Good intentions leading to bad outcomes - school discipline edition

We have a lot of people, including political leaders, who are desperately eager to incite racial division among Americans by touting racism as somehow inherent in the entire culture of the US and bred in the bone of all institutions. Of course the argument is substantially nonsense and in many cases easily refuted, but it is a siren song to those Gramscian devotees of the Frankfurt School and it's unfortunate ideological offspring (third wave feminism, critical theory, critical race theory, postmodernism, etc.).

In the past year the Department of Justice has attempted to rectify, across all schools in the nation, racial disparities of punishment. The argument is that A) there is a racial disparity whereby more black students are punished than white (true) and B) that this disparity occurs because of the inherent racism of the public school system and its administrators (asserted but not proven, with much refuting evidence).

The argument is tenuous on its face. Thats a lot of systemic racism operating across the 13,500 locally operated school districts in the US. It's believable if that is what you ideologically want to believe, but what about some actual evidence? There is very little of that. The reason it is important to establish an evidentiary base is that you can end up doing a lot of harm if you have the wrong root cause. We have a lot of well-intended romantic utopianists who want to take the authority to make things better for third-party victims but who don't actually know what they are doing and end up harming the intended beneficiaries of their actions more often than not.

A statistician writing under the nom de plume, Random Critical Analysis, has evidence that suggests that there is an alternative and stronger root cause than racism. He outlines his argument in On the relationship between school suspensions, race, single-motherhood, and more.

Blacks get suspended at vastly disproportionate rates whereas “asians” (census/OMB definition), on the other hand, are about half as likely as whites are to get suspended. Contrary to conventional wisdom, though, this pattern tends to be pretty consistent nation wide and the south is not notably “worse” with respect to disparities here.

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If you actually look at the department of education’s own map you will see very little sign of regional bias in places with significant concentrations of blacks. If anything the disparities (without adjusting for anything), tend to be larger in the northeast and the midwest (see table above).

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Schools with higher proportions of black students (chosen at random) are more likely to have appreciably more discipline citations. This tends to suggest that this is a broad national pattern and that racial demographics accounts for much of the variance.

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This despite the fact that these mostly black districts are much more likely to be populated with black teachers, principals, etc (unfortunately I don’t have national data at this level of detail!). If these suspensions are mostly grounded in real behavioral problems, as I suspect they are, they are likely to have negative consequences for other students in the classrooms (especially other blacks since they are far more likely to be in class with the misbehaving students).

RCA then gets to the rub of his/her argument:

If we plot the black suspension rate directly by percentage of single-mothers in the school district (all races/ethnicities)…

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Annoyingly I’ve yet to find a decent way to get non-hispanic white suspension rates for all districts from them yet, but it is nonetheless quite obvious that the single-motherhood rate is a strong predictor across the country.

It predicts overall suspension rates better than percent black, better than (child) poverty rates, better than parent education rates (% w/ bachelors+), and so and so forth.

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I am deeply skeptical of the notion that racial discrimination explains much of the differences in outcomes here, particularly when we observe such vast differences in strong predictors like single-motherhood and see similar patterns with other racial-ethnic groups (even when it works against whites, as in the case of “asians”). Now it may be that single-motherhood is operating mostly as a proxy for other differences, but there is some evidence that it is more than that (or see here for more info). Regardless, it seems unreasonable to leap to the assumption that differences in outcomes are the fault of racism on the part of teachers, administrators, and the like when we have good evidence that the outcomes can be mostly explained with readily available observables like this (even more so when it’s quite widely known that there are substantial statistical differences in behaviors between groups today).

This analysis makes clear why it is so important to have an evidence based case for the proposed root causes. Racial discrimination has been explicitly illegal in schools for fifty years and more. Where teachers and administrators discriminate based on race, they can, and are, brought to justice. But there aren't that many cases anymore. Some, but not many. If there is little evidence of actual racial discrimination, then trying to force schools to reduce their discipline rules because it disproportionately affects black students, particularly if there is evidence that the root causes for unruly behavior lie elsewhere, becomes a government sanctioned mechanism to degrade the learning environment of all the other students who are not misbehaving. Another instance of good intentions leading to bad outcomes.