Sacramento News & Review - Why is Sacramento failing its black students? - Feature Story - Local Stories - June 14, 2018
Why is Sacramento failing its black students?
Study reveals that Sacramento City Unified School District has suspended more black boys than any other district in the state
Levi Beckwith is too young to remember much about the first time he was kicked out of a classroom. It happened four years ago when he was in preschool at Woodlake Elementary School in the Twin Rivers Unified School District. Now 8, Levi recalls being removed from class a second time that year, though he can’t say why.
His mother, Tyffani Beckwith, remembers both suspensions vividly.
“It was after [Levi] telling his teacher several times that he was being teased and bullied,” Tyffani said.
Levi’s teacher didn’t intervene, his mother says, and Levi resorted to punching his classmate. He was sent home for several days. Later that year, Levi was suspended again, this time for being disruptive, something Tyffani says could’ve been avoided had the school called her.
“He’s in the second grade now,” Tyffani said, looking at her son sitting quietly next to her. “This is the first year of school that he has not gotten suspended—not once.”
Suspensions are frequent in Sacramento County school districts, especially for black boys like Levi.
According to researchers from San Diego State University and University of California, Los Angeles, Sacramento schools disproportionately suspend black boys. The researchers’ new study, “The Capitol of Suspensions: Examining the Racial Exclusion of Black Males in Sacramento County,” revealed that the schools with the worst record are right here in the state capital: The Sacramento City Unified School District has suspended more black boys than any other district in the state—including Los Angeles’ much larger one. Three other local districts are in the undesirable top 20 for disproportionate suspensions.
While the research brief didn’t examine what behavior preceded the suspensions, other studies have shown that black boys are disciplined more harshly than classmates of other races or ethnicities for the same minor transgressions.
“What we find as a pattern is that when black boys do things that are normal, it’s viewed as criminal,” said San Diego State education professor J. Luke Wood, one of the authors of the new report. “When white children do things that are normal, it’s viewed as just that—normal.”
Maybe you’ve heard of the school-to-prison pipeline? This is how it gets built, Wood says: on the backs of little black boys who are told from an early age that they are unfit for society. According to the figures, that message is loudest in Sacramento County classrooms.
Sacramento schools by the numbers
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This comes at a time when the district is facing a number of issues dealing with race and discrimination against its black student population.
