Extra police officers were posted at every junior high and high school in the Bronx borough of New York City last week following the second race-related attack on a school age child in the area in less than a week.
City police were calling the second attack, against a 12-year-old Hispanic boy, a “copycat” crime because it so closely resembled the assault the week before on a 12-year-old black boy and his 14-year-old sister. In both incidents, groups of white teenagers or young adults were reported to have screamed racial slurs as they beat their victims and smeared white paint on the victims’ faces. Neither assault occurred on school grounds.
The second attack especially alarmed police and community leaders because no one at the busy intersection where it took place intervened to help the boy, who was waiting to catch a bus to school.
A New York police spokesman declined to disclose how many extra officers were posted at more than 60 Bronx schools. He said the officers would stay on duty at the schools as long as they were needed.
Students in Roman Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee generally outperformed students in the city’s public schools in standardized-test scores and grade-point averages, but black students in the Catholic schools ranked below white students in either system, according to a study by the Milwaukee public schools.
The study compared the reading- and mathematics-test scores of Catholic and public-school students in the 5th and 7th grades. White Catholic-school students outperformed white public-school students in three of the four categories. Black Catholic-school students outperformed black public-school students in all categories, but scored below white public-school students in each breakdown.
A comparison of all public-school 10th-grade pupils with 10th graders who had transferred from Catholic schools in the 9th grade showed that the transfer students outperformed the entire test group in reading and mathematics.
Black transfer students outperformed other black students in both reading and mathematics, but they scored below the total for all white students in the system.
The study also showed that a higher percentage of former Catholic-school students, compared with the overall public-school population, went on to graduate from the public system with a grade-point average of 2.5 or better.
The study, prepared by the Milwaukee school system’s research office, concludes that the achievement differences “should not be used to make judgments about the relative qualities of the educational programs in the two school systems.”
A federal appeals court has ruled that the school board of a Texas district acted properly in the 1988 firing of its superintendent after he criticized the board’s president.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled 13 to 2 this month that Superintendent Nolan Kinsey’s pointed remarks in the midst of a school-board election rendered his relationship with the board ineffective. The court said that the administrator’s comments overstepped the boundaries of the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee.
The federal court’s ruling also overturned a jury’s award of $250,000 in an earlier ruling against the Salado Independent School District.
