Gradu(al Alien)ation
for black students school often becomes a "no passing" zone
2007-10-10
By Monroe Anderson
This is a textbook-worthy example of institutional racism: our kids get stopped from schooling while black.
That wasn't quite the way Howard Witt ran it down recently in a report in the Chicago Tribune but that is the reality should you read between the lines. In breaking the Jena 6 story last month in mainstream media, Witt, who is himself white, was struck by the unfair treatment meted out by LaSalle Parish Schools Superintendent Roy Breithaupt.
As southern justice would have it, of course, the noose-hanging white students got a slap on the wrist for behaving badly while the black students got busted -– literally. Such uneven-handed treatment drove Witt to analyze data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year on suspensions and expulsions. This is what he found and the Tribune reported:
--In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.
--In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites.
--In Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended.
The Tribune reported that on average "black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students. No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate."
Indiana University's Russell Skiba wasn't exactly surprised by the Tribune findings. He's studied many like it, dating back more than three decades. And he's conducted more than one study on school discipline discrimination himself. One, "The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment," was published seven years ago. "What really, really stood out," Dr. Skiba told me in a phone interview, "was the racial discrepancy."
In all those studies on school discipline over all that time, the same sad data is rediscovered and reported again and again: Black students don't misbehave any more than other students, but when they do, odds are they're going to get the book thrown at them.
As a result, far too many black children get the wrong kind of education. Through the powers of observation and the course of simple deduction, they learn that our schools are not on the racial up and up. Black students learn an early lesson that life's not fair to them or for them. They learn that they are separate and not considered equal.
"I think there's a psychology to this that's really pretty deep," said Skiba. The professor in counseling and psychology also did a study entitled "Zero Tolerance, Zero Evidence: An Analysis of School Disciplinary Practice," following a brawl between black students at high school football game in Decatur, Illinois where expulsions flew like fists in the fight.
In his studies, Skiba observed that as a general rule white students got called on the carpet for different offenses than blacks. That's partially because the lion's share of public school teachers are white women, but mostly because of institutional racism. So white students get round trip tickets to the principal's office for concrete infractions like missing class, vandalism and smoking, while the black students get hustled out on more open-to-interpretation violations -– loitering, threatening or disrespectful behavior. Class matters in who gets booted from school, but not much. Across the board, from poor to middle class to upper income black students, what counts is the color of their skin not the content of their character.
This knee-jerk practice of ejecting blacks “just because” is more devastating than the old separate but unequal, pre-Brown custom. It feeds the anti-education attitude now prevalent among black youth. It robs banished black students of educational opportunities since they're in detention rooms, at home, or on the streets, while their fellow students are learning today's lessons and getting tomorrow's assignments. That, in turn, leads to greater drop-out rates for children who have officially been rejected, which, in turn, often leads to detention in juvie and fast-tracking for the criminal-justice-industrial complex.
And while there are tons of poor black kids on the street who commonly refer to jail as school, one institution is not as good as the next.
Former television analyst Monroe Anderson is a political writer in Chicago, Illinois. He is a regular contributor to ebonyjet.com