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Brown v Board of Education established the unconstitutional nature of segregation in schools, bu this referred more specifically to students... What about teachers?

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NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

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May 17, 1954 marks a defining moment in the history of the United States. On that day, the Supreme Court declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" unconstitutional and handed LDF the most celebrated victory in its storied history.

Although the Supreme Court's decision in Brown was ultimately unanimous, it occurred only after a hard-fought, multi-year campaign to persuade all nine justices to overturn the "separate but equal" doctrine that their predecessors had endorsed in the Court's infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This campaign was conceived in the 1930s by Charles Hamilton Houston, then Dean of Howard Law School, and brilliantly executed in a series of cases over the next two decades by his star pupil, Thurgood Marshall, who became LDF's first Director-Counsel.

Brown itself was not a single case, but rather a coordinated group of five lawsuits against school districts in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. To litigate these cases, Marshall recruited the nation's best attorneys, including Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, Charles and John Scott, Harold R. Boulware, James Nabrit, and George E.C. Hayes. These LDF lawyers were assisted by a brain trust of legal scholars, including future federal district court judges Louis Pollack and Jack Weinstein, along with William Coleman, the first black person to serve as a Supreme Court law clerk. In addition, LDF relied upon research by historians, such as John Hope Franklin, and an array of social science arguments. This research included psychologist Kenneth Clark's now famous doll experiments, which demonstrated the impact of segregation on black children - Clark found black children were led to believe that black dolls were inferior to white dolls and, by extension, that they were inferior to their white peers.

After the five cases were heard together by the Court in December 1952, the outcome remained uncertain. The Court ordered the parties to answer a series of questions about the specific intent of the Congressmen and Senators who framed the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and about the Court's power to dismantle segregation. Then the Court scheduled another oral argument in December 1953. Wrapping up his presentation to the Court in that second hearing, Marshall emphasized that segregation was rooted in the desire to keep "the people who were formerly in slavery as near to that stage as is possible." Even with such powerful arguments from Marshall and other LDF attorneys, it took another five months for the newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren's behind-the-scenes lobbying to yield a unanimous decision.

Recognizing the controversial nature of its decision, the Court waited another year to issue an order enforcing the decision in Brown II. Even then, the Court was unwilling to establish a firm timetable for dismantling segregation. It ruled only that public schools desegregate "with all deliberate speed." Unfortunately, desegregation was neither deliberate nor speedy. In the face of fierce and often violent "massive resistance, " LDF sued hundreds of school districts across the country to vindicate the promise of Brown. It was not until LDF's subsequent victories in Green v. County School Board (1968)and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971) that the Supreme Court issued mandates that segregation be dismantled "root and branch," outlined specific factors to be considered to eliminate effects of segregation, and ensured that federal district courts had the authority to do so.

Even today, the work of Brown is far from finished . Over 200 school desegregation cases remain open on federal court dockets; LDF alone has nearly 100 of these cases. Recent Supreme Court decisions have made it harder to achieve and maintain school desegregation. As a result of these developments and other factors, public school children are more racially isolated now than at any point in the past four decades. This backsliding makes it even more critical for LDF to continue defending the principles articulated in Brown and leading the ongoing struggle to provide an equal opportunity to learn for children in every one of our nation's classrooms. As then Senator Obama observed in a 2008 speech in Philadelphia, "segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education - and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students."

The legal victory in Brown did not transform the country overnight, and much work remains. But striking down segregation in the nation's public schools provided a major catalyst for the civil rights movement, making possible advances in desegregating housing, public accommodations, and institutions of higher education. The decision gave hope to millions of Americans by permanently discrediting the legal rationale underpinning the racial caste system that had been endorsed or accepted by governments at all levels since the end of the nineteenth century. And its impact has been felt by every American.

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Landmark: Brown v. Board of Education | NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

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May 17, 1954 marks a defining moment in the history of the United States. On that day, the Supreme Court declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" unconstitutional and handed LDF the most celebrated victory in its storied history. Although the Supreme Court's decision in Brown was ultimately unanimous, it occurred only after a hard-fought, multi-year campaign ...

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Affirmative Action in Higher Education: Relevance for Today's Racial Justice Battlegrounds                  (1961) 

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Affirmative Action in Higher Education: Relevance for Today's Racial Justice Battlegrounds                  (1961) 

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Affirmative Action allowed students of color to be accepted into Universities and places of higher education. Additionally, students were able to access resources such as tutoring, food, etc. These policies also opened hiring practices to include more people of color... but this has become fairly controversial. Some people have argued that this gives people of color a "leg up" on white people. Others have said that people of color hired under Affirmative Action are "diversity hires," discounting any possibility that the candidate was chosen because of his/her/their talent.

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In the past two decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed the legality of race-conscious admissions to promote racial diversity in higher education. In 2004, the Supreme Court heard a pair of cases brought by white applicants challenging race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan and Michigan Law School (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger). In handing down its rulings, the Supreme Court explicitly embraced Bakke and re-endorsed individualized review processes that consider race as one of many factors to promote diversity. The Supreme Court repeated this refrain as recently as 2013 and 2016, rejecting a lawsuit brought by Abigail Fisher (a white woman) challenging the University of Texas at Austin's holistic, race-conscious policy on the grounds that the policy "promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes, and enables students to better understand persons of different races" (Fisher v. Univ. of Texas at Austin).

While race-conscious admissions have survived numerous challenges in court, many civil rights advocates have expressed frustration with the current legal limitations of affirmative action and how it is currently practiced. Critics have expressed frustration with the prevailing diversity rationale for centering white students as the intended beneficiaries who extract educational value from minority students. Others, such as Sheryll Cashin and Sally Chung, have criticized the policy for losing its intended purpose of amending structural disadvantages, arguing it fails to adequately assist minority students from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds and ignores structural inequities.

Even advocates for race-conscious admissions have agreed with such criticisms. They acknowledge a comprehensive vision for racial equity must go beyond admissions and the diversity rationale. But they also argue that race-conscious admissions may not be a panacea for resolving racial inequities, but it also must not be abandoned. It remains a vital tool for ensuring talented students of all backgrounds can access quality higher education. Such advocates often emphasize the immediate, adverse consequences of ending race-conscious policies. Experiences in California and Texas are instructive. When UT-Austin stopped considering race from 1996-2004 due to a contrary decision from the Fifth Circuit (Hopwood v. Texas), the number of African American and Latinx students immediately declined, with African American enrollment dropping by 40 percent and Hispanic enrollment dropping by 5 percent (despite the rapidly increasing number of Hispanics in the admissions pool). California experienced similar declines after the passage of proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in education and employment. When implemented, African Americans experienced a 55 percent decline in admissions offers to UC Berkeley and UCLA, the state's two most selective universities. Despite significant investment in race-neutral alternatives over 20 years, the UC system has never returned to its previous levels of diversity.

Today, top-tier universities suffer from abysmally low proportions of black, Latinx, and other minority students. A 2017 New York Times analysis observed that "black and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at the nation's top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago." Our colleges cannot afford to scale back programs that expand racial inclusivity.

Unfortunately, a concerted effort is underway to do just that. Over the last decade, Edward Blum-a longtime opponent of civil rights programs-has spearheaded a series of lawsuits with the stated purpose of ending any consideration of race in admissions. Blum was the mastermind behind Fisher v. Univ. of Texas at Austin. After his failure in Fisher, Blum revised his approach to eliminate race-conscious admissions. He created the organization Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) as a vehicle for his anti-affirmative action efforts. He publicly stated that he "needed Asian plaintiffs," transparently pursuing a racially divisive strategy that tries to pit Asian Americans against other minority groups.

In 2014, SFFA (backed by Blum) filed two new lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) claiming the universities' use of race exceeded lawful limits set by the Supreme Court under Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause. The Harvard lawsuit was novel in two respects. It was the first affirmative action case against a private university. It was also the first case to claim a university's race-conscious policy intentionally discriminated against Asian Americans. Beyond these distinctions, the lawsuits largely rehash the same arguments of prior cases, asserting: Colleges should give greater weight to socioeconomic status in lieu of race; standardized tests provide the benchmark for who deserves admission; and there are sufficient levels of racial diversity across campus.

Both lawsuits promote a colorblind framework. The complaints urge the court to prohibit "any use of race or ethnicity in the educational setting" and ban admissions officers from being "aware of or learn[ing] the race or ethnicity of any applicant." Taken to its logical end point, such relief would substantially alter the admissions process. Purging all reference to race would potentially prevent colleges from conducting interviews and recruiting applicants in person. It would also jeopardize students' ability to submit essays and recommendations discussing how race or ethnicity has impacted their lives; list awards and activities indicating their race or ethnicity; or write about their immigrant stories, regardless of their country of origin. In effect, it would perversely penalize some applicants in the name of equal protection (especially non-white applicants who disproportionately face racial barriers).

Such "race-blind" relief also indicates Blum and SFFA are not genuinely interested in counteracting biases faced by the Asian American community. Research shows that effective methods for combatting racial bias involve race-conscious interventions, such as providing implicit-bias trainings to admissions officers or engaging in race-conscious recruiting to cultivate greater diversity among admissions officers. Banning all consideration of race further fuels a white admissions advantage. Evidence submitted during the Harvard trial showed white students would experience the greatest gains in admission under a race-blind system, with their share of the admitted class jumping from 40 percent to 48 percent.

A diverse coalition of students at Harvard and UNC-identifying as black, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American-came together to express support for race-conscious programs that promote greater racial diversity and inclusion. Their unified stance rejected Blum's divisive strategy and recognized that reckoning with race remains necessary in light of our country's past and present struggles with racial inequalities and overt racism.

In the Harvard lawsuit, the district court permitted this diverse coalition of students to submit testimony in support of race-conscious admissions during the three-week trial held in October 2018. For its part, SFFA did not present a single student to testify on their behalf, nor did SFFA submit a single student file containing implicit or explicit discriminatory statements, nor did SFFA's experts consult a single student in forming their opinions.

The students' testimony and application files humanized the reasons why race and racial diversity continue to matter in college admissions, on college campuses, and across our broader society.

To begin, the students explained how race provides critical context for authentically portraying their strengths and for colleges to more accurately evaluate their contributions to campus. For example, Itzel Vasquez-Rodriguez wrote her application essay on her "experiences as a young Xicana [indigenous Mexican-American] in Southern California." A side-by-side of her personal essay-with and without references to her race-demonstrates how a race-blind system would undervalue her strengths.

The harms would cut just as deep for Asian American students like Thang Diep. In his essay, Diep shared how growing up his Vietnamese identity often felt "lost in translation." At trial, he described how he was mocked for his accent and called racial slurs. His essay shared he ultimately reconnected with his Vietnamese identity in high school and excelled in his language-intensive magnet program. Diep testified that erasing his ethnicity would provide an incomplete picture of his strengths and re-inflict the harms of suppressing his identity for so long.

The students also testified to the profound benefits of cultivating sufficient numbers of racial minorities on campus. They described how this diversity across and within racial groups provided indispensable support for Harvard's students of color who faced overt and subtle forms of racial hostility on campus. Sarah Cole, who identifies as black American, explained that she needed other black students to "lean on" on when she was "cursed at or physically assaulted" for marching through campus and asserting that black lives matter. When the campus was shaken by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the slew of police shootings that followed, it was Cole's responsibility as the president of the Black Students Association to lead the rest of the campus-white and Latinx, students and administrators-in finding a path forward to mourn and become better allies. Her testimony is a reminder of how students of color perform real and exhausting work every day as they are often tasked with mending the racial fault lines that divide campuses and our country. Such work necessitates a robust peer-support system.

The students' testimonies also powerfully countered SFFA's assertion that socioeconomic diversity could serve as a substitute for race. They spoke to how minorities of color face racial biases regardless of socioeconomic class. Their testimony is backed by numerous studies. Black students are more likely to be disciplined than their white peers engaging in similar behavior. This disparate treatment begins early. One study showed African American children are 3.6 times more likely than white students to be suspended from preschool-a disparity that, according to researchers at Yale, is linked to implicit bias among early childhood educators. As another example, those with ethnic-sounding names are less likely to receive callbacks for employment. Another illustration of race's independent effects: Low-income black and Latinx families are more likely to live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty as compared to poor whites.

The students' testimonies also highlighted the distinct benefits derived from racial diversity on campus. As Vasquez-Rodriguez testified: "ethnoracial diversity is more visibly salient." When she entered a classroom, she "took note mentally of the number of students of color," and she intentionally sought out spaces with more nonwhite students because there she could "finally breathe."

The students uniformly declared that SFFA's race-blind regime resulted in an unacceptable drop in the number of minority students on campus. The undisputed evidence at trial indicated the number of black, Latinx, and other minority students on campus would decline by roughly 1,100 students, cutting their numbers by 50 percent. The students also emphasized that SFFA's myopic focus on standardized test scores as a benchmark for who deserves admission was wholly misguided. Numerous research studies show tests such as the SATs have no meaningful correlation with college success; instead, they are most strongly correlated with socioeconomic and demographic factors, such as parents' income, access to high-cost test-prep programs, parents' education level, and race. Such tests also, by design, under-predict the capabilities of underrepresented minority students. The test creators throw out questions where underrepresented minority students do better and white students do worse. These racial skews, in combination with a phenomenon known as stereotype threat, systematically underestimate the ability of stigmatized minority students including those that identify as black, Latinx, and many lower-resourced Asian American subgroups.

On October 1, 2019, the Boston district court issued its decision upholding Harvard's race-conscious admissions program on all counts. The decision resonated with the students' testimony. Of note, the district court cited the students' testimony to observe:

[I]t is vital that Asian Americans and other racial minorities be able to discuss their racial identities in their applications. As the Court has seen and heard, race can profoundly influence applicants' sense of self and outward perspective. . . . Removing considerations of race and ethnicity from Harvard's admissions process entirely would deprive applicants, including Asian American applicants, of their right to advocate the value of their unique background, heritage, and perspective and would likely also deprive Harvard of exceptional students who would be less likely to be admitted without a comprehensive understanding of their background.

The district court's decision also rightly recognized that race-conscious programs remain vital, given racial disparities in the K-12 system, the inherent limitations of standardized testing, and the non-feasibility of relying on imperfect proxies for race. The decision also observed that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's prediction in 2004 that the need for race-conscious admissions programs may expire in 25 years seemed overly "optimistic and may need to change."

The Harvard case now heads to appeal before the First Circuit. In spite of the significant legal victory and strong trial record in the Harvard case, affirmative action advocates have major work ahead. SFFA has vowed to take the Harvard case all the way up to a newly configured Supreme Court, which no longer includes Justice Anthony Kennedy, who secured the favorable ruling in Fisher (the last lawsuit to challenge race-conscious admissions). Meanwhile, SFFA's case against UNC will proceed to trial in district court over the upcoming months. SFFA has also resurrected its lawsuit against UT-Austin's race-conscious admissions program. This time, SFFA has filed in state court, arguing that "student body diversity is not a compelling interest" under the Texas state constitution and remedies code. New lawsuits have also been brought to challenge diversity programs that consider factors correlated with race (so called "race-neutral" programs), which Justice Kennedy expressly encouraged in Fisher and Parents Involved (Christa McAuliffe v. Bill de Blasio).

The civil rights community is prepared to meet these challenges. Today's education system is rife with racial biases. Affirmative action remains vital for recognizing that race continues to play a role in individuals' lived experiences and opportunities, and that racial diversity ensures tomorrow's future leaders come from all walks of life and learn to thrive in our stunningly diverse world.

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Affirmative Action in Higher Education: Relevance for Today's Racial Justice Battlegrounds

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The affirmative action policies put into place for workers and college students in the 1960s have gradually been dismantled by courts. Upholding the remaining affirmative action policies is critical for a national racial justice agenda.

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Study Finds White Teachers of Black Students More Likely to Punish Students for Misbehavior

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Study Finds White Teachers of Black Students More Likely to Punish Students for Misbehavior

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When white teachers discipline Black students, it usually has something to do with inherent biases. Additionally, when Black students don't have teachers who look like them, they are not seeing themselves represented in a position of educational authority.

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The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

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A new study led by Dan Battey, an associate professor of mathematics education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has found that White teachers in majority-Black classrooms have more negative, highly charged interactions with students regarding classroom behavior than White teachers in predominately White classrooms and Black teachers in predominately Black classrooms.

For the study, the research team compared student-teacher interactions from 25 middle school math classrooms with three different settings: a White teacher with mostly White students, a Black teacher with mostly Black students, and a White teacher with mostly Black students. The researches analyzed four videos of each teacher giving different lessons and examined the ways the teachers spoke to students and the kinds of classroom environments they created.

The results found that all teachers, regardless of race, more often reprimanded students than praised them. However, White teachers of Black students admonished students for misbehavior two to four times as frequently as teachers who were the same race as their students. Additionally, White teachers of Black students were more likely to have highly charged interactions with students instead of privately pulling students aside to have a conversation.

Black students who received this negative feedback performed worse than they had in the previous school year. One standard deviation increase in the number of negative interactions around behavior was associated with a 16 percent decrease in Black students' achievement. Additionally, Black teachers were more likely to praise Black students' capabilities than White teachers. The positive reinforcement was correlated with higher Black student achievement.

The researchers believe that their results show the need for White educators to be more reflective about their practice in majority-Black classrooms. The researchers suggest that teachers should handle behavior problems privately and respectively instead of yelling or removing students from the classroom. Additionally, the researchers suggest that White teachers be more intentional about finding moments to praise Black students on their abilities.

The study, "Racial (Mis)Match in Middle School Mathematics Classrooms: Relational Interactions as a Racialized Mechanism," was published in a recent issue of the Harvard Educational Review. It may be accessed here.

Related: California Polytechnic State University * Rutgers University * Vanderbilt University

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Study Finds White Teachers of Black Students More Likely to Punish Students for Misbehavior

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A new study led by Dan Battey, an associate professor of mathematics education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has found that White teachers in majority-Black classrooms have more negative, highly charged interactions with students regarding classroom behavior than White teachers in predominately White classrooms and Black teachers in predominately Black classrooms. For the study, the research team compared student-teacher interactions from 25 middle school math classrooms with three different settings: a White teacher with mostly White students, a Black teacher with mostly Black students, and a White teacher with mostly Black students.

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The heightened discipline of Black and Indigenous students of color leads student to facilities like JCCS (Juvenile Court and Community School). This early introduction to the criminal justice system makes it more likely that students will continue to be involved with said system in the future.

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When a student at Spring Valley High School, South Carolina captured a cellphone video of a police officer flipping over a student and her desk, then throwing the student across the room, the video quickly got national attention: people were alarmed that a police officer in a school would do that to a teenager who didn't pose a threat.

But to others, it was less surprising that a police officer would behave so aggressively in a school: because school discipline and the criminal justice system have already been intertwined, in a phenomenon civil-rights advocates call the "school-to-prison pipeline." Especially for older students, trouble at school can lead to their first contact with the criminal justice system. And in many cases, schools themselves are the ones pushing students into the juvenile justice system - often by having students arrested at school by School Resource Officers like the one in Spring Valley.

Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the juvenile incarceration rate dropped 41 percent between 1995 and 2010. But school discipline policies are moving in the opposite direction: out-of-school suspensions have increased about 10 percent since 2000. They have more than doubled since the 1970s. And it's hardly racially balanced: Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, according to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, and research in Texas found students who have been suspended are more likely to be held back a grade and drop out of school entirely.

Here's how the current state of school discipline developed and why some districts and federal officials are working to change the status quo.

1) Concerns about crime led schools to adopt 'zero tolerance' policies

In the 1970s, keeping students out of school as a punishment was relatively rare: fewer than 4 percent of students were suspended in 1973, according to an analysis of Education Department data by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But growing concern about crime and violence in schools led states and districts to adopt policies that required students to be suspended.

The Gun-Free Schools Act, passed in 1994, mandated a yearlong out-of-school suspension for any student caught bringing a weapon to school. And as states began adopting these zero-tolerance policies, the number of suspensions and expulsions increased. The suspension rate for all students has nearly doubled since the 1970s, and has increased even more for black and Hispanic students.

Zero-tolerance policies have been widely criticized when schools have interpreted "weapon" very broadly, expelling students for making guns with their fingers or chewing a Pop-Tart into a gun shape or bringing a camping fork for Cub Scouts to class.

But they're not the only reason schools suspended students more frequently. At the same time as zero-tolerance policies for violence were growing, school districts adopted their own version of the broken windows theory of policing. The broken windows theory emphasizes the importance of cracking down on small offenses in order to make residents feel safer and discourage more serious crimes; in schools, it translated into more suspensions for offenses that previously hadn't warranted them - talking back to teachers, skipping class, or being otherwise disobedient or disruptive.

At the same time, administrators started relying more heavily on actualpolice - in the form of School Resource Officers (SROs) stationed in schools. From 1997 to 2007, the number of SROs increased by nearly a third. Ostensibly, they were there to prevent mass school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1998 - in other words, to protect students, not to police them.

But as often happens with law enforcement, resources that are supposed to be used for a rare occurrence often get used for more common occurrences simply because they're there. About 92,000 students were arrested in school during the 2011-2012 school year, according to US Department of Education statistics. And most of those are low-level violations: 74 percent of arrests in New York City public schools in 2012, according to a report published by the state courts, were for misdemeanors or civil violations.

2) Schools have outsourced discipline to juvenile courts and officers in schools

When a school allows a School Resource Officer to arrest a student - or, less drastically and more commonly, refers a student to law enforcement or juvenile court as a form of discipline - they're turning that student over to the juvenile justice system. That makes it that much easier for a student to get a juvenile record (so even if punishment for a first offense is light, punishment for a second offense is likely to be much harsher).

This happens way more at schools with officers. A report by the Justice Policy Institute found that, even controlling for a school district's poverty level, schools with officers had five times as many arrests for "disorderly conduct" as schools without them.

This isn't something that the juvenile court system is calling for - quite the opposite. The chief judge of the juvenile court in Clayton County, Georgia has become an outspoken opponent of police in schools and the school-to-prison pipeline after placing cops on school grounds resulted in eleven times as many students getting sent to juvenile court. He told Congress at a 2012 hearing that "the prosecutor's attention was taken from the more difficult evidentiary and 'scary' cases-burglary, robberies, car thefts, aggravated assaults with weapons - to prosecuting kids that are not 'scary,' but made an adult mad."

The Department of Education only started collecting detailed data on arrests and referrals for the last two iterations of its Office for Civil Rights report. So it's hard to be confident about trends. But there's some evidence that arrests and referrals are on the decline; referrals to law enforcement of students without disabilities, for example, went down about 9 percent between 2009-10 and 2011-12.

3) Black students are more likely to be disciplined

Black students are suspended or expelled three times more frequently than white students. And while black children made up 16 percent of all enrolled children in 2011-12, according to federal data, they accounted for 31 percent of all in-school arrests.

The disparity begins in preschool: 48 percent of preschool children suspended more than once are black. And students with disabilities are also suspended more frequently than students without disabilities. This, too, can have a racial component. One 2014 study by a Columbia University researcher found that five-year-old boys whose fathers had been incarcerated were substantially less behaviorally "ready" for school than five-year-olds whose fathers hadn't been incarcerated - making them more likely to be placed in special-education classes for their behavioral disabilities.

Several studies have looked at the relationship between race, behavior, and suspension, and none have them have proven that black students misbehave at higher rates. A study in 2002 found that white students were more likely to be disciplined for provable, documentable offenses - smoking, vandalism, and obscene language - while black students were more likely to be disciplined for more subjective reasons, such as disrespect.

Schools with more black students tend to have higher rates of suspension, researchers have found. There's a 2010 study by researchers at Villanova University that showed the punitiveness of a school's discipline policy was positively correlated with the percentage of its students that were black. It wasn't correlated with students' rates of juvenile delinquency or drug use.

A landmark study of Texas discipline policies found that 97 percent of school suspensions were the choice of school administrators. Only 3 percent of students had broken rules that made suspension a required punishment, such as carrying a weapon to school. And those discretionary suspensions fell particularly hard on black students: they were 31 percent more likely to receive a discretionary suspension, even after controlling for 83 other variables.

Many discretionary suspensions and arrests are for tough-to-define offenses, like "insubordination" or "willful defiance," which can just mean a student has challenged the authority of a teacher or school administrator. In California, for example, 40 percent of all suspensions during the 2010-11 school year were for "willful defiance" - which a US Department of Education official defined in 2012 as "any behavior that disrupts a classroom." "Insubordination" was the most common cause of suspension in New York City public schools in 2013-14.

Unsurprisingly, there's a racial disparity in suspensions for nebulous offenses like these: in 2006-2007 (the last year data appears to be readily available) in New York City, 51 percent of students suspended for "profanity" were black, and 57 percent of students suspended for "insubordination." Even arrests by SROs are often for vague reasons: in New York in 2012, one of every six arrests in schools was for "resisting arrest" or "obstructing governmental administration" after the student had been in a conflict with an officer.

4) Even when schools aren't deliberately sending children into the juvenile justice system, disciplining them makes it more likely they'll end up there

Students who are suspended are more likely to repeat a grade or drop out than students who were not. The Texas study, considered the most thorough analysis of school discipline policies and their effects, looked at data from every seventh-grader in the state in 2000, 2001, and 2002, then tracked their academic and disciplinary records for six years. They found that 31 percent of students who were suspended or expelled repeated a grade, compared with only 5 percent of students who weren't.

It's hard to prove causation; it's possible that students who misbehave would have ended up in academic trouble no matter how they were punished. But the Texas study found that students who had been suspended or expelled were twice as likely to drop out compared to students with similar characteristics at similar schools who had not been suspended.

Students who are disciplined by schools are also more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system. The Texas study found that, of students disciplined in middle or high school, 23 percent of them ended up in contact with a juvenile probation officer. That figure stands at 2 percent among those not disciplined. And students who have been suspended or expelled are three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile probation system the following year than one who wasn't.

It's hard to prove that suspensions causedelinquency in the same way they cause poor educational outcomes. But researchers argue that just as out-of-school suspensions or expulsions don't do anything to improve a student's academic standing, they don't do anything to monitor his behavior or improve his safety, either.

5) The Education Department is pushing schools to change their discipline policies

The Obama administration has opened investigations into the civil rights implications of schools' discipline policies, and urged schools to restructure their discipline systems so that expulsion and suspension are a last resort.

But this effort, by the Education Department and the Department of Justice, has been controversial because the guidance is based on "disparate impact." Even if a policy doesn't mention race and is applied equally to students of all races, the federal government says schools shouldn't use it if the consequences fall disproportionately on students of a particular race. For example, if a school had a policy that all students who were caught using cell phones in class got an out-of-school suspension, and that school ended up suspending a disproportionate number of Latino students as a result of the policy, the federal government would urge the school to figure out if there was another way to achieve the same goal (a cell phone-free classroom) without removing students from the classroom.

Some conservatives argue that schools will become disorderly if teachers and administrators feel that they aren't able to remove disruptive students from the classroom.

6) Some school districts are taking the matter into their own hands

Even before the Obama administration issued that guidance, though, some school districts were acting on their own. Some of the nation's largest districts are working to punish students in ways that don't involve suspension, trying to reform discipline so that students aren't referred to police, or both.

In Clayton County, Georgia, for example, where referrals from schools were overwhelming juvenile prosecutors, the juvenile courts made an agreement with the police force and the school district, restricting the cases in which police were allowed to arrest students in school or refer them to court. The agreement had a huge impact in schools: the high-school graduation rate increased by 24 percent from 2004 to 2010, beating the national average.

Meanwhile, some large school districts are moving away from zero tolerance policies. Broward County, Florida, one of the largest school districts in the country, decided in 2013 that schools, not police, would deal with students' nonviolent misdemeanors. The Chicago Public Schools are trying to reduce the number of suspensions, softening a policy under which students could be suspended for using a cell phone in school and ending suspensions for children younger than second grade, among other changes. In Los Angeles, children under 13 won't be referred to police for minor offenses, after police issued 552 tickets to preteens during the 2013-14 school year.

New York City schools are taking a more targeted approach. The city recently unveiled proposals to overhaul its school discipline code. If the changes go into effect, school principals will have to get the city Department of Education's permission to suspend any student for "insubordination," or for any suspension of a student in third grade or younger. And it would no longer be possible to give "superintendent's suspensions" (a more serious level of suspension) to students involved in "minor physical altercations."

Other schools are exploring restorative justice programs, which focus on forming relationships between teachers, students, and administrators and giving students an opportunity to resolve problems by talking about them. The Oakland School District has been testing this approach for 10 years and recently decided to expand it districtwide after schools using restorative justice reported that their suspension rates were cut in half.

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When a student at Spring Valley High School, South Carolina captured a cellphone video of a police officer flipping over a student and her desk, then throwing the student across the room, the video quickly got national attention: people were alarmed that a police officer in a school would do that to a teenager who didn't pose a threat.

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My Argument for Hiring More Black Educators

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My Argument for Hiring More Black Educators

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Argument for Hiring More Black Educators