Report: Minorities punished more often
Valley schools also harder on disabled, data suggest
A new report from the ACLU of Arizona confirms what some Phoenix-area parents have suspected for years: Certain schools punish minority students and students with disabilities at disproportionately high rates.
Black students are eight times more likely to be suspended from charter high schools than their white counterparts, according to the report. Latino students are six times more likely to be suspended than white students in charter high schools.
In district schools, K-12 students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended than their peers without disabilities, the report says.
The findings, released Wednesday, have broad implications. Experts say overdisciplining students — particularly using out-of-school suspensions — can push kids away from the education system and toward the criminaljustice system.
“It doesn’t matter the age. There are kids who are as young as 8 years old that are getting suspended and expelled,” said Luis Ávila, director of the ACLU’s Demand 2 Learn campaign for
fair disciplinary practices. “The punishments are so harsh that kids are eventually just dropping out.”
The ACLU report used the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, from the 2013-14 school year. Most district schools and more than half of charter schools in Maricopa County submitted information.
An independent Arizona Republic analysis of the data found:
» Seven district high schools had overall out-of-school suspension rates higher than 1 in 4 students. One West Valley high school with about 1,630 students issued 416 out-of-school suspensions in 2013-14.
» Forty-six district and charter high schools in Maricopa County suspended 20 percent or more of their black students from school. The out-of-school suspension rate for black students was higher than the rate for white students in all but three of those schools.
» Students with disabilities had disproportionately high out-of-school suspension rates at several elementary schools. One East Valley district school had an overall out-of-school suspension rate of 9 percent but a rate of 40 percent for students with disabilities. A group of 26 students with disabilities at a south Phoenix charter school received 14 of the out-of-school suspensions for that school year.
“I wish I could say that I was surprised, but I’m not at all,” said Erica Meiners, a Northeastern Illinois University professor who studies the relationship between schools and prisons. “When we look at findings from Chicago, from New York, from Atlanta, we see these overrepresentations. It’s kind of the national pattern.”
Daniel Losen, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Civil Rights Remedies, said fair disciplinary practices are not about excusing misbehavior but about ensuring punishments match offenses.
People think suspensions are all about kids hitting teachers, injuring other students or bringing weapons to school, he said, when those problems make up a small fraction of cases.
“We all want safe schools, good learning environments,” Losen said. “There are still way too many schools suspending kids right and left.”
In Arizona, schools most commonly cite “defiance” or “failure to comply with an administrator” when giving students in-school or out-of-school suspensions — extremely broad categories that can include leaving a uniform shirt untucked or talking back. Many of those suspensions “address behaviors that could be handled more effectively another way,” Losen said, particularly in cases involving students with disabilities who cannot appropriately control their behavior.
Out-of-school suspensions can dramatically affect student performance and graduation rates, experts say, because students miss out on instruction time. If minority kids get out-of-school suspensions at disproportionately high rates, “that means you’re contributing to the racial achievement gap,” Losen said.
Several recent studies have concluded minority students are disciplined more not because they misbehave more, but because teachers expect them to misbehave more.
In 2015, Stanford researchers had teachers review identical narratives describing a student’s behavior. When the child had a “black-sounding” name, the teachers were much more likely to recommend a severe punishment.
A 2016 study from the Yale Child Study Center indicated the phenomenon begins as early as preschool. Researchers played videos featuring a group of four children — a white boy, white girl, black boy and black girl — for teachers of various races and asked them to identify signs of misbehavior. Tracking technology showed most eyes went to the black boy, even though there were no signs of trouble-making in the videos.
“Biases that even well-meaning teachers have play into different perceptions of identical behavior,” Losen said. “All kids do misbehave at one point, but if you’re fixated on the black males, you’re going to be more likely to catch them doing something wrong than if you’re watching everyone equally.”
The ACLU of Arizona’s Demand 2 Learn campaign began privately calling schools’ attention to discrepancies in their disciplinary practices earlier this year, according to Ávila, the campaign director.
“Some schools are reacting well, and some are not,” he said. “The majority of educators that we talk to are like, ‘This is something we should fix,’ but what we keep hearing over and over again is, ‘It’s a system-wide issue.’ “
The campaign entered agreements with four charter schools and four districts eager to correct exclusionary discipline practices, Ávila said. Demand 2 Learn will train administrators at those schools; provide technical assistance to help them interpret data; provide national experts to teach them how to measure progress; and discuss policy changes.