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Jon Cloke


School Discipline Tougher on African Americans

By Howard Witt

September 25, 2007, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-070924discipline,1,6597576.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

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.'

(c) 2007 Chicago Tribune

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