User:NightHeron/sandbox
Controversy over efforts to reduce racial disparities
[edit]In 2014 the Obama administration issued guidance that urged schools to reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions, especially of minority students, thereby stemming the school-to-prison pipeline. During the Trump administration, in December 2018, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded these guidelines.[1] In doing so, she cited research by John Paul Wright and four coauthors that purported to show that the disparate rates of suspensions and expulsions were due not to racism, but rather to prior poor behavior by black students.[2][3]
Lead author John Paul Wright has advocated for the fringe view that black people evolved to be genetically inferior to white people.[4]: 151 In the study cited by DeVos, Wright et al. assumed that teachers' reporting of behavior was accurate and unbiased. They concluded that "the racial gap in suspensions was completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student --- a finding never before reported in the literature."[3] However, other scholars have found implicit bias and racial discrimination in teachers' interpretation of behavior of black students as more threatening than similar behavior by white students.[5][6][7][8]
Education researcher Francis Huang found other methodological flaws in the study by Wright et al., such as sample bias (comparison between a sample of 4,101 students and a reduced sample of 2,737 students who were not representative of the earlier sample) and their use of the Social Skills Rating Scale as a proxy for evaluating prior behavior.[9][10] Correcting for sample bias in the study by Wright et al. led Huang to conclude that their data confirmed what earlier researchers had found regarding racial disparities in punishment that could not be accounted for by actual differences in behavior.
- ^ Camera, Lauren (18 December 2018). "White House: Scrap Obama-Era School Discipline Guidance". Retrieved 2 March 2021.
- ^ Camera, Lauren (28 March 2019). "The race research cited by DeVos". Retrieved 2 March 2021.
- ^ a b Wright, John Paul; Morgan, Mark Alden; Coyne, Michelle A.; Beaver, Kevin M.; Barnes, J. C. (2014-05-01). "Prior problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in school suspensions". Journal of Criminal Justice. 42 (3): 257–266. doi:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2014.01.001. ISSN 0047-2352.
- ^ Wright, John Paul (2009). "Inconvenient Truths: Science, Race, and Crime". In Walsh, Anthony; Beaver, Kevin M. (eds.). Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research. Routledge. pp. 137–153. ISBN 9780415989442.
Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality.... Evolution, however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps to explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits, such as a higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover, evolutionary theory helps to explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm can explain these inconvenient truths.
- ^ McCarthy, John D.; Hoge, Dean R. (1987). "The social construction of school punishment: Racial disadvantage out of universalistic process". Social Forces. 65 (4): 1101–1120. doi:10.1093/sf/65.4.1101.
- ^ Gilliam, Walter S.; Maupin, Angela N.; Reyes, Chin R.; Accavitti, Maria; Shic, Frederick (2016). "Do early educators' implicit biases regarding sex and race relate to behavior expectations and recommendations of preschool expulsions and suspensions?". Yale University Child Study Center. 9 (28).
- ^ Okonofua, Jason A.; Eberhardt, Jennifer L. (2015). "Two strikes: Race and the disciplining of young students". Psychological Science. 26: 617–624. doi:10.1177/0956797615570365.
- ^ Owens, Jayanti; McLanahan, Sara S. (2020). "Unpacking the drivers of racial disparities in school suspension and expulsion". Social Forces. 98 (4): 1548–1577. doi:10.1093/sf/soz095.
- ^ Huang, Francis L. (2018). "Do Black students misbehave more? Investigating the differential involvement hypothesis and out-of-school suspensions". The Journal of Educational Research. 111: 284–294. doi:10.1080/00220671.2016.1253538.
- ^ Huang, Francis L. (2020). "Prior problem behaviors do not account for the racial suspension gaps". Educational Researcher. 49 (7). doi:10.3102/0013189X20932474.