Imagine this: Your third grade child heads back to school after winter break and comes home with a math worksheet. You, being the awesome parent that you are, help your child with his homework. You are shocked to read the following questions:

If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?

Frederick had 6 baskets filled with cotton. If each basket held 5 pounds, how many pounds did he have altogether?

Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves picked them equally, how many oranges did each slave pick?

This exact scenario has recently played out in a metro Atlanta elementary school. In the wake of the incident, the school system launched a full-scale investigation and activist groups took to the airwaves. The Georgia NAACP demanded that all staff involved in the incident be fired, that the teachers offer an apology to all parents, and that the affected students receive counseling to cope with the aftermath of the offending assignment. The Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE), on the other hand, has said that the staff involved should not be fired but retrained and that this unfortunate incident ought to be a teachable moment.

Who’s right?

The assignment was clearly racially insensitive and poorly thought out, a fact that the author of the assignment readily admits. In fact, the teacher who wrote the assignment resigned before the county investigation was complete and has since issued an apology saying, “I did not write those questions with the intent of being malicious or offensive. I wrote poorly written questions in an attempt to enhance student achievement. I have brought shame to my family, and my school. For that, I cannot apologize enough.”

However, the greatest fault lies not with the author of the assignment but with the teacher’s department chair. The school’s policy dictates that all teacher-created homework assignments are to be reviewed before being given to students. In this case, the assignment should have been reviewed by the grade level chair. Instead, the grade level chair was one of three teachers who photocopied and handed out the assignment without ever even reading it. The teacher who authored the questions made a very poor judgment call, but at least he was trying to do his job properly; he has now sacrificed his entire teaching career. The teacher whose job it is to review assignments did not even attempt to do her job properly; she received a warning and is still in the classroom.

As for the students, some parents have expressed concern about their ability to cope with the aftermath of the incident. One parent complained to the school principal and said that counselors should be speaking to the students about the questions and the fallout. But one has to wonder: Did these 8-year-old students even realize the offensive nature of the questions?

While we applaud the effort to include cross-curricular assignments in the classroom, we deplore the lack of judgment that this particular assignment shows. The author of the questions should have known better than to include racially charged word problems in his assignments; the department chair should have done her job and reviewed the assignment before giving it to her students; and the other two teachers who gave the assignment should have bothered to read the worksheet before handing it out – but are these offenses worthy of what amounts to a lifetime ban on teaching? Or is this a teachable moment, a perfect example of why Georgia teachers are required to attend diversity training and why cultural sensitivity is important in the classroom?