Most Likely to be Suspended, Least Likely to Succeed? New Report Shows Racism in Middle School Suspensions
Posted By The Editors | September 17th, 2010 | Category: Education, Feature, Year in Review | No Comments »
Print This Post By TaRessa Stovall
Which is sadder: the fact that black kids are more likely to be suspended than any other group in middle school, or our lack of surprise at this revelation?
A recent study of 9,000 middle schools in 18 of the nation’ s largest school districts revealed that “In many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys … black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls,” reported The New York Times.
“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.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization, published the study, Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis, which “ found that African-American children are suspended far more frequently than white children, in general, with especially high racial differences in middle school, causing them to miss valuable class time during a crucial period in their academic and social development,” according to the SPLC news release
The study adds to growing research challenging whether zero-tolerance polices, which often mandate suspensions for specified offenses, are fair or effective..
“It’s clear from these findings that zero-tolerance policies are pushing too many children out of school at a critical point in their education and are having a disproportionate impact on students of color,” said Marion Chartoff, a senior SPLC staff attorney specializing in education issues.
“As the number of suspensions for kids of all races and all grades has risen dramatically, the gap between suspension rates for blacks and whites has more than tripled – from about 3 percentage points in the 1970s to over 10 percentage points today,” said Daniel J. Losen, a Senior Associate at The Civil Rights Project a project at the University of California at Los Angeles, and co-author of the study. “The incredibly high frequency of suspension use in urban middle schools, and the large numbers of youth of color who miss school as a result, is rarely discussed in debates about what we must do to improve our schools.”
Key finding: The study notes there is, in general, no evidence that racial disparities in school discipline are the result of higher rates of disruption among black students.
The researchers focused on middle schools because studies suggest that suspensions in those grades may have significant, long-term repercussions for students, and because few previous studies have separated middle school data from that for all grades, masking the extraordinarily high frequency of suspension in middle schools. The Times cited a recent study showing that 400 incarcerated high school freshmen in Baltimore “found that two-thirds had been suspended at least once in middle school.”
Clearly “zero tolerance” has earned a failing grade. Before we “Race to the Top”, we’ve got to address—literally— what’s broken in the middle. It’s time for educators to suspend their current disciplinary curriculum to apply the principles of higher learning, study best practices at those schools—public, private, parochial, charger and otherwise—that are working, and upgrade their lesson plan. If not, what worse news might the next study or report bring?.
TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline.
No comments:
Post a Comment