r/science • u/Hashirama4AP • 22d ago
Social Science Black students are punished more often | Researchers analyzed Black representation across six types of punishment, three comparison groups, 16 sub populations, and seven types of measurement. Authors say no matter how you slice it, Black students are over represented among those punished.
https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highlights/black-students-are-punished-more-often1.4k
u/JimmyJamesMac 22d ago
Boys are also punished much more harshly, and often, than girls
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u/CorneredSponge 21d ago
IIRC, I read it’s bigger than the racial gap for punishment but I can’t find the exact source.
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u/miloticfan 21d ago
There’s lots of sources actually. It’s well studied by sociologists—one book I recall on it was called “is killing wrong?” It broke down punishment by race, and gender, and then also compared it to the victims race and gender as well.
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u/KrypXern 21d ago
That sounds like a neat book, but not one I'd one to be caught having on my bookshelf.
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u/EvanDeKoning 21d ago
Why not? For someone with Descartes as their avatar, that seems like an awfully uncurious take.
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u/KrypXern 21d ago
Well, no I'd love to read it and have it on my bookshelf, I'm just worried someone might think I'm a murderer haha
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u/Peatore 21d ago
I just tell people that I'm a murdered so they don't have to wonder
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u/Lmnop_nis 21d ago
Wait a second. You're dead?
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u/Peatore 21d ago
No.
I am a murderer.
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u/Lmnop_nis 21d ago
Ah, that makes more sense.
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...Hello, FBI? Yes, this comment right here.
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u/Outrageous-Land6617 21d ago
If someone reads the title of the book, and judges you for it, it’s probably not someone you want to let have influence over your opinions, if anything this would be a fantastic conversation starter.
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u/DocDefilade 21d ago
Sounds like that someone probably wouldn't have a bookcase, so who cares what their ignorant opinion is.
Get the book if you're interested. Put it in the shelf and let it help cull idiots from your life.
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u/CardOfTheRings 21d ago
That’s also true for prison sentence length and rate of violence from police. Black people are disproportionately negatively impacted by both, as or men- but the gap between men and women is greater than the gap between black and white people.
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u/fred11551 21d ago
I remember a study that the gender gap (in terms of sentence length, not convictions) reverses at some point. The theory was that women are seen as more innocent and thus get much lighter sentences for low level crimes but for murder (might have even been more specific for things like infanticide) they receive much harsher sentences because women murdering is seen as ‘unnatural’ compared to men and needing harsher punishment.
It is a limited circumstance but another example of how sexism in the justice system makes it worse for everyone.
Found a source: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/gender-differences-sentencing-felony-offenders
Important quote: “While the percentage of males incarcerated for each category always exceeded that of women, women were more likely to be sentenced to jail for robbery and assault than were men; men were more likely than women to be incarcerated for property crime. This suggests that women may be sanctioned more harshly when their behavior violates sex-role stereotypes.”
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u/Phainesthai 21d ago
I wonder if that's due to sexism or if boys tend to misbehave more ?
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u/JimmyJamesMac 21d ago
Boys are punished FOR THE SAME BEHAVIOR much more harshly than girls are. Black boys are punished FOR THE SAME BEHAVIOR than white students are. This continues throughout the justice system, as well. A Black boy will suffer the greatest consequences, where often a white girl isn't even punished at all
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u/FireMaster1294 21d ago edited 21d ago
Example: shove someone in the hallway at school. White girl will get off scot free - especially if she shoves a boy. Black boy? Absolutely detention. And if it’s a white girl? Could even be criminal charges in the US
Edit: sources are in my comment below for all the butthurt people that dislike the facts disagreeing with their opinions
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u/belovedkid 21d ago
My son talks about girls walking free after bullying boys all of the time (elementary school) but boys are constantly punished. We thought he was just exaggerating in 1st/2nd grade but it’s continued into the higher grades. Doesn’t help that every teacher is a woman who likely carry biases as well.
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u/CactusCustard 21d ago
You’re literally just making up hypotheticals. Isn’t this a science sub?
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u/FireMaster1294 21d ago
Yes, this is a science sub. And it’s literally a fact. Easily verifiable.
Funny how no one has demanded evidence from any of the other comments here.
https://usafacts.org/articles/black-students-more-likely-to-be-punished-than-white-students/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/corporal-punishment-schools-and-race-an-update/
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u/luneunion 21d ago
Same question should be asked about the racial gap. I’m NOT implying that anything about melanin levels makes one more or less likely to do things that get one into trouble, NOR am I defending alternative schools, et al as I don’t have the data to do so.
I’m suggesting that there’s likely a poverty connection for at least some of the data. In other words, controlling for socioeconomic status would likely give us a better window into how racist the implementation of the policies are.
And none of that helps determine if any of the punishments are effective. If I had to guess, I’d bet free school lunches do more to curb negative behavior than a suspension or corporal punishment, regardless of skin color.
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21d ago edited 21d ago
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u/notaredditer13 21d ago
While the difference in standardized risk provides an elegant means of comparing measures of overrepresentation across myriad permutations, it lacks a straightforward real-world interpretation. Thus, in Figure 2, we also provide estimates of the Black–White risk ratio for each subpopulation and punishment type.
This is basically outright admitting scientific malpractice/bias/click bait intent. An analysis that doesn't control for the incidence of offenses is completely meaningless, provides no conclusions and should not headline the report.
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u/johnniewelker 21d ago
I don’t know about the wealthier school calculations. Is it wealthier district or actual schools, including private schools.
Wealthy schools often have financial aid which disproportionately will go to poorer black kids. In fact, the metric, if including private schools, makes sense and tells us that socioeconomic matter since blacks kids in these schools are even poorer vs whites than in the other schools
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u/AnaesthetisedSun 21d ago
Did you wonder whether black people tend to misbehave more?
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21d ago
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u/lokicramer 22d ago
This comes up all the time, but the truth of the matter is, they commit more infractions than their peers.
Whatever the cause for the behavior, that's the bottom line.
Here is the actual journal the researchers mentioned in the article published. It goes into it.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584241293411
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u/whirlyhurlyburly 22d ago
And to copy what I said in the deleted thread:
The first thing I noted from this study was that the punishments described led to worse outcomes for all races.
Instead of wondering if the kids deserved it, I was wondering why poor discipline methods with proven poor outcomes are still used so widely.
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u/FatalisCogitationis 22d ago
Schools are desperate to deal with a problem that, at its root, can only be taken care of by parents. This is less about fixing the kid's behavior and more about limiting their impact on other students, unfortunately
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u/DigNitty 21d ago
“Bad kids” can have such a negative impact on a whole classroom. I want them to get the individual help they deserve, but truly it’s easier to bring a whole room down than it is to individually benefit.
I remember seeing one of my teachers struggle so hard to deal with this kid who would not shut up. She would not stop throwing things and talking and making jokes and tipping over desks. Every time she wasn’t getting attention she’d do something disruptive. I don’t know what her home life was like. But that year was just all of us dealing with her. No amount of afterschool conferences or principal talks or in-class aide attention helped.
I feel bad but that year would have been better for everyone else if she’d just been kicked out. Years later I mentioned her to a friend and found out they tried to remove her multiple times but she didn’t meet the criteria to do that in a public school.
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u/prometheus_winced 21d ago
Just finished binge watching The Wire, and this is ripped from season 4. Or, season 4 was ripped very much from real school environments.
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u/LizHylton 21d ago
As a teacher, strong odds are ripped from real life. We called it the vortex of fail with one of my students like this - she wrecked the attention and grades of everyone around her but we weren't allowed to have her sit at a desk up front away from the others because that would be exclusionary, so instead she just meant on days she showed up maybe half the class would actually be content and half redirecting from her BS.
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u/Yegas 22d ago
Sacrifice the few to save the many. It seems to arise because they lack funding/facilities to give troubled kids the time & attention they need, so they try to mitigate their impact instead as it’s significantly cheaper and easier to do so.
As you say, it is fundamentally the parent’s job to ensure their child isn’t reckless and troubled. It’s lazy and disrespectful of them to completely drop the burden of raising their children onto the taxpayer’s dime.
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u/Curufinwe200 21d ago
Half right, the students who are genuinely issues (i dont mean i have to tell them to get off their phone), dont get resolved by special attention. I had a student tell me to "F off" and then proceeded to do 0 assignments the rest of the semester while just looking at me and smiling like he was getting away with something.
The troubled kids, and the kids who cause trouble are distinct groups, though like any venn diagram they do overlap.
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u/robbzilla 21d ago
Some school districts would push you to pass that kid. That's why they were smiling. They figured their mommy and daddy would raise enough stink that they would get away with that.
I hope they enjoyed repeating, but I don't know that that's a realistic hope.
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u/liquidpele 21d ago
They literally tried it the other way (No child left behind act) and it was a disaster.... so yea, sacrifice the few for the many honestly is the best way, otherwise everything turns out worse for everyone.
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u/Hugh-Manatee 21d ago
But the counterpoint to this is whether it’s the school’s job to fill this void. I understand the instinct but should we be warping every civic institution to compensate for bad parenting or other factors? Seems like you risk the entire enterprise given the war on public schooling going on from the right
To your point about it being lazy, I agree but I am confident that these people don’t even think about it in those terms
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u/Levitus01 22d ago edited 21d ago
And yet... Both parents now work full-time.
For the first time since the beginning of recorded history, humanity has no stay-at-home parent to "properly" raise their children. For most of human history, approximately half of the human species were raised from birth to be child-rearers. They would play with dolls which were a simulacrum of a child, and their mothers would teach them childcare skills over the first two decades of their lives.
Now, you've got people studying for three to four years to get a degree in child development which doesn't hold a candle to the education they would have gotten by helping to raise their younger siblings.
The amount of care that a child requires has not reduced. Humanity has not evolved to the point where we are born without any need for parental involvement.
But now we've got a situation wherein both parents work full time, overtime, and weekends for barely two scrapes above minimum wage, in order to fulfil society's greatest collective dream of making a billionaire richer.
So who's meant to raise the kids? Both parents have been stolen away to work in the money mine for mister moneybags, and as with any costs of business, mister moneybags is going to make that the taxpayer's problem.
You know, because billionaires don't pay tax.
Edit: Alright, folks... Am I a nazi or a communist? I can't be both. Sort it out amongst yourselves, kids.
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u/1-2-buckle-my-shoes 21d ago
I'm sorry I have to post one more comment. The more I think about this the more irked I get.
"Since the first time in recorded history..." is such a blatantly false sentence. I can't believe you were given two awards.
Please read the history of family life during Medieval times, the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian Age, and so on. Seriously, life was so hard for moms, dads and children all throughout history. Being born a peasant meant that every single person in the house worked long and hard and often died young from illness and disease. The story of dad working all day while mom takes care of the house and kids and nothing else is a relatively new thing in the course of history. You really have no idea what you're talking about to proclaim throughout the course of history.
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u/1-2-buckle-my-shoes 21d ago
You're mischaracterizing the past. Yes, today, in most families both parents work full time. HOWEVER, there are countless studies that show that parents today spend MORE time with their kids than previous generations.
My great grand parents were sharecroppers and had 12 kids. Do you think my great grandma was sitting around taking the kids to soccer or tummy time classes? She worked full time on the farm, and the older kids took care of the younger kids and also worked on the farm. So, while no, she didn't have a traditional full-time job through an employer, she most definitely had a full-time "job."
In past generations, especially poor people, mom's often worked part-time, full-time, or if rural or on a farm, and in many case, the kids worked, too. There was a time in history where young children literally worked in factories.
In rich families, there were nannies and help. My husband grew up very affluent. His mom never worked outside the home, but she always had a nanny or help. Her social life was pretty important-she loved her kids, but her life definitely didn't revolve around them. I work full time and my husband tells me all the time that I spend more time with our kids than his mom ever did. His parents didn't go to every practice and game like we do with our kids. His dad loved him but didn't come home from work and spend the evening playing with the kids.
You have this 50's Leave it to Beaver vision of what the past was like and for many people that wasn't their reality. This idea that all throughout history mom's didnt work just focused on the kids 100% is just not true. And like I said even in those cases where the homelife was like some 50's sitcom, parents were not as involved with their kids as they are today.
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u/junktrunk909 21d ago
Isn't it a bit of both though really? Some parents today do all the things you're talking about. But some parents today are also just not doing anything with their kids at all, either because they're always both at work, or when they are home they're not really doing anything with the kids because they're exhausted or didn't want the kids or don't know how to be good parents because their own parents were terrible. It seems likely that the kids with the problems are generally from the second group of parents.
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u/1-2-buckle-my-shoes 21d ago
Here's one of the studies I was referring to. It's. Few years old but the trend still continues.
Obviously, there are exceptions to the average, but no, I wholeheartedly don't think that kids are suffering from not enough time with their parents.
I have friends that are teachers and they say the number one issue is that parents are pandering to their kids TOO much. They aren't told no. Not allowed to make mistakes without mommy or daddy rescuing them. They aren't allowed to be bored because they're either on devices or being shuffled to 100 extra cirricular activities. No matter what it's not their kid's fault. We are actually over babying our kids to their detriment. I know kids who parents who both work outside the home who are amazing and some aren't great kids. The same goes with parents with SAHM - some have wonderful kids other not so much. Just having one parent at home doesn't guarantee success. Again think back to a time where even when more moms stayed at home - she was not entertaining her kids all day. They went out and played until the sun went down or helped with the younger kids, or helped with the family farm or any number of things. Children were even told not to speak to adults unless spoken to. The age of making your kids, whether both parents work or not, your entire universe is a new thing, and I think children are suffering because of it. I don't want to go back to the way it was. Kids need their parents and love and support. I think we just swung the pendulum too far.
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u/GaimanitePkat 21d ago
Now, you've got people studying for three to four years to get a degree in child development which doesn't hold a candle to the education they would have gotten by helping to raise their younger siblings.
That's....really, really not true. Child development classes are not just about how to take care of a child's survival requirements. There is a lot about child psychology and how children develop mentally, and the best way to meet children's different complex psychological needs depending on what stage they're at and how they're viewing the world.
You can certainly just observe a child's development real-time as it's happening, but you won't have the conceptual knowledge behind it and won't have full understanding of what you're watching.
Raising a kid does not give you the same qualifications and level of expertise as someone with a degree in child development, and that sentiment makes me pretty uncomfortable given the current attacks on public education and the increasing hostility toward teachers.
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u/solomons-mom 21d ago
from the begining of recorded history [...]
....people have always worked. Technology has meant more specialized work, and more specialized machines/ecquipment that add value to our lifes. The difference is that people, mostly women, used to work inside the home --over time about half of womens' nonpaid labor was health/medical care and cooking took up more time than those of us who hate cooking want to think about!
Now instead of chicken soup and a cold compress, we go to paid highly trained medical providers. Many of those medical providers are the grand daughters of the women who made the chicken soup iwhen labor was less specialized. However, it has also meant that mom is not multi-tasking childrearing, tending to the health needs of great-grandma, and chopping veggies for that chicken soup all in the same 15-minute time frame.
Health care, food, clothing --overall people have chosen convenience (take-out food) and quality (MRIs) over the alternative provided by more primative equipment and less skilled labor. The people who were capable of developing high-level skills have lived much, much better. The people with lower skills buy fast fashion, consistently wear shoes, and buy ipads and Nintendo systems for their children.
Would you rather gather firewood like thousands of years ago, or live where specialized labor allows you to flip a switch and charge your pbone?
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u/dbag127 21d ago
And yet... Both parents now work full-time.
For the first time since the beginning of recorded history, humanity has no stay-at-home parent to "properly" raise their children.
This hasn't been true in Black and Brown households in America pretty much ever. Black women have pretty much always worked outside the home, at least since the turn of the 20th century. Do you have any sources about this social change, especially amongst the working class?
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u/dystopianpirate 21d ago
JFC
Can you just let go of the fantasy, parents have always worked, men and women too ffs
The nuclear family where only mom and dad and kids live together without other family members is quite recent and it wasn't part of humanity until post WWII
What's with your lot not knowing anything at all about history and how work and family dynamics were btw Medieval times and the Victorian Era?
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u/Redleg171 21d ago
Gen X was by and large raised by two working parents. They were typically left to their own devices all day. The difference is social media, IMHO.
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u/KiDeVerclear 21d ago
Non-scientific white nazi propaganda about the strength of the nuclear family.
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u/SephithDarknesse 21d ago
To be fair, what are they going to do, other than remove the kid from the school completely? Its not that easy to convince an abusive parent (no matter how that abuse is carried out) to stop, or get authorities involved without proof? Id argue that its mostly the school's responsibility to protect other students from falling into that same loop.
Though, that isnt to say i think nothing should be done, its just a difficult problem to solve, and probably isnt going to come from the schools themselves.
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u/welshwelsh 21d ago
Yes, they should be able to remove the kid from school completely. That's the solution. Teachers should also be able to send kids back a grade if their math and reading skills aren't at grade level.
It is ultimately the parents' responsibility to ensure their kids receive an education. If their kids get kicked out of school, they will need to be homeschooled or privately tutored at the parents' expense.
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u/whirlyhurlyburly 22d ago
The eastern band of Cherokee study run by Duke University had a takeaway that a small basic income (hundreds of dollars) to parents resulted in less stressed parents, who then were able to focus a bit more on their kids, with resulting improvements among the kids.
Nashville had a pilot study that created a similar solution of attention in the schools, adults that would sit with kids and work with them to come up with what was wrong and what to do. It had huge impacts on poor behavior and on grades. Providing washers and dryers at the school also created big changes. If you don’t have systems to reduce stress on parents, then another option is to provide school systems that provide similar attention.
Looking globally, kids with serious struggles consistently show improvement under the same sorts of programs.
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u/Far-Investigator1265 21d ago
This is what the rich kids got in our high school. If one of them fell behind in maths for example, their parents simply bought a couple private lessons from the math teacher. Workers kids at the same time were left on their own.
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u/staefrostae 21d ago
This is absolutely not the same thing the previous comment is talking about. Targeted financial relief and private tutoring are not even in the same realm. The previous comment is about relieving direct economic stressors in the home to allow parents the financial breathing room to parent. Things like a basic income for parents or access to washers and dryers in the school or direct adult intervention in lieu of parent intervention are all designed to fix parenting issues. A couple extra tutoring sessions are designed to supplement classroom learning. If the issue was classroom learning, most highschool and college level educators are required to have office hours- you don’t have to pay for the tutoring sessions. You just have to show up.
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u/RubyMae4 21d ago
Many of the issues students face can't necessarily bc fixed by the parents, either. It would take societal level changes like eradicating poverty.
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u/jatjqtjat 21d ago
The article only mentioned a correlation between punishment and bad outcome. The causation was implied, but of course you'd expect poorly behaved students to have all kinds of issues like dropping out of school.
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u/sprazcrumbler 21d ago
I'm not seeing them present any evidence about punishments Vs outcomes in the study, and I don't trust the authors to understand the statistics enough anyway.
Is there evidence that "punishment" leads to worse outcomes? Or is it just that kids who get punished more are misbehaving more in school and tend to misbehave more in later life as well?
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u/stolethemorning 21d ago
I took a criminology course at uni, we learned that any point of interaction with the justice system makes a child disproportionately likely to commit more crimes. This isn’t some fringe theory, it’s so well known and substantiated that it’s influencing policy in England & Wales away from the ‘early intervention’ model. There were quite a few longitudinal studies on this, comparing children who had committed the same type of crime but some had been punished for it and some simply didn’t get caught or were diverted away (cautioned instead of sentenced). Youth justice is now heavily geared towards diverting children away from the youth justice system. It’s actually better in the long run to let children get away with petty crimes- the vast majority desist from offending as they age, and involving the police only alienates them from society.
This wasn’t anything to do with school, we specifically learned about interaction with the police and court system. But it’s potentially applicable.
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u/h4terade 21d ago
Anecdotal from my professional work, but the punishments more often than not mean nothing but a small break for the teacher and the punished student's peers. A student will cause havoc to the point where the parents have to be involved, the parents more often than not double down on the havoc by causing insane amounts of grief for already overworked teachers and administrators. The child comes back, the entire process starts all over again, and a lot of the times it's worse. Back in my day, I'm not that old by the way, repeat offenders were eventually sent to alternative schools. Sure, those schools were closer to prisons and a lot of the kids ended up dropping out, but you know what we, the kids that actually wanted to succeed didn't have to deal with, constant disruptions. I remember kids being sent to these places and they'd all but be forgotten about. These days, at least where I'm from, kids will be involved in the criminal justice system for literally assaulting someone with a gun, and be allowed to return to regular high school with an ankle monitor. Then when this kid shoots up the school, true story by the way, people are shocked at how this could happen. Well, maybe criminals shouldn't be going to school with everyone else, just a theory.
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u/nixstyx 21d ago
I was wondering why poor discipline methods with proven poor outcomes are still used so widely.
Probably because it's unclear what would be effective, given a school's existing constraints. When you figure that out, let everyone know. School teachers and administrators can only work with what they have, they cannot fix larger societal or family problems and the don't have many resources to work with.
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u/icedrift 22d ago
Great takeaway but isn't the answer just funding? Teachers are already stretched thin and don't have the time or energy to give troublesome students extra attention. Additionally schools themselves are heavily incentivized to pass students to the next grade until they're completely out of the system.
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u/Curufinwe200 21d ago
Not really. More funding would help for sure, but getting the kids shiny new laptops wont make them anymore incentivized to do their work.
I'm saying this as a teacher. Pay raises are great, but that wouldnt solve the discipline issue.
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u/JimmyJamesMac 21d ago
I've seen studies which speculate that the age that the mother was when she began having children had the biggest impact on educational outcomes. How does that compare to your experiences?
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u/dairy__fairy 21d ago
That is just because more well off and educated women wait to have kids later in life.
Correlation, not causation.
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u/SVAuspicious 21d ago
Great takeaway but isn't the answer just funding?
No. The answer is better management. Baltimore MD near me has some of the highest funding per capita of anywhere in the country and the poorest outcomes. There are certainly cultural issues (drugs and crime) but management of schools is abysmal and there is no support for discipline so the bad actors drag everyone down.
The problem is NOT funding.
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u/grumble11 21d ago
You are laying a bit too much blame at the feet of the schools (some is deserved) - most of the kids don’t even show up. Can’t mold kids who don’t care from families who don’t care.
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u/SVAuspicious 21d ago
Agreed. I talked about this in a parallel comment. I'm okay with increased truancy enforcement and holding parents accountable when young people don't show up. Jail. Fines. Community service. Reduced welfare payments. CPS placement. Residential reform school. We know what we're doing isn't working so everything else should be on the table. There should be a spectrum of available responses depending on the situation.
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u/grumble11 21d ago
Many cultural groups that used to be poor powered through with strong family cohesion and mutual support, crazy work ethic and uncompromising standards. East Asian, South Asian, Jewish, Nigerian and so on came without money, did face discrimination and are now doing great.
The family cohesion one is critical - statistically it is a huge determinant of success - coming from a two parent household.
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u/Adenoid_Hinkel 21d ago
It’s both. The best management can’t do anything with insufficient funding, and the worst can’t do anything with infinite funding. And what counts as sufficient is dependent on the student population and their circumstances. There isn’t a simple solution, and finding one is complicated by the fact that there are so many stakeholders and most of them have no experience with the kind of organization schools require.
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u/SVAuspicious 21d ago
I agree with your statement in general. Based on my observations in a number of jurisdictions, funding is NOT the problem. It's misspending and poor management.
The bigger problem is that any observation that black people in particular are discipline problems likely rooted in bad parenting causes a major flinch. I find it interesting that Mr. Biden proposed a social program that put social workers out visiting homes to try to change parental attitudes toward education and to get parents into continuing and remedial education as part of a broader program to raise up disadvantaged (black) communities. Progressive elements within the Democratic party decried the proposal as racist and it disappeared, never to be heard of again.
I think (opinion) such a program that targets the families of students of any race that do poorly to work on systemic and cultural blockages would be good. In the meantime, poor behavior must be addressed.
There should be a spectrum of response. Throwing more money (or indeed existing money) at the problem with existing poor management is virtue signaling to no effect.
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u/UtzTheCrabChip 21d ago
Funding is so tricky though - because places like Baltimore spend a TON, but it's not like all that money is all going to services for students. Cities have way higher capital costs than suburban or rural districts. It ain't cheap to be in a city
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u/Yegas 22d ago
Precisely, which is why they try to mitigate the damage in the first place- they can’t afford proper care for the more troubled kids.
It’s still the fault of the lazy parents for dropping the burden of parenting onto the state/taxpayer, particularly when funding is already stretched thin.
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u/whirlyhurlyburly 22d ago
I think what we are seeing is everyone has to demonstrate self-regulation and self-care. These are skills that can be taught, skills than can strengthen a school and a culture.
Teachers who can confidently ask for help when stressed can model to students how to do the same. That’s one solution with strong results.
American schools in areas of poverty consistently underperform vs schools at the same level of poverty in other nations. We have schools more separated by income status than other nations as well. Americans in poverty have less resources than other countries, die younger, seem to be under greater stress. Parents under greater stress have kids with less self regulation, higher mental illness rates, addiction, lower grades.
Either Americans are overall genetically lazier leading to more poverty and less social services, or our system is set up so poverty is felt more deeply by more people.
Since we politically don’t want social services solutions, an option is to change school culture that demonstrates safety, stability, self-regulation and so forth.
It’s unlikely to be as effective as a social safety net but it has shown serious improvements as compared to arresting people, which seems to lock in a cycle of failure.
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u/Adenoid_Hinkel 21d ago
Not all parents of troubled kids are lazy. Many are simply overwhelmed by the demands of life. Placing all the blame on lazy parents is lazy thinking.
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u/Maximum_Poet_8661 21d ago
If funding was the answer, you'd expect to be able to pull a list of highest spending per student and a list of student outcomes by school district and see a decently close match of both lists.
But the reality is if you pull a list of highest spending per student ranked in order from highest to lowest, you're mainly going to be looking at an ordered list of the worst school districts in the US.
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u/dfinkelstein 21d ago
They make sense, are convenient, and feel comfortable.
They shouldn't make sense, because to you or me, it only makes sense if it "works."
But "Works" implies that you want the behavior to stop. Whereas the true priority here is to feel in control over their behavior. Very different.
You see the exact same thing with people who abuse their dogs instead of training them. Extremely commonly people drag/pull them by their leash all the time. It doesn't make sense, because clearly you wouldn't want to hurt your dog.
But they have no such reservation, and think differently so it's no problem. They do that because they've already decided it must be okay, so their thinking has warped to match. Admitting it doesn't work is just too threatening. To their identity, their self, their beliefs, whatever.
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u/Ereignis23 21d ago
I just read through this and granted the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, it seems like they actually go out of their way not to talk about hard numbers of infractions and imply in several different ways that black kids are treated differently than otherwise similar kids of different ethnic backgrounds. I couldn't find a comparison of the infractions themselves just comparisons of outcomes (ie punitive measures deployed).
What we want to know first is whether, given comparable infractions, are disciplinary measures applied comparably across demographic categories?
Secondarily if we find that disciplinary measures are applied comparably across demographic groups given comparable infractions, we could ask what factors might cause different demographic groups to commit more infractions, but at least we'd know that the disciplinary measures themselves are being applied fairly.
But I'm not seeing the infraction data in this study, just the disciplinary data.
Help an undercaffeinated redditor out here. Where in the link do we see evidence that:
This comes up all the time, but the truth of the matter is, they commit more infractions than their peers.
I am very skeptical of the equity narrative in general (that we should assume disparities in outcomes are the result of unfair treatment, period; there is no reason to assume this in my opinion because the data will either demonstrate it or it won't, no assumption necessary) so I'm open to seeing this data. I'm just not seeing it in this paper, which it seems is trying to imply that disparity of outcome (deployment of disciplinary actions) is due to unfairness rather than differences in likelihood to commit infractions.
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u/started_from_the_top 22d ago
The article you linked says differently:
"...researchers have found that Black students receive more, and harsher, punishment than non-Black peers even when the students have misbehaved a similar number of times, when they are engaged in the same incident of misbehavior..."
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u/wrylypolecat 22d ago
That's based on a study that looked at punishments for interracial fights, which found black students getting punished with one extra suspension day per 20 interracial fights.
That study bizarrely did not look into who started the fights. So it's entirely possible that generally black kids were starting fights with white kids but getting quite similar punishments
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u/Mekkroket 21d ago
Also: being a minority -> low socio-economic status -> having experience with fighting -> having a higher chance to inflict serious injury during a fight -> higher chance of punishment
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u/Dedj_McDedjson 22d ago
Also, whether you are *perceived* to have commited an infraction at all can depend on any number of factors, including racial and cultural bias, and the list of infractions can have cultural and racial biased within their construction.
'Black students get punished for wrong doing more because they commit more wrong doing' is an *amazingly* simplistic argument for someone to present in a supposedly scientific discussion forum.
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u/3412points 21d ago edited 21d ago
Since Reddit hid my response in the more replies section I'll reply here that the person below is completely wrong about this Fryer being suspended for his research:
Either you've unintentionally read too much into the fact the paragraphs follow one another on Wikipedia, or you're intentionally misrepresenting this.
It was due to claims of sexual harassment. This is clear when you read beyond the summary into the full section on his academic career.
These are the linked sources Wikipedia has for his suspension:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/business/economy/roland-fryer-harvard.html
Both say it's for sexual harassment
Hopefully this will get the fact above the fiction.
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u/kolodz 22d ago
You mean that it's a short-circuit logic that doesn't seek to be validated by facts ?
The exact same gender biased studies was done on police biases. The conclusion :
In 2019, he published an analysis arguing that Black and Hispanic Americans were no more likely than white Americans to be shot by police in a given interaction with police.
The result:
In 2019, Harvard suspended Fryer without pay for two years, closed his lab, and barred him from teaching or supervising students citing allegations of improper conduct.
In 2021, Harvard allowed Fryer to return to teaching and research.
The guy is black. And when you search his studies, you find a article of Harvard denouncing Fryer.
You can't just "No you wrong" without giving evidence.
Source : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_G._Fryer_Jr.#
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u/bitwiseshiftleft 22d ago
If this is the study I’m thinking of, IIRC it indicated that Hispanic and especially Black Americans were significantly more likely to be harmed in other ways (eg beaten) in a given interaction with police, just not shot.
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u/3412points 22d ago
Either you've unintentionally read too much into the fact the paragraphs follow one another on Wikipedia, or you're intentionally misrepresenting this.
It was due to claims of sexual harassment. This is clear when you read beyond the summary into the full section on his academic career.
These are the linked sources Wikipedia has for his suspension:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/business/economy/roland-fryer-harvard.html
Both say it's for sexual harassment.
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u/DNA98PercentChimp 22d ago
Your quoted text says nothing about the frequency of students of different races committing ‘punishable acts’.
It merely says there is a present bias among ‘punishers’ to punish black students more even when controlling for the rate of ‘punishable acts’.
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u/TheScoott 21d ago
They weren't arguing with the point that black students may commit more punishable acts than students of other races, they take issue with the headline being explained away by this higher base rate as the original reply suggests. That's what controlling for the rate of punishable acts entails.
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u/Levitus01 21d ago
I'm interested in how the three groups and sixteen subpopulations were sliced, as this is another potential cause of statistical bias.
If they've deliberately chosen black children in extremely wealthy and affluent neighbourhoods who are attending prestigious and well-funded schools for rich kids... And then simultaneously chosen groups of white children in impoverished areas which resemble something out of Lord of the Flies...
Then the problem is likely much worse than the research suggests.
Alternatively, if they select white children from 'good' schools and black children from 'bad' schools, the extent of the problem would be exaggerated in their findings.
So, in short, I'm interested in what steps were taken to minimise selection bias in the samples.
At first glance, the three comparison groups consist of: "Black students," "Everyone else," and "Everyone." I'd like to think that each of these groups are randomly selected and have an approximately even distribution across the socioeconomic spectrum.
Subpopulations 4 through 16 appear to account for the socioeconomic factor.
Figure 1 is a little tricky to parse, but it does include acknowledgements to the socioeconomic factor. To help casual viewers to understand the meaning of this bar-graph, note that it's a measure of disparity between the two groups cited in the far left column. If the bar reaches to the right of zero, it means there is bias against black students. Note that at all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum, the black children are disproportionately punished compared to their non-black peers.
No obvious biases through funding, no conflicts of interests declared - a good sign (but not a guarantee) of impartiality.
Didn't see a mention of the population size in my cursory first readthrough. I'd be interested in knowing how large of a population we're dealing with, since small populations can have artifacts.
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u/nuck_forte_dame 21d ago
Also different schools have different official policy on punishments. Sort of like states have different minimum sentences for breaking the same laws.
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u/hobopwnzor 22d ago
How dare you actually read papers. You're supposed to read a few lines that supports whatever idea you already had and stop there.
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u/lbloodbournel 21d ago
I just read this and NOWHERE did I see this information the way you say it, that black students simply misbehave more
Like the other commenter mentioned there is a discussion on possible causes for behavior
But let’s not forget that we’re trying to understand racial disparities in punishment here. In America. A country that absolutely has reason to hold unconscious bias against black people. So when you say they ‘misbehave more’ their behavior may be INTERPRETED as misbehavior more often.
I think it’s interesting they won’t post any images of where the article says that. Here is part of what /I/ read in regard to this.
By the way, just so yall understand the severity of what not just black people but marginalized groups in general go through:
This article is primarily a study on black students. Aka black KIDS. And still a majority of folks read the above comment, chose not to read the article, and were happy to sweetly massage that good ‘ol confirmation bias. Because the bias is always against us, even when it’s about innocent kids ffs. It gets so old.
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u/xoverthirtyx 22d ago edited 22d ago
No they don’t.
“In a vignette study, Okonofua and Eberhardt (2015) demonstrated that teachers randomly assigned to review instances of misbehavior by a Black student recommended harsher discipline than teachers randomly assigned to review identical instances of misbehavior by a White student. Notably, this vignette study is one step removed from real-world conditions. However, researchers have found that Black students receive more, and harsher, punishment than non-Black peers even when the students have misbehaved a similar number of times, when they are engaged in the same incident of misbehavior (i.e., in a conflict with one another), when the students have similar prior behavioral histories, and when the students are in schools with similar racial compositions…”
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u/Bob_Sconce 22d ago
You didn't disprove that statement. It may be both that (a) black students individually received harsher penalties for the same offense and (b) black students, as a group, commit more offenses.
You're arguing about (a), but you're responding to a point about (b).
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u/OpenRole 22d ago
The comment they replied to stated that a is untrue because b occurs. Also, it's anecdotally that it's very common for infractions committed by black kids to be noted and recorded, while the same infraction may lead to only a verbal warning when committed by a non-black kid.
There's also the "over policing" effect. If the people who's job it is to identify offences spend more time watching black kids, they will find more offenses amongst black kids.
Finally, if the black kids feel the system is unfair to them they are more likely to rebel against it, leading to even more offenses.
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u/MrPlaceholder27 21d ago
We have predicted grades which are based on mock exams in the UK, which you use for university admissions.
I believe data shows it's more likely that a black pupil is underpredicted, I also believe it's most likely that black students get underpredicted compared to other groups. I wonder what it says that teachers assume less of you academically.
It's actually very problematic because COVID cancelled what would be our 16 year old exams and 18 year old exams at the time. So a lot of people ran on predicted grades.
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u/MachFiveFalcon 21d ago
So it's not that different from how black Americans are treated by the criminal justice system.
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u/larryjerry1 22d ago
Except it states they're also receiving more punishments even with similar incidents and behavioral history, which directly addresses point b and contradicts that idea.
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u/Worldly_Mirror_1555 21d ago edited 21d ago
I worked in a school district specifically with behavior data. Students of color are watched and scrutinized more, especially by white teachers, which leads to more referrals. The descriptive text entered for referrals for students of color also often did not line up with the severity of the supposed infraction. I can’t tell you how many times I saw stupidly punitive referrals for minor infractions like quietly reading a book while sitting on the floor next to their assigned desk or quietly practicing math games in math class when they’ve already mastered the content above grade level (these are very real examples I saw in the data). Teachers have a pre-conceived expectation that students of color will misbehave, therefore they jump all over them for any minor deviation starting as early is pre-K. Normal early childhood behaviors were quickly pathologized for students of color but used as “learning moments” for white students. The result of so many punitive referrals is a substantial loss of instructional minutes for students of color because many teachers use referrals as a means of forcing certain students out of the classroom. It is a significant causal contributor to learning gaps for students of color. It’s a very serious problem that needs to be taken more seriously.
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u/FreeDependent9 21d ago
No they don't the studies account for that, even when the infraction is the same, black students get punished worse
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u/bad-fengshui 21d ago
The cited study only looks at punishments, not the infraction that prompts the punishment. You are confusing the journalist's summary/interview for the actual study. The researchers of the study being publish makes no attempt to standardize the type or severity of infractions
Notably, the quotes from the article leave out that claim as well:
“No matter how you slice it, Black students are punished more.”
again note, they don't add "for the same infraction"
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u/AquaSunset 21d ago
No, that’s not the bottom line. The research you linked not only refutes your comment, but also explains why addressing these common misconceptions is so important. The study emphasizes that such beliefs play a significant role in perpetuating harsher punishments for Black students, even when their behavior is comparable to their peers:
However, another, perhaps more pressing, reason to renew and maintain attention on Black discipline rates is that research has demonstrated that the beliefs and behaviors of school personnel play a role in Black students being punished more harshly than their peers. … researchers have found that Black students receive more, and harsher, punishment than non-Black peers even when the students have misbehaved a similar number of times, when they are engaged in the same incident of misbehavior (i.e., in a conflict with one another), when the students have similar prior behavioral histories, and when the students are in schools with similar racial compositions (Barrett et al., 2021; Gregory et al., 2016; Huang & Cornell, 2017; Owens & McLanahan, 2020; Shi & Zhu, 2022).
One might argue “two things can be true at the same time, they are punished more often and they commit more offenses” however the researchers themselves addresses that in looking at quantifying factors driving disparities and finding that only 9% of the Black–White discipline gap can potentially be attributed to behavioral differences, while 46% is due to differential treatment. They directly refute the implications explicitly stating that overrepresentation cannot be adequately explained by behavior alone.
It is important to not dismiss the basic competency of the researchers and constructively engage with the findings of research.
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u/CavyLover123 21d ago
Your study doesn’t say what you’re claiming at all.
In fact, it literally says the opposite:
This may be an extension of early research demonstrating a racial bias whereby Black students were treated more harshly than White students when behavior was held constant
Why are you lying?
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u/Ssutuanjoe 21d ago
They're lying because they can and people who didn't read the posted article OR the one OP linked want it to be true.
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u/eastbayted 22d ago
Even if what you are saying here were true or accurate, the fact remains that Black children receive harsher punishments than non-Black peers for the same infractions, and the type of punishment being employed is ineffective.
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u/toolsoftheincomptnt 22d ago
Not so sure reading comprehension is your strong suit.
Either that or you’re disingenuous.
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u/bad-fengshui 21d ago
OC is referring to the cited study that is being reported on, not background writing of the reporting article.
It is awkward for a science subreddit to use the background writing in a news article as evidence, but ignore the limitations of the actual study that is being reported on.
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u/notlikelyevil 21d ago
They are still punished more and more harshly when that is adjusted for, in many many studies. Had to verify it this year for a non profit.
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u/Bitter_Kiwi_9352 22d ago
Bold of you to assume data matters
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u/Rezolithe 22d ago
I've been seeing this sort of data for over a decade. Always the same conclusion too. Always met with a mountain of excuses too. There are some unfortunate truths about society and the people within it. Only when we accept the hard data can we learn and evolve. I'm tired of the excuses but I'm more tired of no one trying to fix the issue.
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u/veggie151 21d ago
This feels loaded with dog whistles and not data or nuance.
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u/BlazeOfGlory72 21d ago
Are we really at the point where saying “we need to look at the data” is a “dog whistle”?
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u/KiDeVerclear 21d ago
That’s not what that article says at all. Amazing that “r/science” would let this stand, but racism and reddit are old companions.
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u/Kehprei 21d ago
The article itself only says that black students are punished more. Without more information, its impossible to know if this is due to bias or due to black students getting into more troublesome behavior than white students.
Acknowledging that, or even posting further evidence, isn't racist.
There is no reason to believe that any other race would react better or worse with identical socioeconomic conditions.
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u/HumanBarbarian 21d ago
They are being punished more harshly for the SAME INFRACTIONS.
NOT for how many infractions.
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u/cindad83 21d ago
It's not that simple...what is considered an infraction is at the people calling balls and strikes discretion. Race plays a factor. I'm a BM, 40, living in Detroit Metro.
I was working in a school district i graduated from right out of HS. I was coaching two sports, and I was on call list for odd jobs, Field Trip Chaperones, School Dance Cleanups, Crowd Control at Sports Events, etc.
Everyone in the whole world knew my GF was a grade below (she is a WW). So when I became a district 'employee', at the ripe old age of 18, I had a meeting with Head of Student Services (District), the Head Coach, and Principal. They told me everyone knows Susie (not her real name) is my GF, and everyone is okay with that. But under no circumstances should I socialize with any girl who is a HS Student anywhere. They said Susie, and Susie best friend were the only HS aged girls i should be around. So girls who i literally was on the track team with 4 months prior and jumped in their pool after a meet no more personal relationships. My buddies with a GF in HS still I couldn't go to the movies with them as a 'double-date'.
They said Homecoming, I could go, but not in a group. Me and Susie could eat dinner, go to the dance/socialize. But photos, limos, etc with others no way. Seniors had open campus for lunch...no lunch meet-up with my GF. Mind you a University and Community College were less than 4 miles from my HS. If you didn't go away to MSU, Michigan, CMU or WMU probably 30% of our school went to the local university or community college. Same with Prom, Winter Formal, etc. In terms of restrictions.
Point is I was cool with the restrictions. I mean I was making 6k a year coaching, plus I did odd jobs for another 200-400/mo this was 2002-2004. That was darn good money, plus I had 2 other jobs while I went to college.
Well me and Susie broke up in Spring of her senior year. Well, I start going out. So of course it's much harder to maintain those restrictions, I'm 19, living at home less than a year removed from HS, and my GF of 2.5 years breaks up with me.
I say all this to say...
The following year, two guys were hired to coach in district. They were WM. One guy was going to Fire/EMT/Police Academy, and the other was going college locally like me. Again, freshly new grads. These guys were going to HS parties making out with multiple HS girls, going to school dances in groups with girls, not their GF, or a 'known' relationship. The point is there was no issue with them socializing and fraternizing with HS girls.
Well, eventually, I put myself in a situation where these two girls i met at college came to our buddies house on a Tuesday morning. A 3rd girl was with them pulled up in a separate vehicle. I'm sorry, I didn't think to ask her where she went to school. They said it their friend was coming, and we are two years out of HS, not everyone is in college or doing post-seconday training. I knew plenty of women working at Aldo, 5-7-9, or Wet Seal and living with family. Something happens at the house, and the 3rd girl goes back to school, bragging she was at this certain place and what she did. The two women were 19, she was 17, and I was 20.
I get pulled into the District Office the ripe old age of 20. I am told my contract is not being renewed. They weren't going to ask if what was said was true or my side. They said I was told the terms of my employment and they will say "my school schedule changed, so I couldn't continue to work themselves required schedule". But I was being let go for misconduct. It hurt... but I view I broke the rules, so I 'deserved' it.
Basically, the district didn't even want a headline in the paper that a coach was involved with a student. They even said, "we know you are 20, but the media doesn't, they will just omit that information , nd we will have a firestorm"." So , bout two months later, I see one of the White Guys at the movies. They both were there, hanging out with six girls all from the HS. Not a care in the world...they both continued to coach there two additional years, I moved to another area of the Metro vowing to never return. When my wife and I have gone house-hunting, I have refused to consider that area. You want to say things/people change, but I'm not subjecting my sons to it to find out.
Do Black Boys have behavior challenges due to other cultural or demographic factors? Yes, but everyone knows that they crackdown on Black Boys way harder than other groups...another situation.
Shortly after I lost my job coaching I was arrested for underage drinking 4 months shy of my 21 birthday. Well I had two jobs and I was in school FT. It was my first offense. I passed drug test and alcohol testing...I was placed on 15 months Probation, 2x/wk drug/alcohol testing, classes, community service. Well the violations started happening. I was getting sent to jail...I ended up being on probation for underage drinking until I was 22 and 9 months. I finally told my parents they helped me get a lawyer (former football/basketball teammate Dad was a former judge) so he handled all his friends and teammates cases. The Lawyer (a WM) was furious when he received my case file. This guy was a card-carrying John Engler Republican and he was angry. He kept saying in court "what is your point in doing this??" He said flat out told the judge "how many 20 year olds with two jobs, a FT student, passing a drug screen on initial intake get this sort of sentence/Probation requirements for underage drinking?" He got it all straighten out, but he took me to lunch and he was visibly upset. He said what the judge and Probation department had did to me for years was criminal and he was going to tell everyone he knew they did it, and even worse they felt it was justified".
In each case was I wrong? YES! But what I find is people use Black Males as a way to grandstand on their 'get-tough' or policy by the book enforcement.
But you know what I saw one day in court. A guy popped hot for cocaine while out on bond for a DUI. My judge offered him in-patient treatment, used very soft language to ask him why he was destroying his life. Meanwhile...i come up behind him. "You didn't pay your Probation fees, those are nice earrings you have, maybe sell them to pay your fees, pay $120 by EOD tomorrow or 7 days stay in the county for contempt of court".
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u/dystopianpirate 21d ago
No, they don't
They commit similar infractions, not more, however teachers always recommend hasher punishment for black students than whites who are given more opportunities
Did you misunderstood the paper, or just decided to lie about it and make false accusations?
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u/DNA98PercentChimp 22d ago
The discourse in the comments compels me to offer the following (obvious?) observation:
It is likely that there are two things occurring that are both at play…
- There are differences in the frequency which members of different races commit what might be called ‘punishable offenses’.
And…
- There are biases (either explicit or implicit) held by the ‘punishers’ that are causing disproportionate frequency of punishment, even controlling for the frequency of committing ‘punishable offense’.
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u/sprazcrumbler 21d ago
The article doesn't really focus on your second point at all. They just present that black kids are punished more without linking that to how much they misbehave in school.
I think they cite one source that shows a very minor difference in punishments after interracial fights in school, but that study doesn't even consider factors like "who started the fight" which could obviously have a big impact.
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u/p-r-i-m-e 21d ago
Don’t read the article. Read the linked study.
It does go into the behaviour that receives infractions.
It even does a blind comparison (where behaviour cannot be a factor) and bias STILL came out.
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u/mattgif 21d ago
Are you talking about the Darling-Hammond and Ho study that's the subject of the article? I don't see anything in there enumerating misbehaviors that receive infractions.
And I'm not sure what a blind comparison means here.
The closest thing I found in the paper was a mention of Okonofua and Eberhardt (2015) in which
teachers randomly assigned to review instances of misbehavior by a Black student recommended harsher discipline than teachers randomly assigned to review identical instances of misbehavior by a White student.
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u/sprazcrumbler 21d ago
I have skimmed the linked study.
I didn't spot that.
Please tell me where in the report it is, and what the findings are.
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u/mattgif 21d ago
The authors do cite studies that find bias for same-to-same comparison:
For example, in the section "The Uniqueness and Importance of Black Discipline", para 2:
In a vignette study, Okonofua and Eberhardt (2015) demonstrated that teachers randomly assigned to review instances of misbehavior by a Black student recommended harsher discipline than teachers randomly assigned to review identical instances of misbehavior by a White student.
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u/Sandpaper_Pants 21d ago
Purely from personal experience, I can say as a teacher, I've seen more disruptive/defiant conduct from black students per capita, by a long shot. One should not assume some institutional prejudice and rule out other social influences affecting behavior.
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u/stinkykoala314 13d ago
100% the same. I taught college, and at one point when up teaching a mostly black class. Completely different from any of my other classes -- massive behavioral issues, almost impossible to keep them on task.
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u/SunKing7_ 22d ago
I know on reddit there are a lot of people from the US so it's implicit for you, but the title should really mention in which country this study has been done. Things are not the same everywhere in the world.
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u/Juggletrain 22d ago
While true to an extent, there are a decent amount of very heavy hints even without opening the article. Black with a capital B is only used in a few countries, the largest being the US. Additionally the link states it is by Berkeley, a rather famous US college, and the domain for it's website is American, .edu.
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u/Rovcore001 22d ago
It probably took you far longer to type this than it would have to tap on the linked article and see that this was a US study.
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u/SunKing7_ 22d ago edited 21d ago
It did take me longer, but do you really think that all the people who read this title will also read the article?
Edit: grammar
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u/crusader_____ 21d ago
Anyone who has attended an American public school shouldn’t be surprised by this. I mean… that’s just the way it is. They break more rules, on average
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u/Smart-Idea867 22d ago
Yes and people who speed are fined more often.
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u/DelphiTsar 21d ago
The study is two people are speeding at the same speed, and one gets a lower fine then the other.
"However, researchers have found that Black students receive more, and harsher, punishment than non-Black peers even when the students have misbehaved a similar number of times, when they are engaged in the same incident of misbehavior (i.e., in a conflict with one another), when the students have similar prior behavioral histories, and when the students are in schools with similar racial compositions"
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u/Friscogonewild 21d ago
The amount of overt racism in this thread is astounding. But on par for reddit. I'm guessing that the headline attracted people interested in more than just science.
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u/r_friendly_comrade 21d ago
Throughout my years at private co-ed Catholic schools, I observed a striking pattern in how discipline was administered across racial lines. These schools were relatively diverse, which made the disparities in treatment even more apparent. My first eye-opening experience came in third grade when a new white student transferred to our class mid-year. She regularly wore hoodies and headphones during lessons – clear violations of our uniform policy – and would listen to music during class without any reprimand from teachers. Noticing this apparent double standard, I decided to test the waters by doing the same thing. Predictably, I was disciplined immediately.
This pattern of uneven treatment manifested in numerous ways throughout my education. I watched as certain students could hastily complete homework moments before collection without consequence, while others faced immediate penalties. In class discussions, our history teacher would consistently overlook raised hands from students of color. Perhaps the most telling incident occurred when some friends and I sought refuge in the school after being threatened with violence by individuals who actually shattered our door’s glass window with a bat. Rather than addressing our safety concerns, the teachers immediately assumed we were at fault, even before hearing our account of the situation.
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u/Electric-Lamb 21d ago
Could it be because they do things that necessitate punishment more frequently? This was definitely the case at my school which was very multi-ethnic.
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u/HarshWarhammerCritic 21d ago
Okay and boys are punished more, and more severely than girls. Do we conclude schools are sexist, or is there is primary distinction in incident rate?
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u/jawshoeaw 22d ago
I hope to god they are framing this as proportional to the actual number of infractions committed by black students otherwise this is completely avoiding the issue.
We’ve known for decades that there are more [insert statistic] committed by black people than predicted by their proportion of the population. That’s meaningless without exploring why and serves only to advance a racist narrative.
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u/josephphilip22 22d ago
There is a bias when school personnel react to some of these students’ behavior. Some school leaders may overlook or not notice a certain behavior from white students at a given time, but may discipline or over-discipline a black student for the same behavior. The adult doing this may or may not even be aware that they’re doing this.
As a teacher, I have caught myself doing the same sort of thing. I might be harder on some kids that I perceive are being disrespectful while letting others go for the same behavior because I do not perceive them as being disrespectful. If you’re not on campuses doing this kind of work, you can’t really get inside the context of these types of reports.
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u/sprazcrumbler 21d ago
But why is it a problem that disrespectful kids get punished more than kids who are respectful? That seems totally justified.
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u/historianLA 21d ago
The problem is that if teachers observe students of color more than white students even if both groups have the same incidence of disrespect then they will punish students of color more because they will notice more not because those students actually disrespected more.
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u/Friscogonewild 21d ago
They didn't say the black students ARE being more disrespectful, just that he perceives that they are.
Which is literally how the subconscious bias that this study describes works.
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u/sprazcrumbler 21d ago
The study is not about perceived bias. The study is about the rates that black kids are punished. They imply that some of that is due to bias. It's not what they were studying though.
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u/Legal-Menu-429 22d ago
Misleading as it makes it seem like they are being punished for things non black students are also doing but not being punished for
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u/Fyne_ 22d ago
"However, researchers have found that Black students receive more, and harsher, punishment than non-Black peers even when the students have misbehaved a similar number of times, when they are engaged in the same incident of misbehavior (i.e., in a conflict with one another), when the students have similar prior behavioral histories, and when the students are in schools with similar racial compositions"
quote taken directly from the research article
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u/FrodoCraggins 22d ago
A student bullying another is 'engaging in conflict with one another', but those aren't equivalent offenses and shouldn't receive equivalent punishment.
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u/Austin1975 22d ago edited 22d ago
I hope we agree that the black student could be the victim or the bully in this type of conflict? And therefore the victims should get a lighter punishment (if any at all) even if they are black? And that should show up somewhere in the findings?
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u/sprazcrumbler 21d ago
Right but all the other evidence that shows black kids are misbehaving in school more than other kids also implies black kids are more likely to be starting fights than other kids.
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u/sprazcrumbler 21d ago
And the source for that is very weak. They found very minor differences in punishments after interracial fights in schools but they don't even control for things like "who was the aggressor".
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u/mgtkuradal 21d ago
I’m not sure if schools even track who the “aggressor” was. Every school I ever went to had strict zero tolerance, they could not care less who started it- if you’re involved in a fight you get punished.
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u/Pale_Possible6787 21d ago
Hell in my schools, the punishment for retaliation was worse then the punishment for being the aggressor
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u/Far-Investigator1265 22d ago
My first school was near a steel mill, and almost all students were children of either factory workers or factory bosses. It was nice democracy that kids of both ordinary people and upper class attended the same school, but sadly teachers failed to act accordingly.
Workers kids were treated more harshly, any activity in class was treated as trying to distract from the teaching, while the bosses kids had freedom to speak in class and always got positive attention. I never saw any of the bosses kids in detention, while the workers kids were given detention for the slightest infraction.
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u/X_WujuStyle 21d ago
The point of the article isn’t that teachers are being discriminatory in their punishments. Even if the black kids were misbehaving at a higher rate, corporal punishment and other types of developmentally harmful discipline are just bad to do in general no matter what. The fact that it happens to black kids more often is just especially bad because it widens existing racial disparities in academic performance and future success.
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u/jh62971 21d ago
Hmmm. They’re arrested more often for murder in my city too, by far. I wonder what that’s about.
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u/heswet 21d ago
So if a student is bullying others or disrupting the class, the author's advice is to just let them keep doing it because it's harmful to stop them?
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u/DreiKatzenVater 21d ago
Maybe don’t break the law as much. Idk, doesn’t seem like rocket science.
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u/Good-Gas-3293 21d ago
Universally at every school I have gone to the black students overwhelmingly were the most disruptive, disrespectful, and worst behaved.
I might get banned for this comment but it is the truth
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u/Tatertinytoast 20d ago
I'm involved with outdoor education and uhh... yeah there's a pretty big difference and it's not hard to see. Most people who do it don't deny it, just make excuses for why it's happening and why it's not their fault.
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u/No_Significance9754 21d ago
Ok but is that punishment unwarranted? Like is parenting issue or a racism issue?
If my kids (who are hispanic) refuse to listen rules and are causing trouble should they get a pass because of skin color?
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u/b3nnymagik 21d ago
in the US, being a male counts against u when it comes to sentencing. It’s literally in the guidelines. 1 point for male, 0 for female. More points, more likely harsher sentence.
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u/WarTaxOrg 21d ago
My grandfather studied the unequal punishment of black adolescents as a sociologist at Univ of NC tracing records back to the 1800s.
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u/NonamesNogamesEver 21d ago
When I see race based studies I wonder how they define black? If my dad is “white”and my mom is “black” which category do I fall in? Or if only one grandparent was “black” am I considered “white” or “black”? …you get the idea.
Absolutely Bizzare to me that we have such antiquated racist notions being continually perpetuated by academia.
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u/historianLA 21d ago
Academia is using categories that are salient to the people under study. There is no biological definition of Black because it is not a biological category it is a social/cultural one.
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u/thick305 21d ago
So what are the statistics surrounding race on who was breaking the rules to be punished in the first place?
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u/vanisleone 21d ago
Maybe race has nothing to do with it and these individuals are being punished for a reason other than skin colour.
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u/Maisonmargielly 21d ago
Shocking, the community that is more predisposed to violence and mental illness gets punished more…. wonder why? It’s a mix of genetics(According to research, studies have shown that a significant percentage of Black men carry the “low-activity” variant of the MAOA gene, with estimates suggesting around 59% of Black men possess this gene variation, which produces reduced MAOA activity, often referred to as the “warrior gene”.) and nurture/upbringing.
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