Read the following article then use Google to find information about the study they reference. See if there are any other correlations you can draw or infer that were not brought up in the study.
African-American and Latino Students Overrepresented in School Suspensions
By nsenga.burton
Created 09/29/2010 - 08:52
It looks like zero tolerance only applies to some of us.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has released findings of a study of out-of-school suspension rates for 18 of the nation's largest school systems. Black and Latino students were overrepresented in the out-of-school suspensions doled out to students. Since the 1970s, out-of-school suspension rates have escalated due to zero tolerance policies implemented by school systems. Since the 1970s, K-12 suspension rates have at least doubled for all non-whites. The study focused on middle-schools and found that the racial gap in suspension has grown considerably since 1973, especially for African-American students. The Black/White gap has grown from 3 percentage points in the ’70s to over 10 percentage points in the 2000s. Blacks are now over three times more likely than Whites to be suspended. While the average suspension rate was 11.2% in 2006 in the middle schools surveyed, disaggregating the data by race and gender reveals great disparities in the use of out-of-school suspension. For example, for middle school Blacks, 28.3% of males and 18% of females were suspended. In Palm Beach County and Milwaukee, the district-wide middle school suspension rate for Black males exceeded 50%. The suspension rate for Black females exceeded 50% in Milwaukee and was over 33% in Palm Beach County, Indianapolis, and Des Moines. We could go on but we'll stop. We're sure that the racial make-up of the schools has something to do with the numbers and we'd be interested in knowing if they were able to disaggregate the numbers based on offense committed, but still. This sounds like prison prep to us. Why do these numbers correlate with disparities in prison sentencing for blacks and Latinos? To add insult to injury, research shows that removing people from the classroom does not result in better productivity and learning outcomes for students in the classroom. Guess who is getting suspended more often? Black females. Shouldn't there be a zero tolerance policy against targeting black and brown middle-school children for out-of-school suspension? We're just saying.
