I recently heard on NPR a researcher speaking about findings that black youth are more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than are white youth. Without any more factual information than that, he proceeded to talk about the prejudices and racism that make this kind of thing true. While I have no doubt that his findings are mathematically correct, I think it is a great leap to come to conclusions about the reasons for this phenomenon. I can think of several, some of which he has rejected without facts to back them up:
1) black kids act up more than white kids do
2) the school establishment is basically racist
3) the school establishment is too lazy to figure out what is going on
4) white women have most of the influence in public schools
5) it is easy to have a cultural misunderstanding if you are only interested in control
6) there is a legacy of black resentment against authorities who have often mistreated minorities in the past
I am sure there are several more possibilities, and it would take careful work for a sociologist to discover what any of these may have to do with the problem. I have two topics I want to discuss here.
The first is that there are some people who just look angry even when they are not. If you take a white face, preferably male, and morph the jaw forward, making the lips protrude, and moving the eyelids to half-staff, you have a pretty angry-looking face. You have applied African features to a white person. Unless someone really tries to take this into account, the automatic assumption will be that most black young men are dangerous. Add to this the understandable resentment that black youth must feel against an unfair authority structure and the guilt many whites feel about that, you will come to the same conclusion. Therefore, anything this young person does is going to be judged out of line with the meek-girl ideal that teachers tend to favor. These are some pretty tough effects to counteract.
I would like to get into the cultural norm in the black community of just jabbing at each other and "mouthing off." This also gets under the skin of the not-so-tough schoolteacher, but below I address an additional problem.
My second point is that suspension and expulsion are stupid approaches to corrective action for a student of any race or gender who hates school, cannot sit still for long periods of time, has trouble at home and in other relationships, and is failing to learn from the usual teaching methods. Suspension and expulsion in the short term reward this kind of student -- it gets them out of class. In the longer term it ensures that the student will continue to fall behind his/her peers, resulting in almost inevitable expulsion or dropping out.
Admittedly there are not the funds to support the alternative approaches that seem obvious: having the "offender" meet with a person of similar background who has adapted to the school system to learn how to deal with the problems the school is giving them, requiring extra class time and homework to catch up with the class and punish the person who hates this kind of thing anyway, using humane physical constraint where necessary to prevent danger to other students, and working with parents and community groups to build an environment in which this kind of student can learn and feel good about him/herself.
This researcher has some good statistics, but a lot more needs to be done to tell us what those statistics mean.