School discipline tougher on African Americans

From the Chicago Tribune courtesy of AlterNet:

Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America's public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year.

In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population. In 21 states—Illinois among them—that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body. And on average across the nation, 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, the federal data show. Hispanic students are suspended and expelled in almost direct proportion to their populations, while white and Asian students are disciplined far less.

Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research studies have found.

Click here for the rest.

Yeah, well, I've actually seen this in action when I was in the field. Teachers and administrators definitely come down harder on black kids than others. The ironic thing is that virtually all school workers see themselves as anti-racist, and have absolutely no understanding of what they're doing in this area. And it's more than white denial going on here. It is a very real clash of cultures.

Longtime Real Art readers know that I strongly believe that the public school system's mission is to indoctrinate children into the culture of obedience and authority. Historically, and therefore culturally, American blacks have some severe problems with the concept of obedience, for which I don't blame them one goddamned bit. It makes complete sense that the heavy disciplinary establishment of the schools would smash head-on into African-American culture.

This is no bullshit either. Sociologists look at the issue a bit differently, but come to essentially the same conclusion. Black culture is far more collective and collaborative than white culture, which is extraordinarily individualistic and competitive. Indeed, the very social structure of American schooling was created by white Europeans, and distinctly caters to the nuances of white European culture, which educationally shafts non-white ethnicities. In short, black people learn and work differently from white people. The educational establishment is woefully behind in addressing this issue.

Of course, I'm of the opinion that the educational establishment can't address this issue because public schools aren't really about education as much as they are about creating a compliant and docile population. To really serve the black American community, that indoctrinational mission must be abandoned, which will never happen.

When I was teaching, I often admired the resistance of black students, even when I was the one they were resisting. What I'd really like to see happen is for black kids to teach white kids to fight back, too. Maybe then we'd start to see some real change.

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