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Racial disparity in school discipline

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Harsher punishment for blacks, Hispanics

Posted on 3/07/12 • Categorized as Equity issues

By Kathryn Baron

In nine out of California’s ten largest school districts African American and Hispanic students are suspended and expelled at rates far exceeding their numbers, according to newly released data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

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Suspensions and expulsions by race & ethnicity in Los Angeles Unified. (Source: U.S. Dept. of Education) Click to enlarge.

In San Francisco, where African American students compose 11.9 percent of the total enrollment, they accounted for 42.5 percent of out-of-school suspensions and 60 percent of all expulsions. Hispanic students make up 24.6 percent of the student population in Capistrano School District, yet they received 46.3 percent of out-of-school suspensions and, although there were only five expulsions, all were Hispanic students. [Click here for look at all ten districts].

Nationwide, African American students make up 18 percent of the students in the Civil Rights Data Collection [CRDC] sample, but accounted for 35 percent of suspensions and 39 percent of expulsions. The survey included more than 72,000 schools serving about 85 percent of the nation’s kindergarten through twelfth grade students.

California legislators have introduced seven bills this session aimed at providing alternatives – or, what some advocates describe as “common sense” approaches – to dealing with student behavior problems.  Although federal and state law require students to be expelled for specific actions that fall under “zero tolerance” policies, administrators have wide discretion for all other behaviors, and that’s the area the bills address.

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California zero tolerance policy. (Source: ACLU of northern California) Click to enlarge.

Under SB 1235 by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), schools that suspend 25 percent or more of their students, “or a numerically significant racial or ethnic subgroup of that enrollment,” during one academic year would have to implement research-backed strategies aimed at changing the behaviors that lead to suspensions.  [Click here for list of all the bills].

Steinberg acknowledged that sometimes schools have to take the most severe action in order to protect students, faculty and staff, but warned that when those punishments are overused for minor infractions they can backfire. “When students are kicked out of school, they lose valuable class time and are more likely to fall behind, drop out and get into even more trouble on the streets.”

So many students are affected in some low-income communities that when the California Endowment asked residents in fourteen neighborhoods what they would change in order to improve the health and education of young people, high levels of harsh school discipline came up in nine of those neighborhoods.

“We know that it’s important to hold kids accountable, but it’s more important to prevent the behavior by teaching conflict resolution and other approaches that are more positive,” said Mary Lou Fulton, senior project manager at the California Endowment.  A pilot program run by Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, which focuses on making amends or restitution for harm caused to people or the school, and working out conflicts non-violently, has reduced suspensions at Oakland’s Cole Middle School by 87 percent.  The results were so powerful that it’s expanding throughout the district.

The American Psychological Association has been promoting restorative justice for several years, especially an Association task force found no evidence that zero tolerance programs make schools safer or improve the school climate.

District officials need to ask themselves if the approach to school discipline they’re using is getting better result for the students and the schools, said Fulton.  “If it’s not helping students succeed, then why continue to go down this path?  There are so many difficult problems in California education.  This is something that can be solved; we know how to fix it.”



iwatch news

by the center for public integrity

Racial disparity in school discipline in Massachusetts

By Beverly Ford[pic]

6:00 am, January 30, 2012 Updated: 11:28 am, February 6, 2012

A good student with no disciplinary record, Sonia Vivas was on track to fulfill her dream of becoming a lawyer when an encounter with two other teens sent her life into a tailspin. Accused of stealing a cell phone and pulling a knife on a student, the 14-year-old eighth grader was tossed out of school in 2007 with little more than a cursory hearing after the mother of one of the girls, both white, complained her daughter felt threatened.

For six months, Vivas, who denies the accusations, says she languished at home, banished from classes at her Somerville, Mass., middle school where she was the only Hispanic student in the eighth grade.

“It was pretty traumatizing,” she says today, reflecting on the incident she now believes was sparked by jealousy over her friendship with one of the girl's ex-boyfriend. “It made me feel pretty horrible. It changed my life.”

With no due process rights to a hearing under Massachusetts law, Vivas was expelled from school after only a brief interview with the school principal to explain her side of the story. Today, nearly five years later, school officials declined comment on Vivas' dismissal but said where student safety is an issue, the expulsion process remains unchanged.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR), more than three million students are suspended or expelled annually from schools nationwide, including a disproportionate number of minorities. Many of those suspensions are for non-violent, non-criminal behavior such as swearing, talking back to a teacher, tardiness or truancy, said Barbara Best, director of foundation relations and special projects with the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C.. The organization documented those reasons in its “Cradle to Prison Pipeline Campaign,” CDF's effort to curb school suspensions.

“These cases are not jeopardizing school safety,” Best says, noting that suspending or expelling students for such minor behavioral infractions often leaves pupils so behind on their coursework that many end up dropping out of school entirely.

Smoking, vandalism, obscene language and leaving without permission got the white kids in trouble, while black students got disciplined for making noise, being disrespectful, loitering and making threats, said Isabel Raskin, an expert on zero tolerance policies with the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University in Boston.

In Massachusetts, more than 190,000 school days were lost to out-of-school suspensions and expulsions during the 2009-2010 school year, a New England Center for Investigative Reporting analysis of Massachusetts school discipline reports found. That's about one school day for every five Bay State students or just over 10 percent of the 172 million school days logged annually by the state's 955,563 elementary and secondary pupils. Boston was more likely than other school systems to permanently expel students, primarily for violent drug or criminal activity, while Worcester students lost more than 5,000 days of class time more than any other school district in the state due to out-of-school suspensions, the data showed. Boston, one of the larger school systems in Massachusetts, logged only 2,765 lost days to out-of-school suspensions.

While those figures reflect a troubling trend, even more troubling is that OCR data shows that minority students are being expelled or suspended at disproportionately higher rates than their white counterparts. According to that 2006 federal data, the most current available figures show that black males are being expelled at six times that of white male students and at twice the rate of white male suspensions.

“Suspending a student for more than 11 days is tantamount to expulsion,” said Michael Holzman, the research consultant who conducted the Schott Foundation study, adding that comparative studies, including one conducted by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, shows that school dropouts make less money, have a harder time finding a job and often end up in a life of poverty or in prison. At 40 percent, black men also make up most of the inmates in prison even though they are only 12 percent of the population, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics.  

“It doesn't take a leap of imagination to know that if you take children with problems and throw them onto the street with little or no education, we're going to breed a society of criminals,” noted Attorney Sam Schoenfeld, with the Wallace Law Office in Canton, Mass., who has represented a number of expelled and suspended students. “What needs to be done is to stop this chain of events.”

One of the reasons for such strict disciplinary measures can be traced back to April 20, 1999 when two high school seniors, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, massacred 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves at Columbine High School in Denver.

“Suspension became the automatic response to misbehavior,” said Johanna Wald, who has worked on school discipline issues for the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.

Wald said drugs, guns and other threatened and real school shootings have created an era of “Zero-tolerance policies” in many schools.

Paul Andrews, director of professional development and government services for the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, said he supports school discipline policies but they need to be consistent, fair, and progressive so that punishment increases in severity with each new occurrence. School administrators also need to be able to use their own discretion to better resolve issues, he said, adding that parental involvement and support is also key.



New York Times

Racial Disparity in School Suspensions

By SAM DILLON

Published: September 13, 2010

In many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys, according to a new study, which also found that black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls.

School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites.

Federal law requires schools to expel students for weapons possession and incidents involving the most serious safety issues. The authors said they focused on suspensions, which often result from fighting, abusive language and classroom disruptions, because they were a measure that school administrators can apply at their discretion.

The study analyzed four decades of federal Department of Education data on suspensions, with a special focus on figures from 2002 and 2006, that were drawn from 9,220 of the nation’s 16,000 public middle schools.

Among the students attending one of the 9,220 middle schools in the study sample, 28 percent of black boys and 18 percent of black girls, compared with 10 percent of white boys and 4 percent of white girls, were suspended in 2006, the study found.

The researchers found wide disparities in suspension rates among different city school systems and even among middle schools in the same district.

Using the federal data, they calculated suspension rates for middle school students, broken down by race, in 18 large urban districts.

Two districts showed especially high rates. In Palm Beach County, Fla., and Milwaukee, more than 50 percent of black male middle school students were suspended at least once in 2006, the study showed.

Jennie Dorsey, director of family services in the Milwaukee district, said the district had recognized that its suspension rate was too high and had begun a program aimed at changing students’ behavior without suspensions.



The Washington Post

Federal data show racial gaps in school arrests

By Donna St. George, Published: March 5 (2012)

“The sad fact is that minority students across America face much harsher discipline than non-minorities — even within the same school,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. Duncan cautioned that the government is “not alleging overt discrimination in some or all of these cases.” But he said educators and community leaders should join forces to address inequities.

Black males stood out, with 20 percent being suspended from school during the 2009-10 school year. By comparison, 7 percent of white males, 9 percent of Hispanic males and 3 percent of Asian American males were removed from school for disciplinary offenses.

Students with disabilities were more than twice as likely to be suspended as students without disabilities.

Racial disparities in suspensions have been tracked by researchers for years. Experts say there are no studies to show that differences in behavior cause the gap between blacks and whites. Exactly why the gap exists is unclear.

Poverty is an important factor that affects rates of school suspension, but when researchers account for these and other factors, disparities by race still exist.

Many researchers say that unconscious bias is likely to be a factor, as is unequal access to highly effective teachers who do better at managing behavior and engaging students. The culture and leadership of a school are also important. But more research is needed, many agree.

stat/Farkas.doc

RACIAL DISPARITIES AND DISCRIMINATION IN EDUCATION: WHAT DO WE KNOW, HOW DO WE KNOW IT, AND WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW?

George Farkas

Department of Sociology and Population Research Institute

The Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA 16802-6207

Gfarkas@pop.psu.edu

Revised, 8/10/02

3. Possible Discrimination by School District Personnel

Which actions by teachers and other personnel are most likely to involve racial discrimination? And of these, which are likely to be most damaging to students, and to also be observable and measurable by outside agencies? I have attempted an approximate prioritization, beginning with those areas and actions that appear to score highest on all three criteria.

1. Ability Grouping in Early Elementary School

As already noted, many kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers separate students within the classroom into “ability groups” for reading. They do this on the basis of the reading-related skills and classroom behavior (social maturity and readiness to learn) shown by the students. (Since these are not based on innate ability differences, but rather on current performance differences, “ability grouping” is a misnomer. A more appropriate name might be “performance grouping.”) Since low-income, African-American, and Hispanic early elementary students, particularly males, generally show lower skills and lesser classroom maturity than middle class and White students, they are more likely to be placed into the lower groups. Since such placement affects both how much the student learns, and how the individual thinks of him or herself as a student (the student’s “effort optimism”), it may be enormously consequential for later academic achievement. And since these placements are based on teachers’ informal judgments of student skills and behavior, there is certainly every opportunity for teacher prejudice and discrimination to affect outcomes. Finally, the teacher’s placement of students into ability groupings is an action that is, at least potentially, observable and verifiable.

Of course, residential segregation and the use of neighborhood schools within these segregated neighborhoods decreases the scope for this type of discrimination, since most ethnic minority students attend elementary school with few to no Whites. Nevertheless, some African-American and Latino children will be attending school with White children, so that the opportunity for discriminatory placement into ability groups will arise for them. Further, teachers in high minority schools may treat all students as belonging to low ability groups. Then the question becomes, are they given lower placements than their skills and behavior would earn if they were White? Also, would it be better to attempt to induce teachers to place more minority group children in higher ability groups, or would it be more effective to attempt to convince teachers to stop using ability grouping altogether? For the latter argument, see Oakes (1994).

2. Retention in Grade

Studies show that ethnic minority and low-income children are more likely to be retained in grade than White and middle-income children. Certainly, teachers believe that such retention is for the “student’s own good.” And it is difficult to argue with the proposition that if a student has failed to learn the skills taught in a given grade, promoting him or her to the next grade, where these skills are prerequisite for performance, is almost a guarantee of failure there. Yet, it is also the case that being retained in grade, and becoming significantly older than the other children in the grade, is often associated with lower school engagement and effort optimism on the student’s part, which then leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of poor school performance in subsequent grades.

Once again, the issue is whether the student’s performance really requires retention in grade, and whether the teacher’s judgment of this issue is at all affected by the student’s race. And once again, possible teacher prejudice may arise more frequently in racially integrated classes, where teachers are judging White and Black students side by side.

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