Behind the Eight Ball: The Effects of Race and Number of Infractions on the Severity of Exclusionary Discipline Sanctions Issued in Secondary School

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
Jamilia J. Blake ◽  
Danielle M. Smith ◽  
Asha Unni ◽  
Miner P. Marchbanks ◽  
Steve Wood ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
White Students ◽  
Hispanic Students ◽  
School Personnel ◽  
The United States ◽  
Behavioral Disorder ◽  
Emotional Behavioral Disorder ◽  
Disability Categories ◽  
State Educational ◽  
Students With A Disability

African American and Hispanic students receive more punitive school discipline than White students even when students of color commit similar infractions as Whites. Similarly, students with a disability status are more likely to experience harsher discipline in schools compared to their counterparts without a disability label. This study examines whether these discrepancies are a result of a difference in the number of infractions students of different racial/ethnic groups and disability categories commit. Using secondary educational data from a state educational agency in the United States, we demonstrate that African American and Hispanic students and students with an emotional behavioral disorder status receive more severe sanctions than White students and students without a disability label at their first discipline encounter. This racial disparity in discipline severity continues through six sanctions and is eliminated at the 13th sanction. The disability disparity in discipline severity dissipates after 10 sanctions for students with emotional behavioral disorder and intellectual disability. Implications for school personnel and future directions are discussed.

Active Living Education: Leveling the Playing Field for Black or African American Students

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Stacy Imagbe ◽  
Baofu Wang ◽  
Yang Liu ◽  
Jared Androzzi ◽  
Xiangli Gu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Students ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Sedentary Behavior ◽  
White Students ◽  
The United States ◽  
Active Living ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
And Behaviors

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the potential racial disparities in education for active living (i.e., regular participation in moderate to vigorous physical activity with mitigated and interrupted levels of sedentary behavior) between Black/African American and White students. Methods: The study took place in one public middle school located in the Southeastern region of the United States. A total of 167 Black and 168 White students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades completed a written test and a survey in physical education to assess active living knowledge and behaviors, respectively. Results: Multivariate analysis of covariance and tests of between-subjects effects showed significant race differences. Specifically, Black students scored significantly lower on the knowledge test and reported lower levels of physical activity out of school, and higher levels of sedentary behavior than White students, after controlling for grade and gender. Conclusion: The results identified racial disparities in knowledge and behaviors of active living. Tailored, culturally relevant active living education in and out of schools are needed to level the playing field for Black students.

scholarly journals The relationship between test preparation and state test performance: Evidence from the Measure of Effective Teaching (MET) project

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Hongli Li ◽  
Yao Xiong
Keyword(s):  
Effective Teaching ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
White Students ◽  
Test Performance ◽  
Hispanic Students ◽  
Test Preparation ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Test ◽  
K 12 ◽  
The Relationship

The passage of the NCLB Act enhanced accountability policies in the United States, and standardized testing became prevalent as a policy tool to ensure accountability in K-12 education. Given the high stakes of state administered accountability tests, more school teachers have adopted test-preparation strategies to ensure satisfactory student performance on state tests. However, it remains unclear as to whether and how test preparation relates to students’ state test performance. In this study, by drawing on the Measure of Effective Teaching (MET) longitudinal dataset, we examined the relationship between test preparation and students’ state test performance. We found that students with lower test performance in Year 1 received more test preparation in Year 2; however, the effects of test preparation on students’ state test performance were rather small and mixed. In regard to racial differences, we found that Black and Hispanic students received more test preparation than White students. Further, the effect of test preparation measured by the item “practicing for the state test” on state test performance was significantly greater for Black and Hispanic students than for White students. The implications of the study, its limitations, and directions for future research are also discussed.

Special Education and Gender in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nickie Coomer ◽  
Chelsea Stinson
Keyword(s):  
Special Education ◽  
General Education ◽  
School Personnel ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Special Education Policy ◽  
Disability Categories ◽  
And Gender

Historically, Western hegemonic order has been established through cultivating and legitimating social categories of difference. Schools, among other institutions, reinforce difference through marking ability, race, and gender to signify which bodies are productive, deficient, or dangerous and therefore in need of control. This process of differentiation and control is evident in the social, political, and education contexts of disabled youth whose race, gender, and sexuality are read, controlled, and resisted through policy and pedagogy. Through the processes of hypervisiblity, pathologization, and underserving of Black girls in schools, and especially within special education, this animates the nexus of gender, race, and disability. Parallels are drawn to paradigms of the female body and femininity, where difference is constructed as inferior to the normative male body. Similarly, special education policy, practice, and literature conceptualize disability as subtractive difference, wherein what is considered a “deficit” relies on a subtractive interpretation of a normative body or a normative way of being. In this regard, disability, gender—and, crucially, race—are often thought of as a negative departure from a normalized embodiment. In special education, such normalized, essentialist approaches to gender, race, and disability contribute to the disproportionate overidentification of some social identities and the underidentification of others, most often along raced and gendered lines. Importantly, disabling processes are institutionalized in education through the mechanism of special education, which not only serves as an instructional and academic response to a student’s disability but also acts as an institutional process that determines a student as disabled. The determination of a student having a disability is mediated through law, policy, and interpersonal interaction between school professionals and parents and caregivers. Disproportionate identification has been the focus of research, and studies show that overidentification occurs most often in disability categories that are considered “subjective”: for instance, specific learning disabilities and emotional disturbances. Such identification has an impact on students’ learning; opportunities to interact with their peers in general education settings; access to high quality, challenging curriculum; and opportunities to engage critical thinking in educational activities that go beyond direct instruction. Disabling processes in schools related to the intersection of disability, gender, and race, in particular, are mediated by the local, cultural interactions of school personnel and are evident in the ways in which Black girls, in particular, are disabled in school.

scholarly journals Examining Teachers’ Beliefs about African American Male Students in a Low-Performing High School in an African American School District

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin Lynn ◽  
Jennifer Nicole Bacon ◽  
Tommy L. Totten ◽  
Thurman L. Bridges ◽  
Michael Jennings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
High School ◽  
African American ◽  
School District ◽  
African American Male ◽  
School Personnel ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Male Students ◽  
African American Male Students

Background/Context The study examines teachers’ and administrators’ perspectives on the persistent academic failure of African American male high school students. The study took place between 2003 and 2005 in a low-performing high school in Summerfield County, a Black suburban county in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States with a poverty rate below 8%, according to the 2000 United States census. At the time of the study, there were a number of initiatives across the state designed to address what was being referred to as “the minority achievement gap.” The researchers—most of whom were African American faculty and graduate students at the University of Maryland—were interested in understanding what teachers and other school personnel such as counselors and administrators would have to say about why African American students, particularly males, tended to persistently underperform on standardized measures of achievement, had higher rates of suspension and expulsion from school, were overrepresented in special education, and had significantly higher dropout rates than all other subgroups in this mostly Black and middle-class suburban school district. Purpose and Research Questions In the present article, we build on the work of scholars of critical race studies in education and scholars concerned about teachers’ impact on student achievement to explore teachers’ beliefs about African American students, and we discuss the possible implications for African American males in troubled schools. We used critical race ethnographic methods to collect data on the following research questions: (1) How does a low-performing high school in a low-performing school district cope with the persistent problem of African American male underachievement? (2) In particular, how do teachers and administrators understand the problem? (3) How might this impact their ability to work successfully with African American male students? Setting The study took place in Summerfield County, a majority-Black suburban county in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The county is known as the wealthiest Black county in the nation. With over 100,000 students, its school district is one of the largest and lowest performing in the state. At the time of the study, the district was ranked 23rd out of 24 districts in the state in measures of standardized achievement. The research took place in a midsized all-Black high school in a section of the county that is contiguous with one of the poorer sections of a nearby city. The high school, with a 99% Black population of slightly fewer than 1,000 students, was one of the lowest performing high schools in the district. Participants The main participants in the study consisted of two groups: (1) a sample of 50 teachers, administrators, and counselors, and (2) a subsample of 6 teachers in art, music, technology, social studies, and math who participated in ongoing individual interviews, a focus group, and classroom observations. Research Design This study involved a series of focus groups, formal and informal interviews with teachers, counselors, and administrators, and 18 months of ethnographic observations in the school. Conclusions Researchers found that school personnel overwhelmingly blamed students, their families, and their communities for the minority achievement gap. In short, the school was pervaded by a culture of defeat and hopelessness. Ongoing conversations with a smaller group of teachers committed to the success of African American male students revealed that the school was not a safe space for caring teachers who wanted to make a difference in the lives of their students.

scholarly journals Examining instruction, achievement, and equity with NAEP mathematics data.

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Theule Lubienski
Keyword(s):  
Student Achievement ◽  
Instructional Practices ◽  
Hierarchical Linear Modeling ◽  
White Students ◽  
Hispanic Students ◽  
School Personnel ◽  
Collaborative Problem Solving ◽  
Linear Modeling ◽  
Student Groups ◽  
Multiple Choice Tests

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it reports on a study of the distribution of reform-oriented instructional practices among Black, White and Hispanic students, and the relationship between those practices and student achievement. The study identified many similarities in instruction across student groups, but there were some differences, such as Black and Hispanic students being assessed with multiple-choice tests significantly more often than were White students. Using hierarchical linear modeling, this study identified several significant positive—and no negative—relationships between reform-oriented practices and 4th-grade student achievement. Specifically, teacher emphasis on non-number mathematics strands, collaborative problem solving, and teacher knowledge of the NCTM Standards were positive predictors of achievement. An analysis of interaction effects indicated that the relationships between various instructional practices and achievement were roughly similar for White, Black and Hispanic students. The second purpose of this article is to make comparisons with another study that used the same NAEP data, but drew very different conclusions about the potential for particular instructional practices to alleviate inequities. A study published in EPAA by Wenglinsky (2004) concluded that school personnel can eliminate race-related gaps within their schools by changing their instructional practices. Similarities and differences between these two studies are discussed to illuminate how a researcher's framing, methods, and interpretations can heavily influence a study's conclusions. Ultimately, this article argues that the primary conclusion of Wenglinsky's study is unwarranted. Keywords: equity, hierarchical linear modeling; mathematics achievement; mathematics instruction; NAEP.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

scholarly journals Structural Violence of Schooling: A Genealogy of a Critical Family History of Three Generations of African American Women in a Rural Community in Florida

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Evelyn Newman Phillips ◽  
Wangari Gichiru
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Family History ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
American Women ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
American Children

Through the lens of structural violence, Black feminism and critical family history, this paper explores how societal structures informed by white supremacy shaped the lives of three generations of rural African American women in a family in Florida during the middle to the late twentieth century. Specifically, this study investigates how disparate funding, segregation, desegregation, poverty and post-desegregation policies shaped and limited the achievement trajectories among these women. Further, an oral historical examination of their lives reveals the strategies they employed despite their under-resourced and sometimes alienating schooling. The paper highlights the experiences of the Newman family, descendants of captive Africans in the United States that produced three college-educated daughters and a granddaughter despite structural barriers that threatened their progress. Using oral history interviews, archival resources and first-person accounts, this family’s story reveals a genealogy of educational achievement, barriers and agency despite racial and gendered limitations in a Southern town. The findings imply that their schooling mirrors many of the barriers that other Blacks face. However, this study shows that community investment in African American children, plus teachers that affirm students, and programs such as Upward Bound, help to advance Black students in marginalized communities. Further, these women’s lives suggest that school curriculums need to be anti-racist and public policies that affirm each person regardless of the color of their skin. A simple solution that requires the structural violence of whiteness be eliminated from the schooling spheres.

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