Study Finds Racial Disparity in ‘Zero Tolerance’ Enforcement

It started with one peanut, flung in close quarters on a school bus. Soon peanuts were flying back and forth as the 40 teenage passengers, laughing, went about their raucous, risky play. Then somebody misfired and hit the bus driver, who swerved abruptly, braked to a halt and flagged down a patrol car.

The entire busload of students was hauled to the county courthouse and threatened with arrest. But the next day, only five African American boys were charged with assault, slapped with a two-week suspension and banned for a year from riding the bus to their rural high school more than 20 miles away.

One boy’s mother, juggling work and child-care responsibilities, drove him to school. The rest had no other transportation. They dropped out.

The Mississippi peanut-throwing incident is cited in a new report that suggests that “zero tolerance” policies have exacerbated a long-standing pattern of black students being suspended and expelled from school more frequently than white students. That disparity has persisted for at least 25 years, though no national study has ever conclusively shown racial discrimination to be the cause.

The report, released last month by the Advancement Project, an advocacy group led by civil rights lawyers, contends that school administrators using zero tolerance policies have punished black and Latino students more strictly than they might have previously.

The authors suggest that serious sanctions have been used even when misbehavior falls far short of weapon or drug possession, which are the dangers the tough new policies were intended to address.

The report acknowledges that white students also have been disciplined more harshly under zero tolerance policies and includes examples of how individual white students have been affected.

But based on an analysis of federal statistics for 1996-97, the authors determined that “zero tolerance policies are more likely to exist in predominantly black and Latino school districts.”

For example, 85% of predominantly minority districts had zero tolerance for acts of violence such as fighting, while 71% of mostly white districts had similar policies.

“This disparity in the adoption of zero tolerance policies may also account for some of the racial disparities [at least on a national level] in disciplinary actions taken,” the report suggests.

Also last month, the Education Department released national statistics that showed blacks, who make up 17% of the nation’s students, made up 33% of the students suspended in 1998. The department also released the first official statistics on expulsion rates, which showed that 31% of the students kicked out of school were black.

“The disparity in expulsions is pretty much the same as the disparity in suspensions,” said Raymond C. Pierce, deputy assistant secretary for civil rights. “It’s still a matter of concern.”