SRA Blog: Racial Disparities in School Discipline are Growing
In a blog post for Society for Research on Adolescence, BUSSW doctoral student Kendall Johnson calls on schools and parents to stop the criminalization of Black students.
April 2, 2019 | By Kendall Johnson
The following text is an excerpt.
A study conducted by David Ramey of Penn State University and published in the Sociology of Education looked at more than 60,000 schools in 6,000 school districts and found that schools with large minority and poor populations were more likely to infuse, or incorporate into classroom and/or overall school practice, criminal justice disciplinary policies. These policies include the approval of the use of practices such as suspension, expulsion, and arrests. The US Department of Education Civil Rights Data has found consistent disparities over time in terms of school discipline practices. Black students are being criminalized for their behaviors within school which in turn increases the police presence at some of the schools. Furthermore, recent federal data from the Civil Rights Data Collection showed that while overall number of suspensions during the 2015-16 school year had decreased by about 100,000 from the previous year, the number of students being turned over to law enforcement and arrested increased by about 5,000.
What are some of the reasons for this disparity? The Brown Center, a research center within Brown University Medical School that studies the developmental outcomes of youth, discusses some findings that contribute to racial disparities in education that lead to the disproportionate disciplining. One is that teacher-student mismatch harms black children because non-black teachers sometimes have lower expectations for black students. Additionally, white and black teachers evaluate behavior of black children differently. Research has shown that when a black student is matched with a black teacher, they are less likely to get suspended. […]
Full article from the Society for Research on Adolescence blog: https://s-r-a.org/research-summaries/unequal-opportunity-racial-disparities-school-discipline-growing/