The wonderful hubris of the new National Education Policy Center study on Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and Racial Justice, is not the assertion that discipline data should be an essential metric in gauging a school's success--which it should--but that current disciplinary policies and practices are racist.
The author of the report, Daniel Losen of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, is more diplomatic than that, but he does suggest that many current discipline policies may be "unlawful" because of their "disparate impact" on African Americans and the disabled. And I would have to agree.
In our post-Columbine, zero-tolerance, character-first education world, Losen proposes a radical thesis (that the race of the student counts more than his or her behavior) and mounts a remarkably persuasive argument for doubting that current mainstream beliefs--and the policy and practices that they have spawned--about disciplining our students have done anything for academic excellence, much less for equity. In fact, Losen bluntly states, student suspensions "are significantly influenced by factors other than student misbehavior."
If that sounds radical, even counterintuitive, read the study. Among the findings reported here are these:
- "School suspensions nationwide have risen steadily since the early 1970s, and racial disparities have grown considerably as well."
Racial and physical biases aside, the suspension crackdown (my word), according to Losen, doesn't seem to have improved our educational outcomes:
- "[I]f suspending large numbers of disruptive students helped improve instruction and the learning environment, better academic results should be expected. But this does not seem to happen."
While many of these findings may seem obvious, the key insight here is this:
"Often, student misbehavior is attributed exclusively to students themselves, but researchers know the same student can behave very differently in different classrooms. Disruptions tend to increase or decrease with the skill of the teacher in providing engaging instruction and in managing the classroom--areas many teachers say they would like help improving."
I have seen the terrible consequences of overt, covert, and implicit racism in my small district over many years. It is not simply the numbers, though they certainly represent something of a signal of trouble: 30% of the kids are African American and 99% of the teachers and administrators are white. And it has never seemed coincidental--as Losen's report points out--that the academic performance numbers correspond so well with the suspension numbers: blacks were about twice as likely as whites to fail as they were to get kicked out of school. As the American Pediatrics' report quoted by Losen said,
[C]hildren most likely to be suspended or expelled are those most in need of adult supervision and professional help.
If I hadn't seen such racist behavior on the part of adults--and there is no other explanation for it--I would not have believed it. And I would not have believed that the disproportionate number of disciplinary actions--from "referrals" to suspensions--against blacks was caused by the kids' color. But it was. Of course, it is more complicated than that, but that is what makes the problem so insidious and why the "disparate impact" standard explained by Losen is appropriate in weighing a school's culpability for inequitable enforcement of discipline standards. Writes Losen, quoting from a 2010 book he co-authored,
Under the `disparate impact' theory, a method of discipline that is racially neutral on its face but has a discriminatory effect may be found unlawful absent sufficient justification such as educational necessity. Even if a school's action is found to be justified, it still may be unlawful if equally effective, less discriminatory alternatives are available.
There may be some justifiable controversy here about the significance of "uneven educational outcomes" as a perfect measure of unfair disciplinary practices, but there should be no doubt that adults have to take charge of their schools--which means taking responsibility for the behavioral atmosphere within them. The best evidence here, supporting Losen and his findings, comes from Martin Luther King himself, who was asked in 1959 what he thought of the historic 1954 Brown versus Board of Education ruling that integrated schools:
I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel. I am for equality. However, I think integration in our public schools is different. In that setting, you are dealing with one of the most important assets of an individual--the mind. White people view black people as inferior. A large percentage of them have a very low opinion of our race. People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.
As long as white people are writing the rules, interpreting them, and enforcing them, African Americans have something to worry about--and it's not segregation.
This post originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.