Actually, that should be “too mad to calculate correctly,” but at this blog, “funny” beats “honest” every time. My current complaint with Heather occurred in a stridently written but basically correct takedown of the Obama Administration’s announcement that schools “disproportionately” disciplining black students could face federal lawsuits. Heather labels (correctly, in my opinion) as “fiction” the notion that “black students are no more fractious in the classroom than whites and Asians.” However, she seeks to support this contention by unleashing this whopper of a non sequitur—that the “homicide rate among black-male teens [is] ten times that of other ethnic groups of the same age combined.”
Now, first of all, murder in the classroom doesn’t occur very often. It’s rarely an issue. Of course, it’s plausible that the very high homicide rate among black-male teens would imply a greater likelihood of misbehavior in school, but Heather probably could have laid her hands on more relevant data if she had bothered to think about it. One almost gets the impression that she’s more interested in talking about black-male teens and murder than in making an honest argument.
Oh, and what about the math? Well, by italicizing “combined” Heather gives me the very strong impression that she thinks that if the homicide-offender rate for white-male teens is, say, 1.7 per 100,000, and the Hispanic-male rate is 2.1, and the Asian-male rate is 1.9, then you “combine “ them to get 5.7, which would make the black-male rate about 57. Which, of course, is not how it works. To get the “non black-male” rate, you would take the weighted average of the three non-black percentages (weighting to adjust for the differing size of the three populations), giving you a non black-male rate of about 2, and a black-male rate of 20. Still awful, but mathematically valid, though still not perfectly on point for a discussion of school discipline issues.
Heather’s larger point—that the Obama Administration, in its approach to civil rights, often pretends that it’s still 1960—is valid. So why does she have to leave a whiff of racism behind?
