by James A. Bacon
Across the Commonwealth of Virginia, black students comprise 22% of total student enrollment but 52% of all students suspended. Black students are 4.5 times more likely to be suspended from school than white students are. So states the Northam administration’s “road map to equity,” “Navigating EquityVA.”
The disproportionate suspension of black students is evidence, the report suggests, of systemic racism built into Virginia’s public educational system that punishes “marginalized” students. The report doesn’t come right out and say that explicitly, it just presents the data which, presumably, is so manifestly self-evident that it requires no elaboration.
The discussion of school discipline is typical of the thinking behind the document, which provides justification for the top-down re-engineering of the organizational culture of Virginia public schools around the principles of “anti-racism.”
The analysis is astonishingly shallow. The engineers of this educational restructuring start with the conclusion in mind — the system is racist — and work backwards to the statistics that fit. They ignore alternative explanations, such as the possibility that, due to a complex set of reasons, African-American communities suffer from higher rates of out-of-wedlock births, absentee fathers, children raised on the “streets” and students not socialized in the norms required to participate in school.
As is typical of progressives, the authors define the kids who disrupt classrooms as the victims of structural racism. No thought whatsoever is given to the victims of the victims — the students in the classrooms whose instruction is disrupted routinely by their misbehaving peers. No one tracks the race of the children in those classrooms — and they are disproportionately black — or the impact of unruly behavior on their educational achievement. Progressive engage in much hand-wringing about the “school-to-prison pipeline” of disruptive students, but none whatsoever to the crappy educational experience of their peers and the long-term effects of sub-par achievement on their lives.
Ironically, the “NavigatingEquityVA” document provides evidence that undermines the authors’ case.
Look at the map above, which comes from the report. We are to believe that structural racism is endemic throughout Virginia public schools. Yet the map shows wide variation in the disproportion in black-white suspensions. Sixteen school districts have a high RR (relative risk) for blacks, 63 divisions a moderate rate, and 36 districts a low rate. Five divisions show no disproportionality. The wide variability should be a tip-off that we are talking about a complex social phenomenon, not one that can be explained by the uni-explanation of racism.
A curious person might observe that the school divisions with no disproportionality serve rural localities — Patrick, Mathews, and Rockingham are the three I could readily identify from the map. This is “red” country, or “Trump” country, where the inhabitants tend to hew to traditional conservative values and, ironically, are widely stereotyped by progressives as racist. Why would they, of all locales, have zero relative risk? And look at the high-risk localities — they include bastions of progressivism such as Arlington County, Fairfax County, the City of Richmond and the City of Charlottesville, all of which are staffed by superintendents and staffs, and governed by school boards, with impeccable progressive credentials. By this evidence, perhaps we should conclude that the most progressive school districts are the most racist!
The EdEquity report does take note of certain correlations. Districts with higher relatively risk for blacks tend to be located in urban settings and have higher student poverty rates. One might inquire: Are urban settings and high poverty rates the critical factors, or are are they just associated with the higher incidence of poorly socialized children raised in broken families in that tend to cluster in poor urban neighborhoods?
The situation would become much clearer if the authors had the intellectual integrity to look at different suspension rates for blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians. It doesn’t take a PhD in sociology to know that children with Asian backgrounds have more intact families and are better behaved than children of other race/ethnicities, including whites — and that the rate of misbehavior and suspensions for Asian children approaches zero. If the system of public school punishments is systemically racist, are we supposed to believe that it is racist in favor of Asians?
Likewise, no consideration is given to the suspension rate for Hispanic students, who are conventionally described as “marginalized” people of color who suffer from racism both personal and structural. How do the suspension rates for Hispanics compare? The fact that such information is omitted tells me that it does not fit the narrative.
If you misdiagnose a problem, your remedies will fail. In all likelihood, whatever the Northam administration does to “reform” Virginia’s system of school discipline along “anti-racist” lines will boomerang and hurt innocent African-American children the most.