School Discipline Tougher on African Americans
AUSTIN - In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.
In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites.
In Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended.
Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America’s public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year.
In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, 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. And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.
No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. Hispanic students are suspended and expelled in almost direct proportion to their populations, while white and Asian students are disciplined far less.
Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research studies have found. Some impoverished black children grow up in troubled neighborhoods and come from broken families, leaving them less equipped to conform to behavioral expectations in school. While such socioeconomic factors contribute to the disproportionate discipline rates, researchers say that poverty alone cannot explain the disparities. “There simply isn’t any support for the notion that, given the same set of circumstances, African-American kids act out to a greater degree than other kids,” said Russell Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University whose research focuses on race and discipline issues in public schools. “In fact, the data indicate that African-American students are punished more severely for the same offense, so clearly something else is going on. We can call it structural inequity or we can call it institutional racism.”
Academic researchers have been quietly collecting evidence of such race-based disciplinary disparities for more than 25 years. Yet the phenomenon remains largely obscured from public view by the popular emphasis on “zero tolerance” crackdowns, which are supposed to deliver equally harsh punishments based on a student’s infraction, not skin color.
That’s not what the data say is happening. Yet the federal Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which is charged with investigating allegations of discriminatory discipline policies in the nation’s public schools, has opened just one such probe in the past three years. Officials declined requests to explain why.
There’s more at stake than just a few bad marks in a student’s school record. Studies show that a history of school suspensions or expulsions is a strong predictor of future trouble with the law-and the first step on what civil rights leaders have described as a “school-to-prison pipeline” for black youths, who represent 16 percent of U.S. adolescents but 38 percent of those incarcerated in youth prisons.
Relatively few school districts scattered across the country have begun to acknowledge the issue of racial disparities in discipline and tried to do something about it.
In Austin, after administrators discovered that black youths accounted for 14 percent of the school district’s population but 37 percent of the students sent to punitive alternative schools, they introduced a program in some schools based on encouraging positive student behaviors rather than punishing negative ones.
At one school, Pickle Elementary, which serves mostly Hispanic and black students, the results were dramatic-disciplinary referrals dropped from 520 in 2001-2002 to just 20 last year.
“I am not going to give up on a child and suspend him or send him to an alternative school,” said Julie Pryor, who was the principal of the school when the behavioral program was implemented and is now a district administrator. “Washing our hands of a child will never change his behavior, it just makes it worse. These are children. It’s up to us to be creative to find ways to help them behave.”
But academic experts say many more school administrators, when confronted with data showing disparate rates of discipline for minority students, react like officials in the small east Texas town of Paris and strenuously deny accusations of racial discrimination.
Paris is the sole school district in the nation currently under investigation by the federal Education Department to determine whether higher discipline rates for black students there constitute institutionalized discrimination. The probe has been under way for more than a year.
“The school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations,” Dennis Eichelbaum, the attorney for the Paris Independent School District, said in an interview earlier this year.
That perspective is not shared by the families of many of Paris’ black students, who make up 40 percent of the school district’s nearly 4,000 students.
“They say there’s no racism here, but if you go inside a school and look in the room where they send the kids for detention, almost all the faces are black,” said Brenda Cherry, a Paris civil rights activist who assembled some of the complaints that sparked the federal investigation. “Unless black people are just a bad race of people, something is wrong here.”
Exactly why black students across the nation are suspended and expelled more frequently than children of other races is a question that continues to perplex sociologists.
Socioeconomic factors are certainly at play, researchers believe.
“Studies of school suspension have consistently documented disproportionality by socioeconomic status. Students who receive free school lunch are at increased risk for school suspension,” according to “The Color of Discipline,” a 2000 study by Skiba and other researchers in Indiana and Nebraska. Another study concluded that “students whose fathers did not have a full-time job were significantly more likely to be suspended than students whose fathers were employed full time.”
But those studies and others have repeatedly found that racial factors are even more important.
“Poor home environment does carry over into the school environment,” said Skiba, who is widely regarded as the nation’s foremost authority on school discipline and race. “But middle-class and upper-class black students are also being disciplined more often than their white peers. Skin color in itself is a part of this function.”
Some experts point to cultural miscommunications between black students and white teachers, who fill 83 percent of the nation’s teaching ranks. In fact, the Tribune analysis found, some of the highest rates of racially disproportionate discipline are found in states with the lowest minority populations, where the disconnect between white teachers and black students is potentially the greatest.
“White teachers feel more threatened by boys of color,” said Isela Gutierrez, a juvenile justice expert at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a watchdog and policy group. “They are viewed as disruptive. What might be their more assertive way of asking a question, for example, is viewed as popping off at the mouth.”
Nor has the decline of court-ordered integration across the nation and the gradual resegregation of urban schools in recent decades made much difference in disciplinary rates. Even in urban schools where most of the students are black, black youths are still disciplined out of proportion to their population, the data show. In Washington, D.C., for example, black students are 84 percent of the public school population but 97 percent of the students who are suspended. Other researchers believe that zero-tolerance policies, which encourage teachers and administrators to crack down on even minor, non-violent misbehavior, are exacerbating racial disparities. Some states, such as Texas, are so zealous that they have criminalized many school infractions, saddling tens of thousands of students with misdemeanor criminal records for offenses such as swearing or disrupting class.
The school security climate, in turn, can reinforce race-based expectations about which students are most likely to require discipline.
“Most suburban schools, where the students are more likely to be white, purchase security equipment that is meant to protect children-for example, hand scanners that make sure that the parent/guardian picking up the child is legitimate,” said Ronnie Casella, an expert on the criminalization of student behavior at Central Connecticut State University. “In contrast, urban schools choose equipment such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras that are meant to catch youths committing crimes.”
The new behavioral program being tried in Austin, and some 6,500 schools nationwide, seeks to turn zero tolerance on its head in a bid to slash the number of suspensions, expulsions and other punishments meted out by teachers.
Called “Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports,” the intensive regimen requires a commitment from an entire school, including training of students in the behaviors that are expected of them and re-education of teachers and administrators in the use of positive motivational techniques.
The interactions of individual teachers with their students are minutely scrutinized by a team of experts to pinpoint communication breakdowns, and specialized counseling teams are deployed to work with students who present the most serious discipline issues so that classroom teachers are not left to deal with the problems on their own.
“Most schools use a get-tough, punish-the-kids kind of perspective, which results in the kinds of racial disciplinary disparities we see across the country,” said George Sugai, a professor of education at the University of Connecticut who helped create the positive behavioral program. “We come at it from the other perspective: If you teach kids the behaviors that are expected, you have a greater likelihood of success. It’s really more about changing how adults interact with kids than it is about changing the kids.”
Schools like Pickle Elementary in Austin that are using the positive behavioral program often report sharp reductions in their disciplinary referrals. But Skiba, who is currently studying the effectiveness of the program, cautions that it does not always eliminate racial disparities.
“They’ve been very successful at reducing rates of suspension and expulsion while making schools function more effectively,” Skiba said of the schools using the program. “But if you look at the data by race, what you find is that some discrepancies still exist. It’s not enough to put this program in place and say, ‘We are happy to reduce our rates of suspension,’ because what we might have done is reduce our white suspensions and increase our African-American suspensions. There’s just no silver bullet for this problem.”
© 2007 Chicago Tribune
As a Whitey, I think us whiteys have a difficult time with folks who are different than us uncultured fools. We whiteys have fake culture, like a art show, a car show, cheese and cracker shows. Its all ‘I haves’ and ‘you wants’. The “thing” monopoly. If you have a real culture and community, you grow up differently. To go from a home with a strong family pride to a school that treats you as a number can be horrible. Us whiteys are used to being just another cracker in a box. We whiteys are so far from nature it shows in our pale skin, I don’t know how we have gotten so far. People make fun of people who are different but that is not my point here, I don’t think its racism causing this discrepancy. My point comes from the fact we don’t realize the minor subtle differences in dealing with other groups of communities that are fundamentally different. I’m sure a black teacher doesn’t feel the need to suspend a white student more often, out of misunderstanding. I do know more white teachers work in the US.
If we could reach out and teach that, “reaching out”, in school at the earliest level we would have no discrimination or war (and our world leaders might try to listen better to what their votes say too)! Teachers are our future, if they cant reach out, then what are they doing there.
Think of your worst teacher…..
…now think of looking up to them as a peer, a friend.
Do you see how difficult it might be for some kids to find a home in a school. Kids act out for a reason, any kid.
Just think of the biggest white culture, Church. Even Jesus is a white cracker in a box! Hey, you eat him!
I had to…..
This is a really, really tough problem to evaluate. I’ve done a lot of substitute teaching in inner-city schools that were almost entirely minority. Many of them were almost 100% African-American. I’ve had a couple of friends who taught for a number of years in the same schools.
I recall spending several weeks in a long-term assignment at one high school. For most of the day, there were more students in the halls than in the classrooms. You think this is hyperbole, right? The situation I speak of was literal. The noise level from the hallway was so tremendous that you had to keep your classroom door shut to be heard over the din. Sometimes even that didn’t do it.
I could tell you stories that would make your hair curl–if you’re white. If you are Black, I suppose it would just make still more of it fall out, from frustration.
As a teacher, the knee-jerk response is to feel that what’s needed is a lot more discipline. And, since most of the problem arise from a minority of the students, your most ardent (and normally your most secret) wish is that the 25% that are causing all the problems could be expelled permanently, or transferred permanently to some other facility, so that the 75% of the kids who want to get an education could do so.
You don’t necessarily feel that way because you wish the troublemakers any ill. It’s more that you would like to see the kids who want to learn have a chance.
Nevertheless, the main trouble with this solution is its superficiality. You really have to examine the question of why you have 25% of your student body shooting craps and doing round-offs in the hallways. I’m sure they’re doing other stuff besides that, but–hey–who’s got the courage to go out there and check? (Not security, I can tell you that for sure.)
The underlying trouble rests squarely on an economically unjust society. The fact that urban school systems are vast and highly politicized bureauocracies is also an unhelpful, and related, problem.
I think it would help if every neighborhood had its own small school that was run entirely by the neighborhood. Keeping the schools as small as practicable is, I think, a key element.
But even at that, this is a problem that can’t be solved by anything short a level of social and economic justice sufficient to create economic security and family stability.
I wanted to let people know where the term “cracker” stems from. It has nothing to do with food. White people used to carry whips which they would crack at black people; from there comes the term.
Peer mediation programs are increasingly being implemented in schools. Below is just one site:
http://www.studygs.net/peermed.htm
Black, white, brown, red, yellow and all GREENS. www.gp.org
This carries over into the criminal justice system where whites are more likely to be assigned to rehab and community service, and blacks to do hard time for drug law infractions. Resulting in devastating consequences for individuals, families and communities of color.
I once thought it was a conscious conspiracy to oppress and subjugate blacks, and no doubt it is in some quarters, but teachers don’t have conferences where a consensus is reached to harass little Jamal and Shaniqua.
More likely whites are conditioned, by a sense of entitlement and superiority to apply a double standard to interactions with “others.” Apply critical thinking to our foreign policy, double standards in policy toward nonwhite nations are the norm.
It isn’t the Klan and their ilk, that are the greatest danger to minorities
its the cultural systemic subjugation.
I’m a white teacher in Washington, D.C. at a school with a 100% black student population. My initial reaction to this headline was, “Well of course, because black kids are a lot more likely to have black teachers and black principals.” In other words the culture in which these students are living and going to school tends to be a lot tougher when it comes to discipline. At least that’s my experience.
When I was teaching in rural Indiana, where the student population was close to 100% white (a few minority students), the teachers and principals simply treat the students differently, and thus, students are not suspended or expelled as much. And those white students in Indiana came from the same, if not worse, socioeconomic situations. So it may be true that black students are not more likely to misbehave, but black teachers and administrators are more likely to have a tougher response. It’s simply a cultural thing, not a socioeconomic or race thing.
That being said, at locations where there is greater diversity (not 100% one way or the other), institutional, or as I prefer to call it, subconscious racism probably accounts for the discrepancies in disciplinary actions taken towards students of color.
Thus, local data may be informative about the existence of racism, but any national data is skewed by cultural differences between whites and blacks.
And as for the part about Washington DC schools and the fact that black students are disproportionately suspended or expelled in relation to other students. That’s because the white kids in DC are for the most part only in elementary school, after which they are moved to private schools because the most of the middle schools and high schools are pretty scary, let alone academically reputable. And socioeconomic status also plays a part in DC, where there are relatively few, if any, low-income white families. And that is without a doubt the result of institutional racism, but that’s another story.
This looks to me like an example of what statisticians call “Simpson’s paradox”. Look it up on wikipedia for some examples. A correlation appears that would be reversed or eliminated if a hidden confounding variable were taken into account.
In this case, my guess is that the confounding variables are the grouping of schools by socioeconomic class and the association between large poor violent urban schools and urban black populations. That is, presumably there are more discipline problems and expulsions in inner-city schools. There are more blacks attending inner-city schools. The result is that blacks are more likely to be subject to discipline because they are more likely to attend these schools. This is why Idaho bucks the trend– not because there is no institutional racism, but because there are no big cities to harbor urban black populations in inner-city schools.
This is consistent with what the author says, namely that when socioeconomic background is taken into account, there is no effect.
This is not to say we should ignore the larger trend– it indicates institutional racism of some kind. Its just that the institution at fault is not the school.
My friend, who was a city teacher for some years, is now a part-time substitute in a semi-rural, small town area in the south. She is part native American with grandchildren whose father is black. She tells me that her trick for managing her classes is to make extra efforts to befriend the students who act out. She gets them on her side. Perhaps this wouldn’t work in the upper grades. Through fifth works well for her.
How refreshing to have some intelligent comments about a serious problem in this country since “independence”I think the comments from Fresh 1 and Urthsong are the way we should go.
First of all, these general comments are exactly that, general in nature, because anything one can say about schools in the particular is probably true somewhere.
Schools like the society they serve are essentially racist. That doesn’t mean that all teachers are racist, it means that the system is racist in its policies and practices. Dominated by white cultural imperatives and values designed to promote white hegemony. Even when individual racism is not overtly present the system bends all efforts toward the values that sustain industrial capitalism not a humane society.
The instructional practices in our public schools are formed by an antiquated educational system, which has little or no relationship to what is known about human cognitive development. The K to 12 systems are a model of the industrial factory system circa 1900 in which the objective is an acceptance of authority and the promotion of memory not cognition or self discovery or a broad sense of mutuality and trust. Learning which is more than training or rudimentary skill development or social engineering but rather a transformational event is not the objective of our schools. Our schools are a tool or preparatory institution for commercial activities not the building of a humane society. There are few schools in which cooperation, collaboration, trust and mutual concern are considered measurable values or measurements of institutional success.
Teachers are as powerless as their students and equally as isolated from each other as they are from their students and yet they impose on the students a tyranny that is imposed on them while the unions fight for more money but little or no authority and responsibility for true learning.
In this atmosphere, the institutional factory we call schools turns everyone off. Schools are run for the benefit of the 18.5 billion dollar textbook industry and the political hacks that parasitically run the schools. Meanwhile the Business Roundtable, Bill Gates, and the supporters of Ed 08 undermine any efforts to develop a humane society with half-truths with the money necessary to dilute what little good is left in our public schools.
The society is racist and the schools serve that agenda. I believe there are millions of good and generous teachers in our schools but many have not been adequately trained in the pedagogical skills that 21st century students require. There is not one university in this country that has an in place and institutionally funded in-service two-year teacher-training program that can honestly be considered an “internship”. Pedagogy is a lost art form that now serves the meager demands of NCLB, not the transformational demands of true learning - not one school in this country has a graduate program in critical pedagogy or a Educational Administration program designed to promote organizational innovation in the administration of our schools - not one!
I’m worried about our nation, when Black boys prefer to join gangs to find community rather than finish a high school that is devoid of community. The criminal justice system has an increasingly active role in the early elementary grades. That is as fine an indicator of school failure at the systemic level if there ever was one.
If there is a better indicator of the systemic failure of this society is that we have chosen to be led by a “C” student from Yale who’s major accomplishment and claim to fame is his family’s wealth and power.
Blacks are systematically deprived of effective reading instruction throughout the lower grades. It should come as no surprise that they present disciplinary problems as they try in vain to succeed in school.
Baraka is dead-on. My 30 years of teaching in a high school, my M. Ed. program mid-career, and my current per-course instructorship at the same university where I earned my M. Ed. could not be summed up better. The fault is in the hydra-headed ideology of capitalism. The inability to get past ingrained rascism is a symptom of that ideology. But enough of that. I repeat: Baraka is dead-on in every detail.
I agree with Mr. Baraka that our educational system is very antiquated, in fact we are still using the same system that the Greeks themselves used and perhaps are still using the linear education where there is no room for deviation in our linear existence. We teach and reteach or “rumiate” information where the questions are provided to elicit the same answers time and time again, thus the linear aspects of institutionalized racism and every other “ism” in existence.
America does indeed have a social program for underpriveleged young African-Americans. It’s call the prison-industrial complex.
I also agree with Baraka. Not only are Baraka’s comments more closer to the root causes; Baraka’s remarks are solution based.
America reaps what it sows! I am always humbled when a controversial issues hits our awareness or a critical problem spirals out of control in this country; we as Americans are all talk and no action to solve the problem collectively. Many of us Americans have a short memory. However, let me help you out with a little systemic racial history.
Rodney King beat down. Viewed on CNN around the world. People (Blacks and Whites were divided). The LAPD aquittal viewed around the world. Same reaction (Blacks and Whites were divided). Now do you see the pattern.
This “School Discipline Tougher on African Americans,” article is symptomatic of much deeper rooted historical issues that many of us are reminded of when the issue surfaces.
This and many other examples past, present, and future on race in America are the proverbial “There’s the pink elaphant in the room,” which we all choose to ignore and substitute or redirect or focus on the “red herring.” In this case the “pink elaphant in the room” is the political charged and economic greed driven racist systemic “system of white sepremacy” in our education system which bleeps on the social radar as “black kids out of control.” The black kids are viewed as the “Red Herrings,” the scapegoats! Let’s keep this up America, this never solves the problems. This behavior keeps the system cycling full steam in to our future for somebody later to complain!