By Pamela Sweetwood
About a month ago, I attended ISU’s Social Work Day. The theme was “A Call to Action: Disrupting the (in)Justice of the School to Prison Pipeline”. Each speaker, was very knowledgeable and focused on a different segment of the issue. My time was very well spent. The data and arguments were compelling. I won’t do the speakers justice but at least I can pass on a few things.
Dr. Beth Hatt, from ISU’s Educational Administration and Foundations department shared some data. First was the difference between expulsion rates based on race.
- In New York, a black male was 10 times more likely than a white male to be expelled.
- Black females were a whopping 53 times more likely than a white female to be expelled.
- The most common profile of a teacher is a white female.
- There are fewer male teachers and even fewer black male teachers.
Additionally,
- 40% of expelled students each year are black.
- 70% of students involved in “in-school” arrests or referred to law enforcement were black or Latino.
- Black students are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended than whites.
- Black and Latino students are twice as likely to not graduate as whites.
- Finally, 68% of males in state and federal prison do not have their high school diploma.
She next reviewed reasons the Peoria district expelled students. What would you expect? The results are probably different. The two most common reasons were aggression-no physical contact at over 1400 cases and insubordination at 1350 instances. Drugs, weapons, threats were much less common.
An earlier session made the point that our get tough on crime stance with mandatory sentencing and 3 strikes and you are out resulted in a skyrocketing prison population and for profit prisons. Some of this logic carried over to the school system – with 0 tolerance policies.
Next time, I plan to share with you the ramifications of expelling students.
Pamela Sweetwood was an ISU student, like many, who never left town. She works in higher education and has a history with many community non-profits organizations.
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