Study: Black students suspended more often than others

Black students are suspended more than three times as often as their white classmates, twice as often as their Latino classmates and more than 10 times as often as their Asian classmates in middle and high schools nationwide, a new study shows.

The average American secondary student has an 11% chance of being suspended in a single school year, according to the study from the University of California-Los Angeles Civil Rights project. However, if that student is black, the odds of suspension jump to 24%.

Previous studies have shown that even a single suspension can double a student's odds of dropping out, said Daniel Losen, a former Boston-area teacher and one of the authors of "Out of School & Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools," released in April. The study used U.S. Department of Education data collected during the 2009-2010 school year, the latest available.

"Pointing fingers and using the 'racism' word isn't going to get us where we need to go," said Losen, who is white. "But I think we need to acknowledge that there may be general bias against black students."

The UCLA study compares this new data with a similar study of more than 2,800 districts from the early 1970s. Back then a study by the Children's Defense Fund showed that black students were suspended more frequently than their peers, but not at such a disproportionate rate.

Today, the suspension disparity is magnified in some "hot spot" cities – such as Chicago, Dallas, Memphis and St. Louis, Losen said. In these city school districts, at least 40% of all black students were suspended at least once during that school year, according to the UCLA study. And yet, some schools in those same cities barely suspended students at all, Losen said.

"A lot of the time the public has a sense that we have to suspend these 'bad' kids – what else are we going to do?" Losen said. "But this study shows that within the same district, within the same demographics, there are schools that are doing things very differently."

The suspension disparity has recently come to a head in Florida, where the NAACP has filed a complaint against public schools in Brevard County, which suspends its black students about two-and-a-half times as often as its white students. The U.S. Department of Education has agreed to look into the complaint.

Lynne Bleier, a retired assistant principal and dean who worked at two Bevard County high schools, said suspension decisions are based purely on the behavior of each student.

"Believe me, there is plenty of misbehavior," Bleier said. "No assistant principal has to seek misbehavior where it does not exist."

While the federal government collects suspension statistics, it doesn't record suspension causes, and discipline codes vary widely between each state, district and even some schools.

According to an analysis, also by Losen, on the Southern Poverty Law Center website, "fights or physical aggression among students are consistently found to be among the most common reasons for suspension." After fighting, the most common offenses appear to be abusive language and attendance issues such as cutting class, tardiness and truancy, the analysis added.

Chicago public schools have recently reshaped their discipline strategy to keep students in the classroom, said Jen Loudon,director of youth development and positive behavior support. Suspensions dropped by 21% in the first year after the district abandoned a mandatory suspension policy.

Regardless of the progress in some districts, the nationwide statistics are still "appalling," said Gloria Sweet-Love, who served on a Tennessee school board for two decades, and now is the state's leader for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sweet-Love believes that white teachers are more likely to deem a black student "threatening" instead of simply disobedient, and therefore more likely to "make an example" by suspending a black students.

The same pattern persists in Palm Springs Unified, a medium-size school district in a largely progressive area of California. Although black students only amount to 6% of the student body in Palm Springs secondary schools, they account for more than 11% of the total suspensions. This pattern has held up for at least a decade, according to a review of U.S. DOE data.

Kelman also reports for The (Palm Springs, Calif.) Desert Sun. Florida Today reporter Mackenzie Ryan contributed to this report.