The Pipeline
By Albert B. Kelly
Very recently, I read a Star Ledger Guest Column by Rev.
Charles Boyer from Woodbury and Rev. Timothy Adkins-Jones from Newark, discussing
the disparities that exist between the ways children of color are dealt with as
it relates to school discipline in comparison to white children. Their point
was that adolescent behavior that’s often handled with in-school detention for
white students often becomes criminalized behavior when it involves black and
Hispanic students.
In their piece, the pastors provided a startling statistic
that in New Jersey, a black child is 30 times more likely to be committed to a
youth facility than a white child even though they commit offenses at roughly
the same rate. The focus was on youth incarceration, mostly teens, but I wanted
to pick up the threads a little earlier because I suspect that is where it
starts.
As for prejudice, I’m not naïve and I know that in all
people, no matter what their race or ethnicity, there are prejudices and
bigotries that come out in all sorts of ways and no group is above reproach
here, so far so good, we’re all equal and we’re all guilty. But I also know
that depending on who controls the levers of power, wealth, and advantage- not
all prejudice is equivalent nor are its consequences.
In researching the issue of disparities in school
discipline, I found that the Government Accounting Office (GAO) prepared a
report on the issue in 2018. They focused on K-12 education in a report
entitled “Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with
disabilities.” The report looked at, among other things, the patterns in
disciplinary actions in public schools and charter schools.
The GAO looked at five school districts in five states (California,
Georgia, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Texas) and reviewed data from DOE’s Civil
Rights Data Collection for 2013-2014. The data included demographics, school
type, out-of-school suspensions and in-school suspensions; referrals to law
enforcement, expulsions, corporal punishment, and school-related arrests. They
also factored in the poverty level of the school.
The GAO report was hefty at 89 pages, but the bottom line
was that they found that: “black students, boys, and students with disabilities
were disproportionately disciplined in K-12 public schools.” Heaven help the
black male student with a disability. The report went on to say that: “This
pattern of disproportionate discipline persisted regardless of the type of
disciplinary action, level of school poverty, or type of public school these
students attended.”
As for race, the report went on to say that black students
were overrepresented among students in all categories including: suspended from
school (23.2%), expulsion (14.6%), corporal punishment (22.1%), referred to law
enforcement (10.4%), or school-related arrested (19.4%). It starts early as
well as black students accounted for 19% of all pre-school students, but
represented 47% of preschoolers’ suspended.
At about this point, I couldn’t help but think back to South
Carolina cop Ben Fields slamming to the floor a 16 year-old black female Spring
Valley High School student sitting at her desk because she was “disrupting
class” by failing to handover her iPhone and open her laptop.
Now on a topic like this, there may be one or two souls out
there who chalk up disparities to some notion that black students, boys, and
students with disabilities are just plain bad and therefore more deserving of
whatever befalls them, but reasonable people know better. The hard part is that
it all starts with subtle assumptions made by adults on a given day and once
made; many of these assumptions become self-fulfilling.
The “zero tolerance” mindset is part of the issue. Sure,
there are select circumstances where there can be no tolerance and reasonable
people know where the line gets drawn. But under zero tolerance, especially for
black kids, simple teenage antics become “harassment”, garden variety arguments
become “bullying”, and an astounding number of items become an “instrument which
may be used in an offensive manner”.
What do we think will happen when things are raised to the
level of law enforcement? How does it get better if kids are suspended and idling
away hours outside of school? Start imposing these types of punishments early and
often enough and school ends up becoming the “pipeline to prison”. There are real
consequences to these systemic disparities and the punishments behind them should
be considered the nuclear option reserved only for extreme circumstances, not
for the convenience of adult stereotypes.