US school absenteeism is reaching alarming proportions.
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Wide racial gaps remain in US public schools, including in discipline and course access, according to new data released Tuesday by the Education Department.
Suspension rates at public schools across the country decreased almost 20 percent in the 2013-2014 school year compared with the 2011-2012 school year, but minority students are still much more likely to be disciplined than their white counterparts.
“The CRDC data shines a spotlight on the educational opportunities proffered, and denied, to our nation’s sons and daughters in schools every day”, said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon in a press release. Since it started in 1991, the nonprofit has helped more than 8,000 students in Atlanta and Fulton County stay in school.
It’s a disturbing trend of discrimination, experts say, that is directly connected to the classroom experience: inexperienced teachers are often less skilled in managing classrooms, and students that aren’t academically challenged can be more likely to act out.
Across the country, 2.8 million K-12 students received one or more out-of-school suspensions. Students who don’t speak English fluently made up 5 percent of students at schools who offered the course, but just 1 percent of those who took it.
Less than half the high schools with high black and Latino enrollments offer physics, while two in three high schools that have low numbers of black and Latino student offer physics. Published every two years, the latest data provides a look, among other things, at school discipline, where students are repeatedly absent, and where public preschool programs exist. The Administration has also had an important focus on eliminating expulsion and suspension in early learning settings, and released the first Federal policy statement on this issue, with recommendations to states and local early childhood programs, in 2014.
Only a third of high schools with high black and Latino enrollments offer calculus, compared to 56 percent of those that serve low numbers of black and Latino students.
The nation’s public schools suspended significantly fewer students in 2014 than they did in 2012, according to new federal data released Tuesday, but stark racial gaps persisted – not only in the way students were disciplined but also in their access to experienced teachers and advanced math and science courses.
Nationwide, nearly half of high schools offered classes in calculus, and more than three-quarters offered Algebra II. Last July, the My Brother’s Keeper Taskforce convened 40 school districts from across the nation to the White House to announce new commitments to encourage alternatives to suspension and expulsion.
English learners have disproportionately low participation rates in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) programs: while English learners are 11% of all students in schools offering GATE programs, fewer than 3% of GATE students nationwide are English learners. In other data, 51.4 percent were boys and 48.6 percent girls. The school also considers the opinions of parents, students, and counselors in deciding which kids are capable of succeeding in an advanced course instead of relying strictly on a list of prerequisites. So the disparities evident in the high-school years continue to play out in higher education and the workforce more broadly. At schools that serve predominately black and Latino students, that number drops to 33 percent. This chronic absenteeism indicator is new to this year’s report.
Those were two of the many findings in the latest national report from the US education department’s Office of Civil Rights.
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In the upcoming months GreatSchools will analyze the data to produce school-level insights and make it accessible to all parents and the public on the GreatSchools.org platform.
