Apparently the Biden administration is once again pushing the argument that there is disparate impact among school children based on race and not on behavior. This is an odd claim to make given that 81% of African American students are in majority minority schools. 58% are in schools which are 75% or more minority enrollment and an additional 23% are in schools which are 50-74% minority enrollment.
Given that, from the research I have seen, most minority enrollment schools are led and taught by minority Principals and Teachers, the Biden administration seems to be suggesting that minority led schools are too prone to disproportionately punishing students because they are black.
Theoretically that is a possible argument but certainly not one which seems to resonate with any real world experience or research data. So why are they pushing this canard?
I don't know. Here is Gail Harriott's response arguing that we should look at the data and if we do so, we can see that it is bad and disruptive behavior which is being punished, not race per se.
From Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report: Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities. by Gail L. Heriot in 2019.
She starts with
This is hardly the first time I’ve dissented from a Commission report. But to my knowledge, never before has the Commission so seriously misunderstood the empirical research that purportedly forms the basis for its conclusions. Time constraints prevent me from discussing all the report’s problems. But I will try to discuss a few of the more important ones.
Discipline and Race:
Perhaps the most insupportable Finding in the report is this:
Students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers ....941
The report provides no evidence to support this sweeping assertion and there is abundant evidence to the contrary. Not the least of that evidence comes from teachers. When one looks at aggregate statistics concerning which students are sent to the principal’s office by their teachers, there are strong differences. Denying those differences amounts to an accusation that teachers are getting it not just wrong, but very wrong. It is a slap in the face to teachers.
She continues bulldozing facts on top of emotive opinions, demolishing the findings of the report.
For example:
My colleagues are not willing to credit the data from teachers. But even self-reported data demonstrate racial differences in aggregate student conduct. The National Center for Education Statistics has asked students in grades 9-12 every other year since at least 1993 whether they have been in a physical fight on school property over the past 12 months. The results have been consistent. Each time, more African American students have reported participation in such a fight than white students.
In 2015, 12.6% of African American students reported being in a fight on school property, as contrasted with 5.6% of white students. Put differently, the African American rate was 125% higher than the white rate. Similarly, in 2013, 12.8% of African American students reported being in a fight on school property and 6.4% of white students did. Back in the 1990s, the number of students reported participating in a fight on school property was generally higher. But the racial gaps were just as real. In 1993, 22% of African American students and 15% of white students admitted to participating in such a fight. Two years later, in 1995, the African American rate had declined to 20.3%, and the white rate had decreased to 12.9%.949
It should go without saying that these are aggregate statistics and have nothing to do with individual conduct. If a particular student is African American and has not been in a fight on school property then ... well ... he hasn’t been in a fight on school property. If another student is white and she has been in a fight, then she has. Their race has nothing to do with it.
Note that neither African Americans nor whites were at the extremes among racial groups on the issue of fighting. Data on Asian American and Pacific Islander students didn’t start to be collected until 1999. But in nearly every year for which data were collected, Asian American rates of participation in fights on school property were lower than white rates. On the other end of the spectrum, in every year since 1999 for which sufficient data existed, Pacific Islander students reported higher rates than African American students. For example, in 2005, 24.5% of Pacific Islander students reported being in such a fight, while only 16.9% of African American students did.950 The rates for whites and Asian Americans in that year were 11.6% and 5.9% respectively.
She ends with:
One of my earliest heroes – Daniel Patrick Moynihan – famously said that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” A taxpayer-funded federal commission should be especially careful to avoid making these kinds of errors. Yet for all the reasons I discuss above, I fear that the Commission failed to do so with this report. The policymakers we advise and the public who fund us deserve better.
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