Racial bias feeds the school-to-prison pipeline
Oakland High School sophomore Barry Williams answers a question from instructor Tiago Robinson during the Manhood Development Program at Oakland High School on March 12 in Oakland, California. This is the cover story in the Apr. 1 issue of The Christian Science MonitorWeekly.(Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor)Two students set off fire alarms in the same school district. One of them, an African-American kindergartner, is suspended for five days; the other, a white ninth-grader, is suspended for one day.
•An African-American high-schooler is suspended for a day for using a cellphone and aniPod in class. In the same school, a white student with a similar disciplinary history gets detention for using headphones.
•Two middle-schoolers push each other; the white student receives a three-day, in-school suspension, while the native American student is arrested and suspended, out of school, for 10 days.
Civil rights groups have been saying for years that school discipline is not meted out fairly, citing examples like these reported last year from around the country by the US Department of Education.
High rates of suspensions and expulsions for certain groups – particularly African-Americans,