Discipline Study: Schools Unfair to Blacks
Nationwide statistics show that African-American students are disciplined far more than they should be, based on their percentage in the overall public school population. Yet the federal office charged with investigating such discipline disparities doesn’t seem to be focusing on the issue.
“In every state but Idaho … black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population. In 21 states—Illinois among them—that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body,” reports the Chicago Tribune, based on its own analysis of U.S. Department of Education data from the 2004-2005 school year.
At the same time, researchers have found that black children are no more likely than white children to misbehave. “In fact, the data indicate that African-American students are punished more severely for the same offense, so clearly something else is going on,” says Russell Skiba, an educational psychology professor at Indiana University. “We can call it structural inequity or we can call it institutional racism.”
The U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights is responsible for investigating whether public school discipline policies are discriminatory, but has only done so once in the last three years, according to the Tribune. The office declined the newspaper’s request for comment.
The issue goes beyond simple unfairness in school discipline policies, because a history of school suspensions or expulsions is a first step in the pathway to prison, the article points out. Similarly, school discipline is the underlying issue in the recent civil rights marches on Jena, La., over the prosecution of six black high school students, as discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post.
