Don Tow's Website

One of the most terrifying atrocities in human history occurred in Nanking over a six-week period beginning on 12/13/1937, when the Japanese troops entered and controlled Nanking, the then capitol of the Republic of China. During this short six-week period, about 300,000 Chinese (mostly civilians) were killed and over 20,000 Chinese females (women, girls, and even very young girls) were raped, and one-third of the city of Nanking was burned to the ground.

Unlike Germany which later admitted its holocaust atrocities during WWII and paid compensations to the victims or their families, the Japanese government has never officially (i.e., with a resolution passed by their Parliament) admitted to the Nanking Massacre. As a matter of fact, many Japanese leaders and the Japanese mass media have said on many occasions that there was no Nanking Massacre, or any of the other WWII atrocities committed by the Japanese, such as sex slaves (estimated by historians to be as many as 200,000, and euphemistically referred to as Comfort Women). The most recent such statement was by the current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who in 3/07 denied that the Japanese military had forced foreign women into sexual slavery during WWII.

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Using public domain data (http://www.state.nj.us/njded/data/) from the NJ Department of Education (DOE), I have performed an analysis of the racial group (RG) distributions for the students and certificated staff of several school districts in NJ, and have found that there are systemic racial group staff disparities in NJ.

For example, for the Middletown Township School District (where I live), the results are shown below.

The above table clearly shows that for all minority RGs, the % of certificated staff is substantially less than the % of students in Middletown.  The NJ DOE website contains data from 1999-2000 to 2004-2005 (it also contains the student data for 1998-1999 and 2005-2006, but no certificated staff data for those two years).  The above disparities basically have remained steady during these years.  The NJ DOE website does not provide RG data for the non-certificated staff.

I have also done a similar analysis of five other school districts in the central NJ area, and have found similar disparities.  These five districts are Asbury Park City, Edison, Holmdel, Long Branch City, and Marlboro.  Their number of students/certificated staff are, respectively, 2812/427, 13563/1248, 3561/291, 5401/585, and 6012/492.  With a few small exceptions, all minority RGs in all the school districts that we have analyzed are under-represented.  The analysis results for these other five school districts are shown in the next table.

What are the major reasons for the above under-representation?  Without access to appropriate data (e.g., data on recruiting and hiring policies and procedures and the corresponding statistics), we do not know for certain.  We speculate that the reasons may include:

• Small pool of qualified staff from these minority RGs
• Lack of proper advertisements of openings that can adequately reach these minority RGs
• Assessment standards that may not be fair to minority RGs
• Interviewing and selection biases, including subtle ones.

We urge the NJ DOE and the various school districts to look into this issue, and find solutions that can remove the above under-representations of minority RGs, thus providing a fairer and richer diversified staff to serve the diversified student population in NJ.

The conclusion is that it seems that the under-representation of minority RGs at the certificated staff level is a systemic issue in NJ, and is not limited to just a few school districts in NJ.