An article in the national section of today's New York Times runs under the headline "Studies Point Up Racial Discrimination in Special Education." Well, the studies might show racial discrimination, but the Times article offers no evidence from them that indicates any such discrimination. What the Times article reports instead is a racial disparity: "Black students are three times as likely as white students to be labeled 'mentally retarded' or 'emotionally disturbed' and put in special education classes," the Times reports, citing studies purporting to show that "black and Hispanic students receive a poorer, more segregated education."
This disparity could be the result of racial discrimination against black and Hispanic students, as the Times suggests, but there could also be a number of more innocent explanations that the Times article fails to consider. It could be that school officials are actually better at detecting genuine learning disabilities and emotional disturbances among blacks and Hispanics than among whites, and that, rather than wrongly sticking blacks and Hispanics in special education classes, the system is failing whites by failing to detect their problems. It could be that there actually are more blacks and Hispanics who are retarded or emotionally disturbed than there are whites. And it could be that black and Hispanic parents whose children are stuck in crummy government-run monopoly schools are gaming the system by trying to get their students into special education classes because the parents know that those classes are much smaller and have more money spent per pupil.
There's no mention in the New York Times of a recent report by the California state auditor, which, according to a report in the February 8, 2001, Los Angeles Times, found that a disproportionate share of students getting extra time on the SAT because of "learning disabilities" were white students from wealthy families -- some of whom didn't need it. Auditing the files of 330 students in 18 public schools, it found the basis for their special treatment to be questionable in 60 cases, or 18.2%. Students at private schools were four times as likely as ordinary students to get extra time, according to the L.A. Times account. No one is accusing the authorities assessing learning disabilities in California of "racial discrimination" because they are diagnosing more such disabilities among wealthy white students; the more common conclusion is that the students are gaming the system to get more time on their SATs. Of course, it is also possible that wealthy white students in private schools are, in reality, more likely to be genuinely learning disabled than black and Hispanic students are, or that their disabilities are more likely to be diagnosed.
So when white students are judged learning disabled in disproportionate numbers, they are probably gaming the system, while when black students are judged learning disabled in disproportionate numbers, they must be the victims of "racial discrimination." Today's Times article doesn't seriously explore any of these complexities, preferring to go for the obvious, and apparently unsupported, "Studies Point Up Racial Discrimination in Special Education." Nor does the Times disclose that the co-director of the "Civil Rights Project at Harvard," which released the studies the Times is writing about, is Chris Edley, a Harvard law professor who also served as President Clinton's top aide on the issue of race relations.
'Tendonitis': A front-page article in today's New York Times about efforts to impose new regulatory burdens on businesses refers to "tendonitis." The correct spelling of the ailment is tendinitis; the Times stylebook has an entry on exactly this point.