The Price of Fear: Scared Teachers and Social Workers
by Monica Davis ( davis4000_2000@yahoo.com )

Wednesday Jan 23rd, 2008

Minority students and foster care children paying a high price because of scared social workers and teachers.

The turbulence of the 60's and 70's ushered in a new era of education for students in many parts of the United States. Nearly a generation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, American school systems from Boston to Indianapolis wrestled with desegregation and its attendant social upheaval.

The mandate to provide equal, quality education to students of the nation's public schools was marked by violence, hysteria and fear. And, as the buses rolled, young black students, many of whom had never been far from their all-black neighborhoods, were suddenly driven miles across town, to experience racial violence and bigotry which would sear their minds forever.

These reluctant trailblazers experienced violence on a never before seen level. These youthful pilgrims in the nation's newly desegregated schools, were feared, hated and despised by segregationists across the nation. While the media reports of anti-desegregation violence in the Deep South poured from television sets for years, some of the most vivid footage comes from South Boston, "Southie" and other northern school districts.

The fiction of separate but equal had reigned supreme for generations in the American education system. Bureaucrats inside the nation's state governments proclaimed "segregation forever," as radical segregationists outside of the bureaucracy shot at school busses full of black kids, yelled and screamed at black students and created an atmosphere of racial terrorism a full generation beyond the Brown decision.

In 2004, half a century after the Brown decision, the nation's schools and children wre once again in crisis. Gang violence, abusive teachers, indifferent parents, crowded classrooms and prison-like school campuses are once again creating a hostile learning environment.

Today's schools have more in common with prisons and jails than their historic counterparts. Random searches, metal detectors, armed guards, school security forces, security cameras, sniper attacks, bomb threats, dope peddling and gang battles-just how much different than jails are some of our schools?

And, given the random searches, drug tests and police and security presence, just how can we teach our kids about constitutional rights and civil liberties if they are educated in an atmosphere which is antithetical to civil liberties? How can we teach our youth about free speech, freedom of assembly and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures when they are confronted with the very opposite every day of educational careers?

How can we admonish them to keep their minds and bodies drug free, when so many of their fellow students are drugged into submission with a pharmacopeia of psychotropic drugs? How can our students learn when so much of their school and home environments are not conducive to learning, when many of their parents and teachers abuse their authority and the children as well?

Where are the safe havens for today's children? And, just how many holes are in this so-called "social safety net" when social workers remove kids from homes because the caseworker is uncomfortable visiting the child's home?

We know from past experience that ethnic kids, particularly Black, Native American and Hispanic kids pay dearly for being born into impoverished families. A report published in late 2007 noted that American Indian and Alaska Native children experience abuse and neglect at a rate of 16.5 per 1,000 children. This compares to rates of 19.5 per 1,000 black children and 10.8 per 1,000 white children. (Idaho Spokesman-Review)

However, some of what is defined as abuse is a clash of cultures and class values. Simply put, what is 'abuse' in a white, middle class environment may be necessity in another environment. A case in point is babysitting, specifically older children babysitting younger siblings.

Many cultures consider 12 year olds old enough to baby sit younger brothers and sisters. On the other hand, middle class parents and social workers might consider a 12 year old as needing a sitter. For the minimum wage single mother, or working poor parents who can not afford outside babysitters, older brothers and sisters have been the family babysitter for generations.

It is this clash of cultures, which often sets for hostile relationships between minority families and child welfare authorities. And so it is that many parents claim, that they are targeted by social workers and school authorities, because they are not white, middle class. They are further outraged that many of their children inside the foster care system fare worse than they would at home.

Of great importance to many people of color are study results which found that in some states, black and minority children are more likely to be removed from the home and less likely to receive in-home family services. According to information published on Blackamericaweb.com, in one southern state: African-American families are less likely than white families to receive in-home family services to help prevent child removal in three areas of the state, while Hispanic families are less likely than white families to receive such services in four areas.

The social upheaval generated by institutional racism is more difficult to counter than its overt, Jim Crow counterpart. For people of color, the 'enemy' has gone underground, and has attached itself to institutions and government policy much like a virus infecting a host and rewriting its DNA.

Thus, you have mainly middle class, white female social workers using their cultural background and "norms" to determine what happens to black, Native American and Hispanic children. Many claim the same yardstick is not used in all cases, that in fact, different standards are applied to poor and minority kids, as the following study enumerates.

A study of New York State children eligible for adoption determined that "children of color waited longer for placement and were less likely to experience placement than Caucasian children, who were adopted at about twice the rate of children of color" (Courtney et al., 1996). A Contra Costa County, California, Grand Jury found these same dynamics at work. The Jury found that case records and court reports for white children were "consistently more detailed, better prepared and oriented toward family reunification, adoption or guardianship" than cases involving minority children. While the case files of white children had "well-documented" plans for permanent placement, such as adoption or guardianship, case files of minority children did not contain any evidence of a permanent placement plan. "Records reviewed did not exhibit reasonable and consistent efforts on the part of social workers to research and document, in detail, the background of the minority child. (The Institute for Psychological Therapies)

Even more frightening is the discovery that many minority kids wind up in foster care, not because of any danger to them in their own homes, but because the SOCIAL WORKER felt uncomfortable or threatened by the child's home environment and removed the kid because of their own innate fear.

The Child Welfare Institute determined that in one-third of the cases, there was absolutely no reason for the children not to be home with their parents. The children were in foster care for the protection of their caseworker, not for their own safety. (Ibid)

Many of our minority kids have teachers and caseworkers who fear them, are terrified of the environments these kids live in and who base their teaching and counseling on their own fear. They treat these kids like potentially rabid beasts and their students and clients resent the hell out of them for it.

Being kids, minority students often act out in inappropriate ways, in direct response to the way adults treat them, setting up the scenario for a tragic set of events where the kids lose all around. Many are angry at being treated like out of control animals when they have done nothing to merit such fear.

Fifty years after desegregation was made the law of the land, we have teachers and child welfare workers who fear students and who manipulate regulations and abuse rules for their own convenience. Racism is no longer the law of the land, but it still lives deep in the recesses of the nation's education an child welfare bureaucracies. Our children continue to pay a heavy price for our inability to completely put racism out to pasture.

Monica Davis is a columnist and radio personality, the author of 5 books and articles on government policy, alternative fuels, the black farm crisis, mortgage fraud and American culture. She is published in the US, Great Britain, and India. Her articles on Native American culture are used by home schoolers in New Zealand. Her books include: Land, Legacy and Lynching, an overview of land rights, the history of black farming and current events. http://www.lulu.com/davis4000_2000

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