As school desegregation ruling nears 150th year, how do Iowa minority students fare?

Marcus Miller | Iowa View contributor

Show Caption Hide Caption Data: Minority students often lack crucial skills for kindergarten Meet Brailynn Simmons, 5, a preschool student in Des Moines. Her teachers at Taylor Education Center meet with her mom regularly to help Brailynn learn valuable skills needed to start her education.

Almost 150 years ago, Iowa became one of the first states to abolish racial segregation in its schools. A father in Muscatine Iowa, Alexander Clark, wanted to make sure that his daughter, Susan, had the same educational opportunities as white children. The Iowa Supreme Court agreed and in the 1868 landmark decision of Clark v. Board of School Directors, our state became one of the first to clearly state that racial discrimination in our schools was not tolerable.

Clark was a significant accomplishment, and one that we should absolutely celebrate. (Editors note: Drake University will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the ruling next month.) However, Iowa black and Latino students are still not treated equally in our public schools here in Iowa.

U.S. Department of Education statistics for public K-12 students in Iowa show that we discipline black and Latino students far more harshly than white students.

Latino students are more than 1.5 times more likely to receive a suspension than their white peers.

Latino students are more than 2 times more likely to be arrested for school-related incidents than their white peers.

Black students are 5 times more likely to be referred to law enforcement than their white peers.

Black students are nearly 6 times more likely to receive an out-of-school suspension that their white peers.

Black students are 8.5 times more likely to be arrested for school-related incidents than their white peers.

There are many other similarly disheartening statistics found by many other researchers. The statistics are so widely recognized that they are seen as part of a syndrome dubbed “the school to prison pipeline.” And even if you don’t care about the terrible individual human cost of this racial inequity, you should care about the cost to our society, such as broken families, a lost labor force, and the approximately $282 million dollars the state spent on incarcerating Iowans in 2016.

It’s a common misconception that black students are disciplined more often and more harshly because they misbehave more than their white peers. But a 2016 University of Missouri-Columbia study found that black students did not misbehave nor did they think it was appropriate to misbehave any more than white students. In a 2009 study, other researchers from the University of Missouri found “that even when they commit the same offenses as white students, black students are significantly more likely to receive the type of exclusionary discipline that contributes to increased contact with the justice system.”

It’s certainly possible that teachers, administrators, and school district officials think they are doing their best to treat all students fairly. But just because we intend to do something does not mean we are actually doing it.

What can you do? Start by finding out what is happening right in your backyard, in your local public school district. Go online to check the statistics at the U.S. Department of Education website http://ocrdata.ed.gov/DistrictSchoolSearch. Then take these statistics to your local school board and ask them to support district policies that would lessen the disparities. Write a guest column in your local paper. And talk to your local state representative and state senator about your concerns and what legislation they can support.

Together, we can work toward making sure all students, regardless of race, are treated equally in our public schools here in Iowa.

Marcus Miller is a senior studying political science, ethics, and public policy at the University of Iowa and is a communications intern at the ACLU of Iowa.