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The Department of Education will be releasing a report today that corroborates a Post story from late last year: Black kids (and Latino kids) get suspended and expelled more often than white kids. From the New York Times: “One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.”
We haven’t seen the data yet, but we’ll be interested to find out whether the Post’s Donna St. George‘s more interesting findings also bear out: That black kids get disciplined more harshly than white kids do when they commit the exact same infractions (that includes controls for race of teacher, and previous behavior).
Note: One thing from the Times report that we didn’t consider when writing about this before, is that black and Latino kids tend to go to school with lots of other black and Latino kids. And these same schools tend to have less experienced teachers and more punitive policies.
Photo by alex drennan via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License