Research
Source: The Council of State Governments Justice Center
"The comprehensiveness of this report is unprecedented. It presents nearly two dozen policy statements to guide multidisciplinary approaches to meet the needs of both youth and educators while addressing student misbehavior, and 60 recommendations that explain how to implement these policies."
Source: Columbia law school
"For girls, as with boys, the failure to receive a high school diploma often places individuals on a pathway to low-wage work, unemployment, and incarceration. The imposition of harsh disciplinary policies in public schools is a well-known risk factor for stunted educational opportunities for Black and Latino boys. Such punishments also negatively affect their female counterparts, as do other conditions in zero-tolerance schools. Yet, the existing research, data, and public policy debates often fail to address the degree to which girls face risks that are both similar to and different from those faced by boys."
Source: Journal of Pan African Studies
"Herein are recorded not opinions but the reflections of one who for forty years has participated in the education of the Black, brown, yellow and white races in both hemispheres and in tropical and temperate regions. Such experience, too, has been with students in all grades from the kindergarten to the university. The author, moreover, has traveled around the world to observe not only modern school systems in various countries but to study the special systems set up by private agencies and governments to educate the natives in their colonies and dependencies. Some of these observations, too, have been checked against more recent studies on a later tour."
Source: Center for American Progress
"Our findings suggest that the nation needs a two-pronged approach to improving teacher diversity. We need to expand high-quality recruitment programs, for starters, with some of this being done through the alternative certification programs mentioned above. We also need to do more to improve the professional experience of teachers of color. Our nation has a long way to go when it comes to ensuring a diverse and well-qualified teacher workforce. Solutions will not be easy. It will take hard work, smart policy, and above all, the political will to ensure that the nation has an effective and diverse workforce."
Source: Stanford University, The King Institute
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.”
Source: Whitehouse.gov
"This report examines the barriers that disadvantaged youth, particularly young men of color, face and quantifies the enormous costs this poses to the U.S. economy. In particular, this report focuses on the significant disparities in education, exposure to the criminal justice system, and employment that persist between young men of color and other Americans."
Source: Project Gutenberg
"Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there."
Source: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
"On December 3, 2007, eight experts briefed members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on whether blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Limited English Proficient (LEP) students are misplaced in special education programs more often as a proportion of the general education student population, than their white, Asian, or non-LEP peers; and the nature, extent, and possible causes of any misplacement. In addition, the panelists were asked to give their views on what the federal government, schools, and parents could do to address the issue."
Source: University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
"This report aims to make transparent the rates at which school discipline practices and policies impact Black students in every K-12 public school district in 13 Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Despite comprising only 20.9% of students in the 3,022 districts analyzed, Blacks were suspended and expelled at disproportionately high rates."
Source: The Association of Black Psychologists
"This paper, commissioned by The Association of Black Psychologists, reviewed the literature on the disproportionate placement of African American children in special education. It traced the long standing nature of the problem, and reviewed a number of causes of the disproportionality."
Source: The American Academy of Pediatrics
"The primary mission of any school system is to educate students. To achieve this goal, the school district must maintain a culture and environment where all students feel safe, nurtured, and valued and where order and civility are expected standards of behavior."
Source: The Civil Rights Project
"Six decades of “separate but equal” as the law of the land have now been followed by six decades of “separate is inherently unequal” as our basic law. The Brown decision set large changes and political conflicts in motion and those struggles continue today."
Source: Kirwan Institute, Ohio State University
“Implicit bias” is heavily implicated as a contributing factor when we analyze the causes of racial disproportionality in school discipline. In this context, implicit bias is defined as the mental process that causes us to have negative feelings and attitudes about people based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, age and appearance. Because this cognitive process functions in our unconscious mind, we are typically not consciously aware of the negative racial biases that we develop over the course of our lifetime.
Source: Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)
"According to cognitive and social developmental theory, success- fully structuring a multifaceted sense of self comprised of a mix of social, political, economic, and philosophical identities is one of the major accomplishments of adolescence (Marcia, 1980). African American adolescents grapple with the additional task of developing a racial/ethnic identity in an American social milieu that is often polarized along racial lines (Monteith & Spicer, 2000; Winant, 1998) and is replete with negative racial stereotypes (Hudley & Graham,2001)."
Source: National Association For Gifted Children
"Reversing the underrepresentation of culturally and linguistically diverse students (CLD) in gifted education will require that educators have a thorough understanding of the reasons that CLD students have traditionally been excluded from participation in gifted programs."
The 2013-14 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) is a survey of all public schools and school districts in the United States. The CRDC measures student access to courses, programs, instructional and other staff, and resources — as well as school climate factors, such as student discipline and bullying and harassment — that impact education equity and opportunity for students. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) will release additional data highlights later in 2016 on key topics such as student discipline, early learning access, teacher and staffing equity, access to courses and programs that foster college and career readiness, and chronic student absenteeism. Learn More >>
Source: American Psychological Association
The social category “children” defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers.
Source: Center For American Progress
The term “school-to-prison pipeline” has become a powerful metaphor to capture the processes by which children—typically low-income children of color—are pushed out of school and into the criminal justice system. While exact definitions of suspension and expulsion vary across states and school districts, it is clear that what were intended to be last resort and occasional disciplinary tools have become wildly overused and disproportionately applied to children of color, resulting in dramatically negative long-term effects.
Source: The University of North Carolina
"White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress be- comes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. "
Source: The Justice Center
"The CSG Justice Center, in partnership with the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University, has released a groundbreaking statewide study of nearly 1 million Texas public secondary school students, followed for at least six years. Funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Open Society Foundations, this study found that when students are suspended or expelled, the likelihood that they will repeat a grade, not graduate, and/or become involved in the juvenile justice system increases significantly. African-American students and children with particular educational disabilities who qualify for special education were suspended and expelled at especially high rates."
Source: CNN
"The previous CNN AC360° project on race (‘Doll Study’) was a re-examination of the classic “Doll” study conducted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s in which young African-American children, particularly in the South, when given a choice between a White doll and a Black doll, preferred the White doll."
With the goal of promoting equity in IDEA, the regulations would establish a standard methodology States must use to determine whether significant disproportionality based on race and ethnicity is occurring in the State and in its local educational agencies (LEAs); clarify that States must address significant disproportionality in the incidence, duration, and type of disciplinary actions, including suspensions and expulsions, using the same statutory remedies required to address significant disproportionality in the identification and placement of children with disabilities.
"The purpose of this study is to report on a multilevel examination of variables at these three levels to identify the relative contributions of type of behavior, student demographic variables, and school characteristics to rates of and racial disparities in out-of-school suspension and expulsion."
Source: SAGE Publications
"Students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs relative to White students, but the reasons for this underrepresen- tation are poorly understood. We investigate the predictors of gifted assignment using nationally representative, longitudinal data on elementary students. We document that even among students with high standardized test scores, Black students are less likely to be assigned to gifted services in both math and reading, a pattern that persists when controlling for other back- ground factors, such as health and socioeconomic status, and characteristics of classrooms and schools."
This article reports research into associations between students’ perceptions of the school climate and self-reports of ethnic and moral identity in high schools in Western Australia.
This article describes two studies related to the development of the Perceived School Experiences Scale (PSES). The PSES may be used by social workers to assess youths’ perceptions of three school-related protective factors, including school connectedness, academic press, and academic motivation.
Experiences of racial discrimination have been demonstrated to be related to racial and ethnic disparities in mental and physical health and healthcare. There has been little study, however, of the relationship between racism and health in children, and few psychometrically valid and reliable instruments to measure Perceptions of Racism in Children and Youth (PRaCY) exist. This paper reports on the development and testing of such an instrument, the PRaCY.
This article discusses the development and validation of a measure of adolescent students’ perceived belonging or psychological membership in the school environment.
In an equitable education system, every student has access to the resources and educational rigor they need at the right moment in their education, irrespective of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language, disability, family background, family income, citizenship, or tribal status.
Source: The Equity Project at Indiana University
"it becomes more likely that highly consistent statistical discrepancies in school punishment for black and white students are an indicator of systematic and prevalent bias in the practice of school discipline."