Are disciplinary actions always fair across different races? Are harsher punishments for minority students perpetuating a school-to-prison pipeline?
We’ve heard it for years — but now, it seems like we’ve finally got the data to see it spelled out. According to data gathered by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, suspension/expulsion rates are not doled out equally across races/ethnic groups. In a recent article published on Yahoo!, the data is summed up as the following:
Data from 72,000 American public schools in the 2009-10 school year, for example, show that while African-Americans make up 18 percent of the students in this large sample, they account for 46 percent of students suspended more than once, 39 percent of students expelled, and 36 percent of students arrested on campus.
White students, by contrast, represent 29 percent of multiple suspensions and 33 percent of expulsions – but 51 percent of the students.
With the number of suspensions almost tripling between 1976 and 2006, officials are starting to question the necessity of the punishment for things that were once considered “typical adolescent behavior.” In addition to speculation on excessive suspensions and expulsions, officials have speculated that the popular “zero tolerance” mentality has “led to what they call a ‘school-to-prison pipeline,’ and the implications of this unfair, even draconian, disciplinary system are enormous.”
Is it a fair conclusion derived from fact or a hasty assumption regarding a “chicken or egg” scenario? Is this a cycle that is self-perpetuating or is it a product of a system ingrained with racial bias? Is it fair to assume that increased numbers of school suspensions correlate to higher levels of imprisonment? Is it fair to assume the opposite?
Photo: ★ Cleo Chabrou © ★/Flickr
Bottom line, once you start suspending kids, you start to lose them. If they quit coming to school, they are likely to start the prison track. I’d rather pay for them to be in school and get creative on how to keep them there, than lifetime scholarships to prison at 50K a year. I’m just sayin.
The article states “Two students set off fire alarms in the same school district. One of them, an African-American kindergartner, is suspended for five days; the other, a white ninth-grader, is suspended for one day.” Apples and oranges…. Kindergarten vs 9th grade? AND “•An African-American high-schooler is suspended for a day for using a cellphone and an iPod in class. In the same school, a white student with a similar disciplinary history gets detention for using headphones.” ….. BIG difference between a cell phone and a device to listen to music. Kind of a stretch to call this a disparity,… Read more »
You know what would be more cool? A study on these kids and if they have a dad in their lives. Oh wait, that’s been done and the figures have been out for YEARS. The result? None.
Curious: Did they look across gender lines
Or, putting it another way: Isn’t this assuming that all the students are more or less equally well-behaved, with no statistically significant difference in their behavior, only in their punishment? To prove objectively that racism was a key factor in a punishment system, you would need to demonstrate that rates of punishment are significantly different from rates of infraction. I’m aware that some people would say that it’s racist to ask that question, but most people are willing to accept the argument that boys are punished more often than girls because boys are simply less well-behaved. If we’re willing to… Read more »
All data for the study (among others) by the OCR can be found here: http://ocrdata.ed.gov/
I definitely think there is merit to studying this across gender lines and it would be interesting to see even a cross-study of gender AND race, no?