremacist extortionist-kidnapper-murderer Sonny Carson – perpetrated a race hoax, claiming that veteran white teacher Rita Altman had called her students “a bunch of niggers.” In 1996, black supremacist Rev. Charles Norris told Newsday reporter Merle English that it didn’t matter if the charges were true; Altman had to go.[vii]

In 1998, a mob of black parents marched into Bushwick Brooklyn’s P.S. 75, threatening to lynch a dedicated, young, white teacher, Ruth Sherman, purportedly because she had used a black book, Nappy Hair. The real reason was that Sherman was being paid to teach black children. The parents had had no objections, when Sherman had worked in the school as an unpaid student-teacher.[viii]

In the Rita Altman case, New York’s black schools chancellor, Rudy Crew, supported the racists, but was successfully opposed by the majority-white school board; in the Ruth Sherman case, he did nothing to stop or prosecute the racists. Both teachers were transferred.

Washington, DC. In 2000, native Washingtonian Joshua Kaplowitz began teaching fifth grade in failing, predominantly black, Emery Elementary School. As Kaplowitz later wrote in “How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million,” black educators and parents alike agreed that as a white man, he had no right to teach black children.[ix]

In a race hoax recalling such stunts during the black supremacist Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn “community control” school debacle over thirty years earlier,[x] the mother of one of Kaplowitz’ most violent students had him arrested for assault and sued him and the school for $20 million. “Thus ended my first and last year as a public school teacher.”

The discrimination is not limited to white educators, but extends to any whites working in black-dominated public schools. On October 1, 2004, The Wave newspaper, which covers the Rockaway peninsula in Queens NY, reported the charge by a source “who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution,” that Beach Channel High School Principal Dr. David Morris “told NYPD personnel who are in charge of the department’s School Security Officers that he wanted to ‘keep white cops out of his school,’ because ‘white cops harass our black males.’”[xi]

“He requested that only black cops be assigned to the building.”

Dr. Morris insisted that the story was “a total misunderstanding...”

The Wave reported further that NYPD sources corroborated its original source, who said “that the incident 'is an indication of the way the school is being run.’”[xii]

Officials of the New York City Department of Education reflexively took Dr. Morris’ side. Education officials routinely investigate all charges, no matter how frivolous, made by minority group members against white educators, while sweeping charges against black educators under the rug, refusing to punish guilty blacks, or even rewarding them.

In a 2004 case from the Rockaways, a white teacher at Rockaway Beach’s Middle School 180, Melissa Gianninoto, accused the school’s new black principal, John Comer, of assaulting her. Gianninoto said that Comer came into her classroom, and in front of her (predominantly minority) students, dragged her into the hall, and “flung her into a wall.”[xiii]

Colleagues and union representatives talked Gianninoto out of filing a police report, saying that Comer would then have her terminated (she lacked tenure), but she did file an incident report with union officials. The Wave reported that Gianninoto’s students told their other teachers that Comer had attacked her, reports which the teachers then told The Wave about.

Predictably, school officials took the black principal’s side against the white teacher, ignoring the assault allegations entirely.[xiv]

Chicago. In February 2006, a white teacher at Chicago’s predominantly black Fenger High School (aka Fenger Academy) was so disgusted with the school’s criminality, vice, and violence – including open drug dealing in the halls, sex in stairwells, burglaries of teachers’ property, vandalism of teachers’ cars, gang fights and assaults on staff by students and parents alike – that he began writing a blog, “Fast Times at Regnef High.”[xv] As Chicago Tribune reporter Tracy Dell’angela noted, “He took swipes at his colleagues, too—‘union-minimum’ teachers, literacy specialists who ‘decorate their office door with pro-black propaganda,’ and security officers whose ‘loyalty is to the hood, not the school.’”[xvi]