The Schadenfreude Post

Los Angeles Unified School District has a history of tone deafness with regard to best practices, not to mention maintaining a minimal level of safety for its students. While the district may not have resources to ensure that students are safe from gang warfare or have drinking water that is not polluted with toxic levels of lead, it finds the resources to implement a commissar system to weed out teachers who may actually care about the student's education. The Schadenfreude Post has learned that a teacher was just fired for being too "Afro-centric."

In March 2007, The Schadenfreude Post reported on the bizarre firing of two teachers at Celerity Nascent Charter School in Watts for allowing students to do a class project on the murder of Emmett Till, an African-American child who was tortured and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Administrators further disciplined students and employees for participating in a petition protesting the cancellation of the project.

...for a school principal to tell mostly African-American children that they can't present a project to the school on Emmett Till because he whistled at a woman, which is sexual harassment is simply obscene. By inference, the principal is saying that 14-year old Till deserved to be beaten to a pulp and thrown still alive into a river to die, because a black boy whistling at a white woman constituted sexual harassment (Sexual harassment, by the way, did not exist as a cause of action in 1950s Mississippi. Furthermore, the facts in this case do not warrant such a characterization, even by today's standards.).

TSP noted that charters served a role in helping to keep the traditional-style schools more competitive but needed oversight to prevent further capricious and wrongful terminations. At the time, we assumed that LAUSD would be free of such racially-tinged discrimination of teachers. We were wrong. The LA Times reported today that:

Students and fellow educators are rallying behind a fired Jordan High School teacher they say was sacked for encouraging political activism among her students.

About 60 students rallied Wednesday at the Watts campus, while a colleague of the fired teacher said he and 15 other instructors planned to resign or transfer to other schools to protest the dismissal of Karen Salazar, a second-year English teacher.

When a school district can't even find the competency to print out pay checks for its teachers (for many months), why would it terminate a teacher who is dedicated to her job and who had the audacity to use course materials that "include 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' which is approved for students... [and who] sprinkles in lyrics of slain rapper Tupac Shakur and the poetry of Langston Hughes?" Is it really that out-of-bounds to teach African American and Latino kids in Watts about the recent history of their nation with regard to racism and prejudice? Apparently so.

My advice to the district would be the following: 1) send Admiral Brewer on a one way cruise to somewhere sunny and far away; 2) fire the administrator who terminated Ms. Salazar; 3) fire the rest of the administrators as well; 4) put a poster on each teacher's desk that reads "teach. serve. use common sense"; and 5) put a second poster on each administrator's desk that reads "above all else, don't make things worse."

Editor's note: it is ironic that conventional wisdom says African-Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles are incapable of living in peace with each other. Ms. Salazar appears to be of mixed Latino/African-American ethnicity. Protesters from both groups are vigorously protesting her firing. All Angelenos should join them in their protest. Good schools and fairness are causes that transcend race, class and politics; they are the embodiment of American values.