Minneapolis school administrators may have to think twice before suspending students – depending on what their skin color is.
After undergoing an investigation from the U.S. Department of Education for its inconsistent suspension treatment for black students, Minneapolis Public Schools announced Friday that every suspension of a black, Hispanic or American Indian student would warrant a special review by the superintendent’s leadership team.
This initiative is a part of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s goal to reduce the alleged disproportionality of nonviolent suspensions between minority students and white students 25 percent by 2015, 50 percent by 2016, 75 percent by 2017 and 100 percent by 2018, according to a Friday press release. The school will be required to report its progress on suspension reduction to the Office of Civil Rights in the DOE for the next three years.
“We embrace the charge to serve all students in our city with a high quality education. We take ownership of ensuring that our policies and practices equitably serve all students, especially those who have been historically marginalized in MPS,” Johnson said in the release. “Changing the trajectory for our students of color is a moral and ethical imperative, and our actions must be drastically different to achieve our goal of closing the achievement gap by 2020.”
According to an August 2013 study conducted by the Minneapolis Foundation, black students at Minneapolis Public Schools were 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be sent home from school. Furthermore, in 2012, although black students accounted for 40 percent of enrollment in Minneapolis Public Schools, they received 80 percent of the suspensions doled out that year.
While there is indeed a glaring gap in the number of suspensions between black students and white students, it is doubtful teachers are issuing them without a reason. It is difficult to teach a class when one or more students are acting out, and often, teachers resort to asking the misbehaving student to leave, rather than find more creative solutions to remedy the issue.
Many teachers in the school district maintain that suspensions are necessary to keep order in the classroom and are not a product of racism. Lynn Nordgren, president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, argued that the problem may lie in teachers’ misunderstanding of the home lives of some of the more underprivileged minority students in the school district.
“We have students who are coming to school hungry, who’ve not slept in a bed, who have been evicted from their home or who have had to move every two or three weeks to a different school,” Nordgren said to the Minneapolis Public Radio News in April 2013. “I think if I was eight years old and those things were happening to me, I might be pretty crabby. Those things all play out in the classroom.”
The issue of combating racism in schools is an important one worthy of a solution. Too many African-American students are being suspended in Minneapolis, a great detriment to the students being sent home. However, creating a racial divide between suspensions may only create more problems for the school district.
Suspension is the least creative form of discipline there is, as it prevents the student in need of correction from learning. The less a student is in school, the less apt he or she is to enjoy school and learning in general. The school district may find it more beneficial to its students to reduce its number of suspensions altogether by extending the “special review board” to students of all races.
Focusing on discipline itself is dangerous, for it may be flaws in education, not the students, that are causing certain ones to act out. If a student feels he or she is not valued in the classroom, that student will be more likely to act out. Perhaps teachers should focus on the learning and engagement in the classroom that makes students feel as if they should act out rather than formulate complicated ways of issuing punishments.
Every student deserves a chance to go to school each day, and suspension destroys that chance. Suspension is an ineffective and outdated way of disciplining any student, no matter the racial background, and the entire form of punishment deserves a review.
