A white male student Kansas He yelled racist slurs and shoved and punched a black female student.two iowa The lawsuit accuses the school district of failing to protect children from harassment.a nevada Community protests after black student is expelled from school after being attacked by classmates.
All these recent events illustrate the details of data compiled by the federal government regarding discipline and harassment in America’s public schools. In November, the U.S. Department of Education announced: Figures about student discipline During the 2020-21 school year, most school districts offered a combination of hybrid and in-person instruction.
This data reveals some glaring, perhaps unsurprising, inequalities in how students of different genders and races are treated in public schools. This work shines a particularly bright spotlight on how black children face a tremendous amount of discipline that excludes them from school. The report also includes figures showing that boys make up the majority of children disciplined for bullying.
boy and bullying
The report reveals how many students are targeted by bullying, why they are targeted and who is punished for harassment.
Although boys and girls each make up about half of K-12 public school students, boys seem to do the majority of the bullying, at least based on who gets reprimanded. 78% of students disciplined for gender-based bullying are boys; 75% of students disciplined for race-based bullying; and 77% of students disciplined for disability-based bullying. was.
Boys were more likely to report being bullied based on race, accounting for 60% of reports. Black and mixed-race students reported race-based bullying at 2.5 times the admission rate of 15 percent and 4 percent, respectively.
White students were disproportionately represented among students disciplined for race-based harassment, accounting for 64% of students disciplined compared to 46% of the total K-12 student population.
This data is consistent with what past researchers have found. In other words, boys and girls are targeted by bullies at about the same rate, but boys are generally more likely to be bullies.bullying study A study of more than 1,000 primary school students in Portugal, published in the October 2022 issue of the International Journal of Educational Psychology, found that students are rarely the only aggressors. Rather, about 41 percent of children involved in bullying were “aggressive victims,” sometimes the targets of harassment, sometimes bullying classmates.
The answer to why boys are disproportionately bullied and harassed is as complex as the components of masculinity itself. in one study Based on data from the Youth Voices Project, which surveyed approximately 13,200 K-12 students, boys are more likely to experience perceived unmasculinity and threats of violence on a daily basis. He says he is being bullied. Similar pressures force boys to accept harassment as a normal part of the social dynamic.
“If boys accept victimhood, they are admitting their own weakness and defeat, thereby calling into question their masculinity,” the researchers wrote. There is. “But when boys dismissed their experiences as just ‘boys doing’, the victims were able to save face and reaffirm their masculinity.”
Further evidence of inequality
EdSurge has previously written about how data shows racial disparities in discipline. For example, in a detailed study of discipline data from one California school district, researchers found that a group representing just 5 percent of teachers doubled the rate of discipline referrals issued to black students compared to white students. identified as being responsible for the
This disparity starts early and has a gender component as well.
Boys were generally more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled from public kindergartens, according to a federal report. Although no information was provided on why students were expelled, boys accounted for more than 80 percent of both suspensions and expulsions for preschoolers, despite making up just over half of the students. It’s obvious.
In 2020-2021, black boys made up just 9% of preschoolers, but they accounted for 23% of preschoolers who received at least one suspension and 20% of expulsions.
White boys were also largely removed from kindergartens. They account for 43% of children suspended from school and 47% of children expelled from school, compared to 24% of preschool children.
This trend continued from K-12, where Black boys made up 8% of enrollment, but 15% of students received at least one in-school suspension, and 15% of students received at least one out-of-school suspension. 18% of students. 18% of students were expelled. In fact, dropout rates are better than they used to be. Total approximately 26% in 2017-2018when black boys made up 7.7 percent of K-12 enrollment.
Black families say there are few conversations with school administrators about how decisions to remove children from classes or schools are made. This raises the question of whether higher levels of discipline among boys and black students actually reflect bad behavior.
in 2022 survey Researchers found that the events leading up to suspensions and expulsions left parents confused and seeking more information about what had happened, including black parents’ perceptions of school discipline surrounding their children. . In many cases, schools did not provide adequate explanations. Even when parents sought more mental health support on their child’s behalf, they felt that other interventions were omitted in favor of immediately removing the child from the classroom or school.
Researchers also found that parents who are aware of their child’s behavioral problems seek help from school administrators but feel unheard. In an extreme case, one mother said her child set her house on fire. Additionally, she said later in her report that school officials ignored her calls to discuss her child’s suspension from school due to her family’s loss of home.
“I want you to understand, like when I was in a shelter, there was a fire, I was homeless, and they kept suspending me and they didn’t even have a place for them to go while I was at work. Are you saying that?” she told researchers. “You’re supposed to be at school while I’m at work, so where are you going?”
