Can a racist still be a good educator? Or a fair one?
Those questions have to be on the minds of Buford parents after the resignation Friday of Superintendent Geye Hamby following the revelation of a shocking audio recording in which he allegedly used a racial slur repeatedly.
The person in the recording purported to be Hamby complains bitterly about African-American temp workers at a construction site, saying at one point, “I'll kill these (expletive)--shoot that (expletive) if they'd let me. "
Hamby has led Buford schools since 2006, and the small system -- four schools and about 4,600 students – ranks highly. That explains Hamby’s base salary of $308,000, which is high for any district, never mind one with less than 5,000 students.
According to the Governor's Office of Student Achievement, Buford City Schools is a diverse district. Whites make up 52 percent, Hispanics 30 percent, blacks 11 percent, multiracial 4 percent and Asians 3 percent.
Before Hamby turned in his resignation Friday, the Buford Board of Education placed him on leave earlier in the week.
When educators make racist statements that become public, the repercussions are usually swift. Two years ago, Forsyth County fired a paraprofessional within three days of news of a Facebook post in which she called First Lady Michelle Obama a gorilla. In 2014, an Ohio teacher was fired for telling a black student who aspired to be president someday, "We do not need another black president."
A retired teacher told me, while fellow teachers in her rural district held racist views inculcated in them as children, she felt most kept those beliefs out of the classroom and championed the cause of black students.
But is that true? Can teachers overcome their biases?
A while back, I interviewed Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, on implicit bias -- attitudes or stereotypes that influence our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.
As an example, Losen said white teachers would spot white kids scuffling and tell them, “Come on guys, knock, it off.” However, if the kids were black, “There was a tendency to see the same thing as dangerous and negative,” said Losen, a public school teacher for 10 years before becoming an attorney.
It’s not easy to get teachers or anyone else to recognize implicit bias. “I think it is in the air we breathe,” said Losen. “I didn’t pick my parents; I grew up in a mostly white community. I don’t get to choose how society influences my biases. But those biases are in play. A teacher looking at black kids acting up in class may think, ‘I am losing control of my classroom and I have to put my foot down before I have gang warfare.’ They reach for a more punitive solution. With white kids, they’re more likely to call the parents. We have to reflect on our practice.”
Bias can affect school offerings, policies and discipline referrals. Black students are expelled at three times the rate of white students. Black and Latino students account for 40 percent of enrollment at schools with gifted programs, but represent 26 percent of students designated gifted. Only 29 percent of high-minority high schools offer calculus, compared to 55 percent of schools with the lowest African-American and Hispanic enrollment.
Researcher David Quinn of the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education examined the racial attitudes of prek-12 educators compared to non-educators and found educators expressed less negative racial stereotypes and were more likely to ascribe inequalities in jobs, income, and housing to discrimination rather than biological or cultural causes.
However, the analysis found about 30 percent of preK-12 teachers attributed inequalities to a lack of motivation among African Americans, compared to 46 percent of noneducators.
In his paper, Quinn concluded that while educators largely have more positive racial attitudes than the general public, "students would be better off if fewer educators explained inequalities through racial differences in motivation or willpower, and if more perceived education as playing a corrective role." He called for more research looking at how interventions can raise teachers' awareness of problematic attitudes and how those attitudes affect their students.
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