The Civil Rights Data Collection, a national survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, surveyed over 50 million students at more than 95,000 schools and found that while suspensions decreased by nearly 20 percentage points between the 2011-2012 and 2013-2014 school years, gaps between the suspension rates of different groups of students remained, according to results released late Monday.
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According to The Washington Post, the latest installment of data released from the Civil Rights Data Collection comes from surveys conducted in “nearly every single one of the nation’s 95,000 public schools”.
Students with disabilities are more than twice as likely as students without disabilities to be suspended in K-12 settings.
Thirty-three percent of high schools with substantial black and Latino enrollment offered calculus.
High school students with disabilities are 1.3 times as likely to be chronically absent as high school students without disabilities, and 20 percent of all English learner high school students are chronically absent. “Frequent absences from school can be devastating to a child’s education”.
Of the 100 largest school districts by enrollment, the Detroit City School District had the highest rate of chronic absenteeism. In addition to the findings on college readiness, today’s data covers school discipline, the use of restraint and seclusion, early learning, chronic absenteeism, teachers and staffing, and education in justice facilities.
But the racial gap encompasses much more than discipline — students of color similarly have less access to experienced teachers and advanced math and sciences courses than their white peers do, the study said.
“Students of color are now the majority of our nation’s public school system, but our educational system continues to deny too many of these students an equal educational opportunity. They will also more likely end up in prison”, King said.
More than 3 million high school students were chronically absent – almost 1 in 5 high school students.
U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. says that despite significant work from districts across the country, the persistent disproportions shown in the data highlight the need for a continued focus on educational equality.
College-ready courseworkNationwide, nearly half of high schools offered classes in calculus, and more than three-quarters offered algebra II. But among black, Latino, American Indian and multiracial high school students, it was about 20 percent. Black students were also twice as likely to be expelled as white students.
White students make up 41 percent of preschoolers, and 28 percent of preschool kids with suspensions.
“If you think about a preschool student. how a preschool student bites another student and how a teacher how reacts, and if you have a white teacher and that’s a white student, there might be a different pathway in that teachers brain, that says, ‘Oh I recognize that is developmentally appropriate behavior I’ve seen in my child or I’ve seen my niece do this, and so I know how to respond”, Potter said.
6 million students attend a school with a sworn law enforcement officer but not a school counselor. But there are many neighborhoods where those courses aren’t available to anyone, the civil rights data show.
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GreatSchools, a website that aims to give parents a snapshot of public schools through test scores, demographics and reviews, announced Tuesday that it would begin including the federal civil rights data in its school profiles.
