Are School Suspensions Racist?
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Critics of Catholic schools often argue that their success can be attributed not to superior teaching but to their exclusion of slow and “difficult” minority students. In many ways it is an unfair charge. But not entirely. I frequently point to the successful Catholic high schools in New York City that include large numbers of minority students among their student bodies. But admission to those schools requires success on a competitive entrance examination. And the schools’ enforcement of standards leads to some students being expelled.
How should this trade-off of achieving a successful and safe school at the expense of excluding difficult minority children be judged? Michael Petrilli wrestled with the issue on the website Bloomberg View (bloombergview.com) on November 3, in a column titled “Disruptive Students Hurt High Achievers Most.” He points to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Syracuse, which “have made a goal of reducing the number of school suspensions and other tough-love approaches to school discipline.” He writes that their efforts may be well-meaning, but come at the expense of “low-income strivers — impoverished families who follow the rules and work hard to climb the ladder to the middle class.” He calls this segment of society perhaps “the most underserved population in America today.”
For 20 years, Petrilli continues, the country has focused on underperforming and unruly students, “to the detriment of their higher-achieving, low-income peers.” He calls upon us to look at what happens when we fail to discipline difficult students. He points to how educational policymakers, including those at the federal Department of Education, praise themselves for their compassion and commitment to equality and racial justice when they refrain from suspending troublemakers. But he charges that when “when everyone in a school is harmed by some students’ unruly behavior, it’s a strange notion of fairness indeed.”
Petrilli proposes that we should “prioritize the needs of low-income students who demonstrated the aptitude to achieve at high levels and a willingness to work hard.” He urges that we should identify these students through a “universal screening process,” and then provide them with “special programs” that would give them the “opportunity to spend part of their day learning with other high-achieving peers, and to go faster or deeper into the curriculum.”
At the middle-school level, he proposes “tracking” students, “so that poor, bright students have access to the same challenging courses that affluent high achievers regularly enjoy, and that are essential if young people are going to get on a trajectory for success in Advanced Placement classes in high school and at more selective colleges.”
Beyond that, he argues for a concerted effort to “ensure that schools are safe and orderly places to be — balancing the educational needs of disruptive students with the equally valuable needs of their rule-abiding peers.”
Petrilli understands that those who propose such changes will be accused by progressives of racism and “classist” attitudes. But he disagrees, pointing out that it is poor and minority parents who are turning to “high-quality charter schools” because of their “frustration with traditional public schools.” These parents know that charter schools are being criticized for “suspending students aggressively and removing those who are chronic disrupters.” Their answer? “What’s wrong with that approach? Why not ensure that schools are safe places to be?” They see as the alternative “hard-working, high-achieving students” left behind in “chaotic, low-performing public schools.”
What of the disruptive and underperforming students? Writes Petrilli, “Our public schools are intended to help all students achieve their potential. By all means, we need to find ways to better serve disruptive students, who are often dealing with horrendous situations at home. (Often, specialized alternative schools are the best option.) Trying to boost the performance of the lowest-achieving kids is also the right thing to do; kids who grow up to be illiterate or innumerate have little hope for success in our knowledge economy.”
But, he continues, “the bulk of the attention can’t go just to the toughest cases. Poor children who are ready to learn, follow the rules, and work hard deserve resources and opportunities to flourish. If the public school system is unwilling or unable to provide them, then charter schools should be allowed and encouraged to do so, even if that means cracking down on the students who ruin it for the rest.”
Heather Mac Donald, writing in the summer 2012 issue of City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, made a similar case. She argued that “efforts by the Department of Justice and Department of Education to equate the suspension of students of color with Jim Crow laws are misguided.”
Mac Donald concedes that “blacks are three and a half times more likely to get suspended or expelled than their white peers.” But she points out that “white boys were over two times as likely to be suspended as Asian and Pacific Islander boys.” And asks, rhetorically, whether we should attribute this to “anti-white bias”?
Mac Donald moves to the bottom line, proposing that “if black students are suspended more often” it is likely to be “because they misbehave more.” And asks whether Arne Duncan, until recently the head of the federal Department of Education, “should be more aware of inner-city students’ self-discipline problems, having headed the Chicago school system before becoming secretary of education. Chicago’s minority youth murder one another with abandon. Since 2008, more than 530 people under the age of 21 have been killed in the city, mostly by their peers, according to the Chicago Reporter; virtually all the perpetrators were black or Hispanic.” (Mac Donald wrote this column in 2012. The number of killings of young blacks by young blacks is significantly higher now.)
In addition, she writes, “Between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white ones were arrested at school, mostly for battery.” She notes that there was an “outcry over the arrest data,” but offers a comment by a Chicago teacher to keep things in perspective: “I feel bad for kids being arrested,…but I feel worse seeing a kid get his head smashed on the floor and almost die. Or a teacher being threatened with his life.”
Mac Donald closes with the observation that these facts “make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
