Charter schools suspending black students at high rates
Charter schools, which are new to Washington state, appear to be suspending African American students nationally at even higher rates than the traditional public schools whose educational practices the charter operations want to reform.
That’s one of the key findings of a study recently done for theCivil Rights Project at UCLA, which also found particularly high rates of suspensions for students with disabilities attending charter schools.
While the report found that some charter schools do a very good job of holding down suspension rates for all students, it also raised concerns about the effects of disparate rates of suspensions in many of the charter schools. It faulted many charters for contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline with high out-of-school suspension rates — running at least 25 percent of students — at the elementary and secondary levels. In some cases, the practices may amount to civil rights violations, the report suggested.
Under a 2012 ballot measure, Washington launched a modest program for establishing charter schools, with fewer than a dozen operating currently. And, despite a new state authorization by the Legislature in response to a court decision overturning the 2012 measure, questions continue about whether charter schools can be funded with state money.
The discipline report fits with concerns of charter opponents in Washington state about whether they will operate as equitably as regular public schools.
Some supporters of charter schools questioned the research methodology and the value of the report, saying many of the schools are leaders in new approaches to discipline. And the National Association of Charter School Authorizers told the media that parents need to be able to select the type of school they want, including ones with strict disciplinary policies.
The report, done by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, compared close to 5,000 national charter schools to 90,000 non-charter public schools, based on 2011-2012 discipline data of all schools obtained from the U.S Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The report says that the 2011-12 data was used because it provided the first full year of data under a new reporting requirement for charter schools.
The researchers found charters’ suspension rates were higher than that of non-charters for all students by 16 percent.In 2011-2012, for all students at the secondary level, the average suspension rate was 13.2 percent for charters versus 10.5 percent at regular public schools. A disparity was found between black and white students, and this occurred at both elementary and secondary levels but was particularly a factor with older students, according to the Civil Rights Project report.
“Specifically, the 6.6-point racial gap at the elementary level more than doubles to 16.4 points at the secondary level,” the report said. “This means that charter secondary schools suspend more than 16 more black students than white students per every 100 students enrolled.”
The rate differences for students with and without disabilities also rise with older students. At the secondary level, the suspension rate was 23.3 percent, a couple of percentage points above the regular public schools’ rates.
Emphasizing the sweep of the longstanding problem in public schools, however, the charters’ 13.1 percent suspension rate for American Indians came in 3 percentage points under that of the traditional schools. Latino students had slightly higher suspension rates at traditional public schools; charters suspended Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students at slightly higher rates at the Charter schools suspending black students at high rates | Crosscut: