by Erik Eckholm
CHOCOWINITY, N.C. — As school let out one day in January 2008, students from rival towns faced off. Two girls flailed away for several seconds and clusters of boys pummeled each other until teachers pulled them apart.
The fistfights at Southside High School involved no weapons and no serious injuries, and in some ways seemed as old-fashioned as the country roads here in eastern North Carolina. But the punishment was strictly up-to-date: Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed and briefly arrested a dozen students. The school suspended seven of them for a short period and six others from the melee, including the two girls, for the entire semester.
As extra punishment, the girls were told they could not attend Beaufort County’s alternative school for troubled students and were denied aid to study at home.
Their punishment was typical of the get-tough, “zero tolerance” discipline policies that swept the nation over the last two decades, resulting in an increase in suspensions that are disproportionate among black students. School officials here say they acted to preserve a “safe and orderly environment.”
But whether banishing children from schools really makes them safer or serves the community well is increasingly questioned by social scientists and educators. And now the punishment is before the courts in what has become a stark legal test of the approach. Lawyers for the girls — who are black — say that denying them a semester’s schooling was an unjustified violation of their constitutional right to an education.
After a snip so that you can read the article and I can avoid a copyright violation, it gets really interesting.
On March 8, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, lamented “schools that seem to suspend and discipline only young African-American boys” as he pledged stronger efforts to ensure racial equality in schooling.
A growing body of research, scholars say, suggests that heavy use of suspensions does less to pacify schools than to push already troubled students toward academic failure and dropping out — and sometimes into what critics have called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
A rising number of districts are already reversing course and trying new approaches, including behavioral counseling and mediation, to reduce conflict and create safer, quieter schools while ejecting only the worst offenders.
And...
Some 15 percent of the nation’s black students in grades K-12 are suspended at least briefly each year, compared with 4.8 percent of white students, according to federal data from 2006, the latest available. Expulsions are meted out to one in 200 black students versus one in 1,000 white students.
Do realise that not just racially biased discretion by admins, but also other factors like family background and income that contribute to this statistic. I won't deny that some school districts might've been easy on white students who engaged in similar behaviours for which black students might've gotten much much harsher punishments.
The full story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/education/19suspend.html
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