Black students in NC are more likely to be punished, civil rights group finds
Racial bias in North Carolina’s public schools is leading to black students being punished too much and falling behind academically, according to data released Wednesday by a civil rights group.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice released “racial equity report cards” for the state and for individual school districts showing that black students are more likely to be suspended and referred to the court system than their white classmates. The report cards also show that black students are lagging behind white students academically.
“We’re still continuing to see a pattern related to school discipline that breaks down along racial lines,” Meredith Horton, deputy executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in an interview Wednesday. “For those who are committed to racial equity, it is a concern that the experiences of black and brown students in Wake County and across the state don’t match up to those of their white peers. The data again demonstrates disparities based on race.”
Horton said factors such as implicit racial bias, structural racism and explicit discrimination have contributed to a “racial caste system” where black and brown people are unfairly considered to be unsafe and overly aggressive. She said the disparities exist even though studies show that black and white students misbehave at similar rates.
Terry Stoops, vice president of research for the John Locke Foundation, said the report cards should start a conversation in North Carolina public schools about why the racial disparities exist. While racial bias could be the reason, Stoops said more data is needed at the classroom and school level before the causes can be determined.
“It seems to me that looking at it from a statewide or county level provides some suggestive information but doesn’t really get into the heart of what’s happening in schools every day,” Stoops said in an interview Wednesday.
Reports for this year and prior years can be found at https://www.southerncoalition.org/resources/racial-equity-report-cards.
Racial disparities in suspensions, academic performance
Among the findings in the 4th annual report:
▪ Black students received 55.2% of all short-term suspensions, even though they made up only 25% of the state’s student population in the 2017-18 school year.
▪ Black students were 4.1 times more likely to receive a short-term suspension than white students.
▪ Black students accounted for 47.6% of school-based juvenile complaints referred to the justice system. White students only accounted for 36.5% of the referrals while representing 47.3% of the state’s school enrollment.
▪ White students were 2.1 times more likely than black students and 1.7 times more likely than Hispanic students to score as “college to career ready” on state end-of-grade tests in elementary and middle school.
Similar patterns can be seen in individual North Carolina school districts:
▪ Black students in Wake County were 6.7 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
▪ Black students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro were 10.4 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
▪ Black students in Durham were 7.4 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
▪ Black students in Johnston County were 3.3 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
▪ Black students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg were 7.1 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
School districts throughout North Carolina have worked to reduce suspensions, saying keeping students out of schools keeps them from learning.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights reached agreements with the Wake County school system and Durham Public Schools after both districts took steps to reduce suspensions.
But there’s been a backlash against efforts to reduce suspensions. In December 2018, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos rolled back Obama-era guidelines that warned school districts that they could be investigated if minority students are suspended at disproportionately high rates.
Horton said the report cards are a call to action to break the school-to-prison pipeline. She said steps such as hiring more school social workers and counselors, using restorative justice practices and eliminating policies that criminalize schoolyard behavior would lead to significant changes.
“We need to stop criminalizing behaviors (of black and brown students) that when performed by white students wouldn’t be treated as crimes or with removal from the classroom,” Horton said.
Stoops said another possible solution is to look at expanding access to charter schools, where black students are more likely to be taught by a black teacher than in a traditional public school. Several studies have found that students of color do better academically and are less likely to have disciplinary issues when they’re taught by a teacher who looks like them.
This story was originally published February 26, 2020 at 2:30 PM.
