Study: Black Boys Nearly Three Times More Likely Than White Boys to be Suspended from School

There's another startling study about black males in this country that deserves our attention. The study, entitled “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization, found that in many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys. The study also found that black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls.

School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites.

The study analyzed four decades of federal Department of Education data on suspensions, with a special focus on figures from 2002 and 2006, that were drawn from 9,220 of the nation’s 16,000 public middle schools.

The co-authors, Daniel J. Losen, a senior associate at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Russell Skiba, a professor at Indiana University, said they focused on suspensions from middle schools because recent research had shown that students’ middle school experience was crucial for determining future academic success. Source: NY Times

The reality is that statistics are against black males in this country and each parent must play an active and integral role in the education of their children. My husband and I are the parents of two boys. Their education and well-being is of paramount importance. We teach our children the value of a solid education and being productive members of society. My boys play club soccer, but they don't aspire to be professional soccer players only. They want to be an architect and anesthesiologist respectively. They both read every night before going to bed. They both get good grades in school and we continue to play an active role in their school activities. Though I realize that there are many black parents out there like us, the reality is that there are some who don't give their children the tools to succeed due to a host of societal and psychological issues.