Rex Kerr
2 min readSep 19, 2023

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Speaking of accurate information, you seem to be having some issues with that in this article.

The paper you linked saying "evidence of systemic bias" claims no such thing and shows no such thing--rather, it finds that among black students who themselves agree that they're sometimes disruptive and disrespectful, they act better around teachers who they perceive as caring about them (both they and the teachers agree). It's an important message...but it's not the message you said it was!

Also, you link to this same paper three different times in three different places (one time you quote from it)?

You also quote one source without attribution (it's Sibka et al, 2000, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED468512) and although it's the most damning it's twenty-five years old so don't you think it's worth considering that the situation may have changed?

And you attribute the second quote to "Khalifa 2015", but in fact you took the quote not from Khalifa's article itself, but from the MSU press release which you did not cite: https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2015/schools-failing-to-address-biased-student-discipline

Furthermore, you've erased Khalifa's coauthor, F. Briscoe (paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016146811511700801), and the paper itself is extraordinarily shaky. As they say, "one administration after another...seem[s] unable to disrupt the racially oppressive discipline and achievement gaps [...] we use counternarrative autoethnography to describe that school district administrators play a significant role in maintaining practices that reproduce racial oppression in schools"

That is, they decided what the right answer was, they talked to some school administrators who acted defensive, and the authors are telling a story (narrative) that aligns with what they know the right answer is.

You say "metal detectors have been proven fundamentally ineffective" and yet you link to a source that merely argues against them, somewhat, while admitting, "While anecdotal evidence suggests that metal detectors are effective at screening out weapons at schools (see, for example, Algar, 2016; Corcoran, 2015), there is a lack of accurate statistics to support the claims. Moreover, the available data suggest that schools with metal detectors are actually more successful in identifying weapons during searches of students without scanning devices." So...it's actually not proven, and the more effective alternative is a more intrusive search of students! The effectiveness is in question, but it's not proven ineffective at least not by the support you gave.

Your attention to credit assignment and support for your statements is far less than the heavily-cited appearance of your text suggests.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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