The Government Accountability Office recently released a report on school discipline. It made non-racist school officials look racist by trumpeting the fact that black girls are disciplined at higher rates than white girls, without mentioning the fact that black kids misbehave at higher rates — a fact made clear both by kids themselves in surveys, and by researchers who take into account kids’ disciplinary records.
The federal government’s own data shows black students don’t misbehave at the same rate as students of other races. Data from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) shows blacks are much more likely than whites to admit to getting into fights at school — 12.6% of blacks did so in 2015, compared to 5.6% percent of whites, according to page 87 of the NCES’s Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2016. (See Figure 13.2, Percentage of students in grades 9–12 who reported having been in a physical fight at least one time during the previous 12 months, by location and race/ethnicity: 2015).
Higher black misbehavior rates are not limited to fights, but extend to other areas of misbehavior as well. The Final Report of the Federal Commission on School Safety issued by the Departments of Education and Justice in 2018 pointed out that “research studies reveal that black youth, in comparison with their white counterparts, are … disproportionately involved in delinquency and crime (Earls, 1994; Hawkins, Laub, & Lauritsen, 1998), and are more likely to behave in ways that interfere with classroom and school functioning (Beaver, Wright, & DeLisi, 2011). These studies, and others from various disciplines, suggest that the school disciplinary rates may also reflect the problematic behaviors of black youth—problem behaviors that are imported into schools and into classrooms.” (See page 74, note 27).
So it is not surprising that black girls are disciplined at a higher rate.
Studies also show that black students facing discipline have worse overall discipline histories and more prior instances of misbehavior, causing them to be suspended at a higher rate than whites. A 2014 study in the Journal of Criminal Justice by criminologists and academics like John Paul Wright examined what was causing black students to be suspended at a higher rate than white students. The study, entitled “Prior Problem Behavior Accounts for the Racial Gap in School Suspensions,” concluded that “the racial gap in suspensions was completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student,” not racism by school officials, or worse treatment of black offenders compared to similarly-situated white offenders. This study was approvingly cited in the Final Report of the Federal Commission on School Safety, which pointed out that “researchers” had “analyzed the specific circumstances underlying these suspensions and discovered that ‘the racial gap in suspensions was completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior’ of the student.”
So it would not be surprising if black girls were disciplined more severely on average than girls of other races, if they have more prior offenses. Discipline — whether in school or in the criminal justice system — is appropriately more severe for those who have a history of prior offenses, than for those who are first-time offenders. The Supreme Court has ruled that it is “rational” that states laws punish people more harshly when they have committed prior offenses; in Ewing v. California (2003), the Supreme Court upheld the use of California’s Three Strikes Law to sentence a man to 25 years to life for stealing where he had previously committed burglary and robbery, concluding that this harsh penalty was “justified by the State’s public-safety interest in incapacitating and deterring recidivist” offenders.
But the Government Accountability Office’s report mentions neither of these realities. Not once does it even entertain the possibility that blacks and whites misbehave at different rates, nor does it consider the possibility that black girls may have more prior instances of misbehavior than girls of other races. It also ignores other relevant factors, as the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty explains.
The GAO strongly implies that the higher black discipline rate is due to racism, stating that
Among girls, Black girls faced more and harsher forms of discipline than other girls and had the highest rates of exclusionary discipline, such as suspensions and expulsions. According to GAO’s analysis of the most recent Department of Education data before the pandemic, in school year 2017–18, Black girls comprised 15 percent of all girls in public schools but received almost half of suspensions and expulsions. Further, GAO’s analysis of school year 2017–18 infraction or behavior data showed that Black girls received harsher punishments than White girls even when the infractions that prompted disciplinary action were similar. For example, Black girls had higher rates of exclusionary discipline compared to White girls for similar behaviors such as defiance, disrespect, and disruption. The data also show that in every state in the U.S., Black girls are disciplined at higher rates….We found that the discipline gap between Black and White girls is mainly driven by differential discipline within the same schools, not enrollment patterns across schools…. Another study found that, while racial differences in school composition accounted for 20 percent of the racial gap in discipline between Black and White elementary school girls, the differential treatment of Black girls explained 25 percent of the differences in suspensions and expulsions… Colorism, a form of racial bias that favors lighter skin tones, can also impact the discipline and treatment of groups of girls, according to empirical research we reviewed and stakeholders we interviewed. For example, a study in our review found that, when controlling for school and student variables, Black girls with the darkest skin tone were twice as likely to be suspended as White girls; this relationship didn’t hold for Black girls with lighter skin complexions
But if black students misbehave at a higher rate, then it makes no sense for the GAO to complain that black girls have “higher rates of exclusionary discipline.” Higher rates of misbehavior should lead to higher rates of discipline! Demanding otherwise leads to illegal racial quotas. For example, a federal appeals court struck down as an illegal racial quota a rule that forbade a “school district to refer a higher percentage of minority students than of white students for discipline,” saying that requiring the same rates of discipline for all races would lead to “either systematically overpunishing the innocent or systematically underpunishing the guilty,” in People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education (1997).
(The GAO doesn’t assert that black girls have the same rate of misbehavior as whites, although it also never recognizes the reality that they have a higher misbehavior rate than white girls. It simply ignores this key issue, because the data is clear that blacks misbehave at a higher rate, but if the GAO admits that, then its complaint that black girls have “higher rates” of discipline will seem meritless).
The “differential treatment” the GAO complains about is not necessarily bad or illegal. The GAO never even mentions one of the most important factors in student discipline — prior instances of misbehavior, which justifies differential discipline of a student who is a repeat offender. So the “differential discipline” it alleges seems to capture only “differential” rates of various forms of discipline between blacks and whites, not differential treatment of a black girl versus a similarly-situated white girl. A repeat offender and a first-time offender are not similarly situated, just as a non-offender and an offender are not similarly-situated.
The GAO’s speculation that “colorism” is the source of differential discipline rates is hard to reconcile with the fact that Asians — who are generally darker than whites — have the lowest suspension rates and the lowest rates of school discipline. In California, white students are suspended at about four times the rate of Asian students, who have the lowest suspension rate of all races. (See Tom Loveless, The 2017 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?, Brookings Institution, March 2017, pg. 25).
Racial differences in suspension rates don’t prove racism, as appeals courts in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Richmond have noted. Differences in suspension rates partly reflect the fact that black kids are more likely to come from struggling single-parent households that fail to instill discipline. As the liberal Brookings Institution conceded in 2017, “Black students are also more likely to come from family backgrounds associated with school behavior problems.”
The GAO report suggests that “subjective infractions” are fueling the higher black discipline rate. But subjectivity in discipline isn’t the primary reason why blacks are suspended at a higher rate than whites. The federal appeals court in Philadelphia noted in 1996 that “statistical data” showed larger racial differences in discipline rates for serious, “very objective” offenses than for minor, “less objective” offenses. It also cited a lack of evidence for the notion that “misbehavior” occurs at the same rate among all “racial groups.” (See Coalition to Save Our Children v. State Board of Education of Delaware).
The GAO report is titled, “K-12 Education: Nationally, Black Girls Receive More Frequent and More Severe Discipline in School than Other Girls.”
