High suspension rates call for innovations, deeper study

Public schools must maintain order for teachers to have a fair chance at effectively educating students. But public schools also must strive to achieve that order without resorting to widespread suspensions that vastly increase the number of students who fail to get even a high school education. The task of finding the right balance between those two vital goals has become a defining challenge for public education in our community and beyond.

A Post and Courier statistical analysis released last week showed that in the Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester 2 school districts during the 2006-07 school year, black students were suspended at a significantly higher rate than white students. In the Berkeley district, with an overall black enrollment of 34.2 percent, 54 percent of the suspensions were of black students. The corresponding percentages showed the same trend in the Charleston County district (51.9 percent black enrollment, 83.5 percent of suspensions were of black students) and Dorchester District 2 (27.9 percent, 48.5 percent).

Yet in all three districts, no racial disparity existed in expulsion rates. As for the higher suspension rate of black low-income students compared to white low-income students, the study found that this stems from a high percentage of the suspended black students coming from low-income families, while the suspended white students were far more broadly dispersed across a wide range of incomes.

In all three districts, the statistical review, analyzed by Mike Politano, an associate professor of psychology at The Citadel, showed that teachers' race was not a factor in suspension patterns, which are disturbingly high regardless of race.

For instance, at Dorchester District 2's Summerville High School, which produces standardized test scores that rank among the best in the tri-county area, one in 10 white students — and three in 10 black students — were suspended at some point during the 2006-07 school year. Such high levels of suspensions, even at a relatively successful school, inevitably drag down collective educational achievement.

Regardless of some readers' criticisms of the analytical methods used for and conclusions drawn from this newspaper's study, this fact is indisputable: When a student of any race is suspended, that student misses potentially critical class time. Repeat the suspension process often enough, and the student is far more likely to eventually become a dropout.

With dropout rates across our state near 50 percent, adding "throw-outs" to the growing numbers of insufficiently educated South Carolinians undermines not just the future of those students but our state.

Experts increasingly cite cultural and background differences, not racism, as a common factor elevating the suspension rates for black students, not just in our state but across the country. Kevin Smith, an assistant principal at Morningside Middle School in North Charleston, told our reporter that some black students are disruptive in school because, due to cultural influences, they feel they are being "disrespected" when a teacher tells them what to do.

But there's nothing more basic to any student's education than an understanding that it's a teacher's job to tell a student what to do — and that it's a student's job to follow a teacher's instructions.

Innovative approaches to the problem have produced encouraging results without sacrificing teachers' authority. At Berkeley's College Park Middle School, which has experienced an influx of more low-income students over the last five years as a magnet school, teachers went through "re-training" that helped them relate to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Principal Ingrid Dukes told our reporter that while serious offenses still warrant mandatory punishments, "the student's circumstances" are considered whenever possible to maximize the chances of keeping a child in school.

Dorchester District 2 Superintendent Joe Pye offered this apt assessment: "What we see in our schools today reflects the culture of our community, and this goes beyond a single commonality such as race. Risk factors include poverty, developmental levels of students and lack of parent involvement in a child's life."

Dr. Pye, Berkeley Superintendent Chester Floyd and Charleston Superntendent Nancy McGinley stressed programs that reward good behavior. Dr. McGinley pointed to the ongoing work of a task force reviewing suspension data and looking for "the reasons behind the numbers."

Finding those reasons requires additional information, including school-by-school breakdowns along income lines and examinations of whether students of different races received different punishments for the same offenses. Such questions will be the focus of not just further inquiry by our local districts, but of further study by this newspaper.

Meanwhile, as more pertinent facts are gathered and analyzed, more early interventions for children who misbehave are plainly needed. We need a comprehensive effort to save more young people from the insidious cycle that takes so many of them from misconduct in school to lives limited by their failures to get — and the system's failure to deliver — a good education.