Latino Students More Likely Than Whites To Be Suspended

Here are a couple of dots that I never thought to connect (I’m glad someone had the good sense to do it). It comes form a study done by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a group dedicated to “produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions.” The quote is from their own website.

The study is titled Discipline Policies, Successful Schools and Racial Justice, and it has to do with disparities in public school suspensions. USA Today got to the gist of the study in a quick sentence:

U.S. public schools suspend black, Hispanic and disabled students at much higher rates than others…

The study took the numbers gathered by the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, and reviewed them to look for trends.

The federal government found that between the 1972-73 and the 2006-07 school years…Suspension rates for Hispanic students rose from 3% to 7%.

That may not sound like a lot, but it has big consequences. What’s happened is that there seems to be less tolerance for minority students behavior. Latino and black kids are suspended for minor infractions at a greater rate than their white peers. This was especially true for first time offenders. If a Latino kids gets busted for the first time for some minor prank, he will more than likely be suspended; as opposed to his white classmates who, under the same circumstances, would not get so severe a punishment (I’m betting that at this point most of you are having middle and high school flashbacks. So we’ll let them pass, and go on with the stats).

In middle school, according to the report, 16% of Latino male students are suspended each year, in comparison with 10% of white students. You’re probably nodding because this is not news to you. But here is the other dot I spoke of connecting at the beginning of this post:

The increased suspensions are linked to higher dropout rates and heightened risks to students’ mental and physical well-being.

There’s more:

…one cause for the high number of suspensions among the minority students is the result of discretionary behavior on behalf of disciplining adults rather than student behavior.

There have been studies in the past that have tracked the disparities in school discipline; that’s why the NEPC decided to go back to take a closer look and to relate their findings to the dropout rate. They found what they were looking for – a direct relation between discipline and suspensions on one hand, and dropout rates on the other. The reasons for the discrepancy, though, are what we should be noting.  The suspensions, left to the discretion of the education professionals, tend to favor non-minorities. This is important becasue it can be changed. But in order to do that we need to make some fundamental changes in the way some teachers feel about disciplining minority students.

The first step is to acknowledge the problem. Do that and you’ll change the dropout rate as well.