Today is Jesse's birthday.  Someone asked him the other day how old he would be?  His reply.. "the big one O"  Very typical of a guy who is the apple of every person's eye who has ever met him.  What a joy!

And he's good lookin' too... just like his old man.

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Update to this post: Ed Cone has asked if it is relevant to identify the race of disruptive children and if such identification is constructive.  I believe that you can't fix a problem unless you can identify where the problem is.

Guilford County Schools requires the reporting of many aspects of school accomplishments and problems by race and income (free/reduced lunch recipients).  One such report is a school's "School Improvement Plan" which is a comprehensive measurement and diagnostic tool that identifies problems and the plans for rectifying them.  Here is Aycock's (PDF file - 54 pages) through last year.  Page 52 shows:

•                                                                                                      Population
• Incidents of short term suspensions - Total school      -    246             720
• Incidents of short term suspensions - African American -  235             387
• Incidents of short term suspensions - "Free/reduced"  -   230             346
• Incidents of short term suspensions - White                 -     6               226
• Incidents of short term suspensions - Hispanic             -     4                 29

We must determine what is going on here.  Are black children misbehaving at a higher rate than other students or are black students being suspended at a higher rate because they are black? Or is it some combination of the two?  Do cultural differences enter into the equation?  Is parental involvement a factor? Is something else going on?

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Dr. Myra Shird, coordinator of NC A&T's communication department, wrote a column about the Commissioner Billy Yow controversy for the Carolina Peacemaker last week.  She leads with, "No I don’t think that Billy Yow is necessarily a racist..."

Much of the column recounts the discussions that the flap caused in one of her communications classes.  The comment that caused her to question the racist label for Yow was this.  "The words of one young male student resound in my head, 'I don’t know about calling the man racist. I don’t like the KKK. Does that make me racist?' Hold up. I think that the student may have a point."

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