In the wake of the latest mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the topic of school discipline is once again at the forefront of the national conversation about education. Though details are still emerging about the alleged shooter Nikolas Cruz, records indicate that he was routinely in trouble for disruptive behavior in school—including physically assaulting someone.
To that end, politicians, educators and advocates are suggesting that this is an opportune time to re-examine school disciplinary methods and assess their effectiveness. This is re-centering a longstanding debate about how students of color, black children in particular, are disproportionately on the receiving end of school discipline measures. And Minnesota appears to be ground zero for this discussion.
According to a recent article in The New York Times, educators in Minneapolis are working to understand why their black students are punished so often.
The Minneapolis school district suspends an inordinate number of black students compared with white ones, and it is struggling to figure out why. Last year, districtwide, black students were 41 percent of the overall student population, but made up 76 percent of the suspensions.
Numbers like that prompted the Obama administration in 2014 to draft tough new policies to try to address racial disparities in school discipline across the country. Now, the Trump administration is trying to reverse those policies — in part, administration officials say, as a response to school shootings like the massacre last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Like many other best practices in education, this is an issue where educators do not have common agreement—and Twin Cities teachers and administrators are no exception. Some groups from the state have gone to DC to try to lobby the Department of Education to reverse the Obama-era policies. Others have gone to try to advocate for keeping them. What’s at stake is a federal investigation and potential loss of federal funds for those schools that do not comply with civil rights laws addressing the racial disparities in school discipline rates.
Nationally, black students are suspended three times as often as their white peers; in Minnesota, it is eight times as often. To explain this trend, officials here point to the rapid increase in the state’s minority population in the last decade, and the fact that the state has the largest poverty gap between blacks and whites in the nation.
Last month, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights notified 43 school districts and charter schools that suspension rates for nonviolent offenses still suggested widespread discriminatory practices. [...]
While critics of the Obama-era discipline changes argue that disparities cannot be explained away by racism, education leaders here say it is the natural place to start.
So here is where we push up against our inability, as a country, to fully understand how racism works and how it is embedded in every structure in our society. There is a ton of qualitative and quantitative data that helps us to understand how black students are disciplined much more often and in harsher ways than their white counterparts. There is also nothing we’ve seen thus far that links school shooters (whom, let’s not forget, are overwhelmingly white and male) with the kind of guidance that attempts to address racial disparities in school discipline. In other words, there has yet to be a case that we know of where a black child who has benefited from more racially equitable school discipline policies has turned around and shot up their school. So, this is a misguided conversation comparing two very separate things.
There are some Minnesota educators who are naming these policies as racist in themselves.
Simon Whitehead, a former physical education teacher at Southwest High School in Minneapolis, said he had watched the district’s discipline policy changes play out in his classes. Name-calling escalated to shoving, and then physical assaults. Profanity was redefined as “cultural dialect,” he said. [...]
The discipline model that he said had worked for him for 25 years — a warning, then a consequence — was no longer recognized by his bosses. He retired last year, labeled a racist.
“We do need to train teachers, especially white teachers, on how to interact with our African-American students,” he said. “But not expecting the same things from them is actually disrespectful. That would actually be racist.”
No, Mr. Whitehead—that’s not what racism actually is. You are right that in an ideal world, all children would be held to the same standards and treated equally. But, we don’t live in an ideal world. The entire point of these policies is that we don’t expect the same things from all children. We hold white children to a completely different standard that allows them to be disruptive in schools and label them in ways that, as the NYT article points out, are much more forgiving. Descriptors like “high strung,” “gifted but unable to use their words,” or “having a hard day” are applied to white children, while black children are held to a much higher standard and when they exhibit the same behaviors, they are called “violent” and “cannot be managed.”
It is not racist to call this out. It is not racist to say we need to do things differently. It is, however, racist to think that these kinds of practices are okay in the first place. And this kind of willful ignorance on the part of white educators—the very notion that they are “colorblind and treat every child the same” is not only devoid of historical and current social realities, it also does more harm for black children than good. In a racist world, treating people as colorblind is simply not an option. And it’s just not true. The amount of unconscious (and sometimes very conscious) bias that these supposedly colorblind educators have and bring into the classroom because they haven’t taken the time to reflect on their own behaviors nor been provided with cultural competence training is staggering.
It feels fitting that this debate is being had in Minnesota, and specifically, in the Twin Cities. Minnesota is 81 percent white. But the population of color is growing rapidly—mainly in the Twin Cities, and an increase in immigrant and refugee populations is part of this growth. As the state becomes more diverse, it will be forced to wrestle with these issues directly and uncover how racially biased practices limit opportunities for children and adults of color. This can only be a good thing—if schools and other institutions are held accountable for making important and necessary changes.