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01/17/2006:

"Black Students Under Fire: Racial Profiling in Public Schools"

More black students than ever are getting the boot from public schools. Things are so bad that the NAACP plans to hold public hearings nationally on the racial disparities in school discipline. It's none to soon. In a report on school discipline, the U.S. Dept. of Education in 1999 found that while blacks made up less than twenty percent of the nation's public school students they comprised nearly one out of three students kicked out of the schools.

Five years later nothing had changed. In a report the Children's Defense Fund branded "Educational Apartheid in America's Public Schools," it found that black students are still expelled and suspended in disproportionate numbers to whites. And that's not all. A recent study by the Advancement Project and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on school discipline procedures in Denver, Chicago and Palm Beach County, Florida found that black students are getting expelled or suspended in high numbers, and many of them also wind up in police stations and courtrooms after being expelled.

In the past year black students have gotten dumped from classrooms or hauled off to jail for using a cell phone, talking in class, or simply calling names. And those being severely punished are getting younger. The arrest and manhandling by police of a five year old in Florida earlier this year ignited a firestorm of protest. The child's arrest cast an even harsher glare on the stiff punishment school officials routinely dish out to black students who allegedly misbehave.
counterpunch.org