When you look at the break down for why students get suspended based on ethnicity, you see some interesting patterns.
I forgot to label this, but these are out-of-school suspensions by ethnicity, out of 100%. There are two real trends here that can be seen in the green and red bars. African American students are suspended at a higher percentage for violence with injury than white or latino students. Conversely, White students are suspended much more often than African American students for drugs.
What does this mean? There are so many possible explanation for these trends, that I also wanted to look at in-school suspensions.
Here, something interesting: African American students are given in-school suspension for “other defiance” at almost twice the rate that white students are. Conversely, white students are again suspended at significantly higher rates for drugs.
In a perfect world, these differences would simply be consequences of random differences in student action. Unfortunately, I feel that these differences might be caused by difference in treatment of African American, Latino and White students by schools. It seems to me that this data shows that “other defiance” by white students may be tolerated a bit more than it is tolerated for African American students.