Report: Schools Suspend Black Students at a High Rate

by Frederick H. Lowe
As students prepare to return to class for a new school year, a major university has released a blistering report that paints African Americans as poster children for out-of-school suspensions.

According to a study published by the University of California at Los Angeles, able-bodied African-American students and black students with disabilities are suspended from school at much higher rates than their white, Asian, Hispanic and Native American classmates.

The report, titled "Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School," reported that 17 percent, or one out of every six able-bodied black students, were suspended at least once during the 2009-2010 school year at 6,779 school districts that were studied by authors Daniel J. Losen, JD, MEd and Jonathan Gillespie, MSW. Losen is director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, and Gillespie is a research associate with the project.

Schools may suspend students multiple times throughout the school year, but numerous suspensions are only counted once.

The out-of-school suspension rate for able-bodied black students compares with 5 percent for whites, 2 percent for Asians, 7 percent for Hispanics and 8 percent for Native Americans.

The study found, however, that more than 300 school districts suspended 25 percent of  enrolled black students. The Pontiac City, Michigan, school district, set some sort of a record, suspending 67.5 percent of its black students. Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, with the nation’s largest black business community and the most African-American educators and administrators, suspended 25 percent of its black students.

Black students with disabilities don’t escape suspension. Their suspension rates are higher than those of able-bodied black students.

School districts nationwide suspended 25 percent of the black students with disabilities, or one out of every four students in the kindergarten through the twelve grade, at least once in the 2009-2010 school year. This compares with the suspension of one out of 20 white students with disabilities.  

Illinois led in the category of suspensions of black students with disabilities. The state’s schools suspended 42 percent of black students with disabilities, the report concludes.

The study asks the question---are black students being suspended because they present higher discipline problems than their white, Asian, Hispanic and Native American classmates?

The report concludes that African-American students don’t present a more serious discipline problem than their classmates.

A 2010 study of 21 schools led by Johns Hopkins University researcher Katherine Bradshaw found that even when controlling for teacher ratings of student misbehavior, black students were more likely than others to be sent to the office for disciplinary reasons.

“The risk of getting suspended is not borne equally by all students, which raises civil rights issues and questions about fundamental fairness,” the report said. “While children from every racial group can be found to have a high risk for suspension in some school districts, African-American children and children with disabilities are usually at a greater risk than others.”

For its report, the study analyzed data released in March 2012 by the U.S. Department of Education. Similar studies also have focused on the high-out of school suspension rates of black students. In a report, titled “Monitoring the Future: A Continuing Study of American Youth," Dr. Ivory A. Toldson, a Howard University professor, wrote about the high-out-school suspension rate for black students.

Unlike Toldson’s study, the UCLA report noted that out-of-school suspensions are used to dismiss students for even minor infractions of school rules. In North Carolina, for example, the out-of-school suspension rates for black students for such behaviors as talking on a cell phone, violating the dress code, being disruptive and displaying affection was at least twice as high compared with white students engaged in the same behavior.

The suspension rates are becoming a big problem affecting students of all races, although black boys are the most-frequent target of school suspensions.

“There are over three million children, K-12, estimated to have lost instructional seat time in 2009-2010 because they were suspended from school, often with no guarantee of adult supervision outside the school,” the UCLA report said. “That is about the number of children it would take to fill every seat in every major league baseball park and every NFL stadium in America, combined.”

School districts in Chicago, Memphis, Tenn., Columbus, Ohio, and Henrico, Virginia suspended 18 percent or more of their total enrollment. Illinois claimed the title as the state with with highest out-of-school suspension rate.

“Besides the obvious loss of time in the classroom, suspensions matter because they are among the leading indicators of whether a child will drop out of school, and because out-of-school suspensions increase a child’s risk of future incarceration,” the study found. “Given these increased risks, what we don’t known about the use of suspensions may be putting our children’s futures and our economy in jeopardy.”

A Miami, Fla., high school had suspended Trayvon Martin before he was shot to death by George Zimmerman.