Racial Profiling in Public Schools

[Judi Lynn]

January 16, 2006

Racial Profiling in Public Schools
Black Students Under Fire
By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

More black students than ever are getting the boot from public schools. Things are so bad that the NAACP plans to hold public hearings nationally on the racial disparities in school discipline. It's none to soon. In a report on school discipline, the U.S. Dept. of Education in 1999 found that while blacks made up less than twenty percent of the nation's public school students they comprised nearly one out of three students kicked out of the schools.

Five years later nothing had changed. In a report the Children's Defense Fund branded "Educational Apartheid in America's Public Schools," it found that black students are still expelled and suspended in disproportionate numbers to whites. And that's not all. A recent study by the Advancement Project and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on school discipline procedures in Denver, Chicago and Palm Beach County, Florida found that black students are getting expelled or suspended in high numbers, and many of them also wind up in police stations and courtrooms after being expelled.

In the past year black students have gotten dumped from classrooms or hauled off to jail for using a cell phone, talking in class, or simply calling names. And those being severely punished are getting younger. The arrest and manhandling by police of a five year old in Florida earlier this year ignited a firestorm of protest. The child's arrest cast an even harsher glare on the stiff punishment school officials routinely dish out to black students who allegedly misbehave
(snip/...)

http://www.counterpunch.org/hutchinson01162006.html

[Igel]

1. Anybody have a link to the original report being cited?

A quick googling didn't turn up much.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. I believe this is the report mentioned on MTP yesterday

by Marion Wright Edelman who is the head of The Children's Defense Fund.

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. I am going to argue with the opening sentence in the following paragraph:

Also, school principals have near dictatorial power. They set the standards of what is acceptable behavior or not, and once that's done and a student is deemed a discipline problem, there isn't much parents can do to reverse a decision to suspend or expel. In fact, studies have found that poor and minority parents are less likely than white, middle-class parents to challenge school officials' decisions to suspend or expel their children. There are two other reasons that school officials grossly overreact to the real or perceived bad behavior of some black students. The federal Gun-Free Schools Act, passed in 1994, requires that states order their schools to boot students out for weapons possession in order to qualify for federal funds. (School officials later expanded the list of violations for student expulsion to include fighting and other violent acts.) California's zero-tolerance school laws mandate that a student be expelled for one year for infractions that include drug sales, robbery, assault, weapons possession and fights that cause serious physical injury. The only exception is if the student that caused the injury acted in self-defense.

Principals are bound by zero tolerance laws which are usually tied to state legislation. That, in essence, strips them of that dictatorial power the author mentions. And in my state, parents do indeed have the legal right to appeal suspensions and expulsions. And very often, they win their appeal. There was a high profile case in my district recently where a kid who brought a weapon to school was allowed to return to school after his parent appealed and the superintendent reversed the decision to expel him.

Principals USED TO have near dictatorial power, but they do not have it any longer.

I agree in principle with the author but disagree with this one statement.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. dupe