Learning While Black

By Jodie Morse

No one is saying Kenneth Russell is an angel. The 16-year-old high school junior from Salida, Calif., is a C student with a filthy mouth who has been known to saunter into class on his own schedule. And, yes, as Russell readily admits, after a bout of name-calling with a white classmate last fall, he threw the first punch in a fistfight that left him battered and his adversary with five stitches over his left eye.

But is Russell actually a victim? The N.A.A.C.P. and some of his teachers think so. His father John has filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, charging that Kenneth was unjustly punished for the fight. Although officials from the local Modesto school district ruled the scuffle "mutual," the white classmate received a three-day suspension while Russell was sent home for a little more than a month and later expelled from his school and assigned to one farther from where he lives. "It's been hard catching up with my work," says Kenneth. "I lost out on a month of my high school life."

For years black parents have quietly seethed about stories like Russell's. Now civil rights groups have given those silent suspicions a recognizable name: racial profiling. They contend that not unlike police who stop people on the basis of race, teachers and school officials discipline black students more often--and more harshly--than whites. The result: black students are more likely to slip behind in their studies and abandon school altogether--if they're not kicked out first. In Modesto, black students are 2 1/2 times as likely as their white peers to be expelled. This kind of treatment persists not only in the farm country of Modesto but also in urban districts like Minneapolis, Minn. During the 1998-99 school year, only one state (South Carolina) suspended 9% or more of its white students, but 35 states suspended that percentage of blacks, according to The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. The syndrome has even acquired a catchphrase: "learning while black."

In the past two years, advocacy groups in a dozen cities have taken up the cause, and the N.A.A.C.P. called on every state to submit a plan to redress discipline and other educational inequities by May 10. Last week the group announced that it would file civil rights complaints against the 22 states that missed the deadline. Meanwhile, legislators in Maryland and Rhode Island have set up task forces to study school discipline. In April, under a new state law, Ohio released suspension data broken down by race for each of its school districts. Earlier this month the Rev. Jesse Jackson addressed a conference at the Northwestern University School of Law titled "Dreams Deferred: A Closer Look at School Discipline."

Despite the current concern, the school-discipline gap is actually an old problem, first noted by social scientists a quarter-century ago. But with schools suspending nearly twice as many pupils as they did in the early '70s, the racial disparities have widened sharply. And today the penalties are stiffer. In the post-Columbine era, which has seen administrators reach for one-strike-and-you're-out, or zero-tolerance, policies, many schools no longer grant students a warning and a second chance, turning over even the most routine disciplinary matters to local police. "Schools now call in the police if a student is talking too much or doesn't do his homework," says Pedro Noguera, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

There is some evidence that black students are more likely to wind up in the dragnet. A study being released this fall by the Advancement Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, reports that black students, although they made up just 30% of the population of Miami-Dade County public schools in 2000-01, accounted for half the school arrests in that district. Says Judith Browne, senior attorney with the project: "This is no different from what happens on the street, only now it's school administrators abusing authority."

Predictably, talk of racial profiling turns very nasty very quickly. No matter the venue, the debate revolves around the same set of slippery questions: Do differences in data equal racism? Or could it be that blacks actually drive more recklessly or, in the case of schools, behave worse? Perhaps race is just incidental, and gender or class is the overriding factor. "This is not a simple matter, where the numbers speak for themselves," says Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. "In the past two years there have been five or six conferences on traffic-stop data, and there's still no consensus."

The school-discipline picture is even cloudier. "In isolated cases, there appears to be a difference in treatment," says Susan Bowers, an enforcement director with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights who investigates claims like the one filed in Modesto. "But often school districts have a justification, and race goes away." Researchers have theorized that anything from lead exposure to passive smoke may drive some students to act out more than others. The National Association of Secondary School Principals has deemed the discipline gap "an issue of socioeconomic status." The interim findings of the Rhode Island task force bolster this view. The group, after considering a student's race and whether he or she qualified for free lunch, concluded that "poverty is the single most pressing factor" associated with the disproportionate suspension of minority students in as many as a third of Rhode Island schools.

But a major study to be released in December in The Urban Review journal squarely shows the opposite. Russell Skiba, an associate professor of educational psychology at Indiana University, charted the discipline patterns of 11,000 middle-school students in a major urban district in Indiana, in which black students were more than twice as likely as their white peers to be sent to the principal's office or suspended--and four times as likely to be expelled. When Skiba factored in the financial status of the students and their families, the discipline gap did not budge. But a second finding smacks more overtly of discrimination: while white students were typically reprimanded for behaviors like smoking and vandalism, black students were more often disciplined for nebulous infractions like excessive noise and disrespect. "It's pretty clear that black students are referred for more subjective behaviors," he says. "You can choose not to use the word racism, but districts need to look seriously at why this is going on."

The more closely districts look, the less transparent the diagnoses. Beginning last year, Texas' Austin Independent School District began requiring principals to track discipline data by race to discern if any specific teachers were using a heavier hand with black students. The answer was yes, but the reasons were far from straightforward. Cornel Jones, principal of Austin's Oak Springs Elementary School, does not blame racism but chalks the problem up to "cultural misunderstandings" between his white teachers and the 97%-minority student body. One insidious source of confusion: When a teacher scolds a black or Latino student for a simple matter like talking out of turn, Jones says, that student typically looks away out of respect. Feeling her authority challenged, the teacher may send the student to the office. "It cycles up into a big monster, and then nothing the child can do is right," says Jones.

But when does misunderstanding slip over the line into prejudice? "There are racial misunderstandings, but there is also racial paranoia," says Beverly Cross, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Education. "We see this a lot with black boys who are cute until about the fourth grade, and then teachers start to fear them." Linelle Clark, Austin's dropout-prevention coordinator, sees some evidence of this in her district. She recalls that "one principal noticed a teacher with a pattern of sending the same black kid to the office, and when he called her on it, she said, 'I'm scared of that child.'"

Because racial-profiling claims are difficult to prove in court, civil rights activists urge parents to bypass the legal system and confront school officials directly. In some cities, the N.A.A.C.P. accompanies families to expulsion hearings. Another tactic popular among advocates is to gather a district's discipline statistics--which are collected by the government and can be obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Act request--and prepare self-published reports for local news broadcasts. After enough badgering, some districts have begun to bend their discipline codes. Last fall Chicago public-schools chief Arne Duncan directed principals to stop handing out suspensions for picayune infractions like "gum chewing" and reserve the punishment for violent offenses. The district is working with local activists and civil rights attorneys to launch a program allowing students to be tried by a peer jury for violations such as arguing with a teacher or using profanity.

The conversation in Modesto has thus far been much less conciliatory. Despite repeated calls for reform from a small but vocal black parents' group, the district is not weighing any changes to its discipline code. Administrators will not comment on particular cases, but Jim Pfaff, Modesto's associate superintendent, points out that district policy stipulates a stiffer penalty for a student, like Russell, who inflicts injuries causing "stitches, loss of consciousness or a fracture." Pfaff attributes the high rate of black expulsions to an influx of black families from San Francisco "who do not understand" Modesto's discipline code, which provides few second chances--just consequences. He has little patience for charges of profiling. "Because we expel more males than females, does it mean that we discriminate against men too?" he asks. Even the black community has splintered over the issue, with some parents who want change accusing others of kowtowing to the district. "[She's] dealing with the people we're fighting, running to the white man with everything," sniffs Mack Wilson, education chairman of the local N.A.A.C.P., speaking of a black mother who joined with school officials to form Project Success, a group that tries to defuse small disciplinary matters before they escalate.

Russell is indifferent to the charges flying around him. He has more urgent matters to attend to, like the D and the F on his latest report card and whether they will affect his prospects for studying architecture in college. While parents and administrators continue to bicker, he has found his own remedy for the discipline gap. "You learn which teachers treat different ethnicities differently," he says. "And you learn when you're around them to stay quiet and keep to yourself." --With reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago

With reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago