Last year the CSG Justice Center, in partnership with the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University, released a statewide study of nearly 1 million Texas public secondary school students, followed for at least six years. One of the more shocking discoveries of this report is that the majority of students were suspended or expelled between seventh to twelfth grade. This report clearly shows that there needs to be changes made to how we discipline our children in schools. Below is a passage from the report about how African-American students were disproportionately removed from classes. A link for the whole report can be found below.
2. African-American students and those with particular educational disabilities were disproportionately likely to be removed from the classroom for disciplinary reasons.
- The great majority of African-American male students had at least one discretionary violation (83 percent), compared to 74 percent for Hispanic male students, and 59 percent for white male students. The same pattern was found, though at lower levels of involvement, for females—with 70 percent of African-American female pupils having at least one discretionary violation, compared to 58 percent of Hispanic female pupils and 37 percent of white female pupils.
- Whereas white, Hispanic, and African-American students experienced discretionary actions at significantly different rates, students in these racial groups were removed from school for mandatory violations at comparable rates.
- Multivariate analyses, which enabled researchers to control for 83 different variables in isolating the effect of race alone on disciplinary actions, found that African-American students had a 31 percent higher likelihood of a school discretionary action, compared to otherwise identical white and