Being a counselor, I deal with all aspects of life, including those of diversity and cultural understanding. This article was interesting to me, because I have parents who come to me from the LBUSB and the LAUSD that have the same complaints. Yet, I've read articles from NY, FL and IL that seem to have the same issue. It makes you say, hhhhmmm....is there something going on that I could be more sensitive about to help my clients. The answer is yes! I do provide counseling for diversity/cultural sensitivity understanding, to help those who need to have a better social interaction or better business skills.
Let's read the article.
Race gap in school discipline?
Blacks expelled, suspended more than others at SUSD
The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has been studying school discipline in numerous districts this year, and a member of the Stockton community provided the organization's report on Stockton Unified to The Record.
According to the data, black students represented 12.2 percent of the population at Chavez, Edison, Franklin and Stagg high schools during the 2010-11 school year. But they received 23.1 percent of the expulsions and 22.9 percent of the suspensions.
Stockton Unified officials were not surprised by the ACLU's findings.
"It has been a concern for the last 25 years," Stockton Unified Superintendent Carl Toliver said. "It has always been an issue."
Stockton Unified's data is mirrored by other school systems across the United States. For instance, a 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Education found that 28 percent of black male middle-school students had been suspended at least once, compared with 10 percent of whites.
Theories seeking to explain the data are varied. Is racial bias the cause? Is it a lack of cultural sensitivity and awareness on the part of some adults at the schools? Are the inconsistent applications of vaguely worded policies to blame?
"We've had these conversations before: Why is it certain groups get suspended more than other students?" Stockton Unified Deputy Superintendent Julie Penn said. "We never could pinpoint it."
Quoted in Education Week magazine two months ago, education policy expert Daniel J. Losen of the University of California, Los Angeles, said he believes prejudice is a major factor. Some data appears to back him up.
In North Carolina in 2008-09, Education Week reported, for the first offense of possessing or using a cellphone at school, 33 percent of black males were suspended, but only 14.5 percent of whites. For first-time dress-code violations, 38.3 percent of blacks were suspended, but only 16.6 percent of whites.
"Why else would we see, for the first-time offense, blacks receiving harsh punishments far more often than whites?" Losen asked in Education Week.
Bobby Bivens, head of the Stockton branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he believes some school staffers may not be attuned to the reasons some students react strongly when they receive discipline.
As an example, Bivens cited a situation last year involving a black fifth-grade student on a Lincoln Unified campus.
According to Bivens, the student raised his voice to his teacher, prompting the teacher to pick up the phone to call the boy's mother. The boy snatched the phone from the teacher's hands, Bivens said, and he was expelled as a result.
In grabbing the phone, Bivens said, the boy may not have been behaving aggressively so much as reacting out of fear that if the teacher called his mother, "I'm going to get a spanking when I get home."
"The biggest problem I see is a lack of cultural understanding ... to how (some) African-American students speak," Bivens said. "A lot of times fear or anger causes them to speak at an amplified voice level."
Toliver said Stockton Unified has held numerous staff training sessions to raise the cultural awareness of district employees. More are planned as a result of the ACLU report.
But Chavez High Principal Will Nelson said he believes that to cite staffers' lack of cultural awareness as the prime source of the issue is to oversimplify a complex problem.
He declined to theorize on the reasons why black students as a group are disciplined disproportionately, but he said the need for discipline in general is reduced when students are more engaged and interested in what they are being taught. He also said budget cuts in recent years have made it harder to provide support to those students who would benefit from counseling.
Nelson said he will tell a minority student who approaches a teacher in a "headstrong" way, "Think how you would feel if I came at you like that." And he will advise staffers to consider students' feelings, telling teachers, "Think how you'd feel if you got an F?"
Stockton Unified has changed some of its conduct codes this year, taking suspensions off the table as a discipline option in many nonviolent situations where a student shows "defiance" to staff. The result, officials say, has been a 50 percent decline in suspensions so far this year.
"I think that's a good start," Bivens said.
School policy experts increasingly oppose "zero-tolerance" discipline measures and cite suspensions as a prime predictor of students who eventually will drop out.
Suspending or expelling students often results in removing from school those students who most need to be in attendance. Zero-tolerance policies come under fire for contributing to what some experts call the school-to-prison pipeline.
Stockton Unified's policy change this year is intended to force school sites to use measures that are more rehabilitative than disciplinary in dealing with children who misbehave.
"Schools need to have interventions, they need to have programs available, they need to do some counseling with students," Penn said. "We want interventions to help change the behavior."
Michael Tubbs, a 2008 Franklin High graduate, was one of the few black students in the school's rigorous International Baccalaureate program. Tubbs, now 21, said the ACLU findings are not a surprise. Though never being suspended, when he was in high school, Tubbs said he led the IB program in the frequency of trips to the office of the principal, vice principal or counselor.
"I definitely had more referrals than anybody in my class," he said. "I was very headstrong."
Tubbs, now pursuing a master's degree in education policy, organization and leadership studies at Stanford, said there are school staffers who need to increase their "cultural competencies."
"The media portrays black men as angry, aggressive and threatening," Tubbs said. "That plays out in the classroom. In the African-American culture, we speak really directly. To people not in the know, it may sound rude and off-putting."
But Tubbs said suspensions and expulsions solve nothing.
"I would definitely think you should look at more rehabilitative and restorative measures," he said. "You can't educate students when they're not in school."
Contact reporter Roger Phillips at (209) 546-8299 or rphillips@recordnet.com. Visit his blog at recordnet.com/phillipsblog.
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