School officials in Baltimore County are unnerved by it; in Howard County, they're studying it. In Anne Arundel, they're under a federal agreement to fix it. The problem they and many other school systems share is a huge disparity in the levels of school disciplinary actions against black and white students. Black students are suspended at triple the rate of whites nationally.
To say this is a volatile issue is to understate the case. Some observers, particularly black parents and scholars, believe the schools have difficulty communicating with black youths. Teachers are loathe to take the blame for yet another social problem dumped in their laps. Meanwhile, communities are clamoring for more effective discipline.
One can argue the cause of this imbalance or whether it deserves fixing. What one can't dispute is the dramatic gap between black and white suspensions. In Baltimore County, for example, a full third of all black males in secondary schools were suspended at some point last year -- a figure reminiscent of the stunning finding several years ago that more than half of all young black men living in Baltimore city were at some stage in the criminal justice system. (In Baltimore, where four of every five students are black, the rate of black suspensions is higher than whites proportionately, although the city removes from school far fewer students overall than most jurisdictions.)
