children out of school in america - University of Tennessee Digital ...

dren were suspended. The next highest rates of suspension
occurred among children of Spanish origin:
4.5 percent of Puerto Rican children and 3.9 percent
of Mexican-American children.
At the secondary school level, black students
in our survey were suspended more than three
times as often as white students - 12.8 percent compared
with 4.1 percent. We also found 9.4 percent
of the Puerto Rican students, 7.1 percent of the
Mexican-American students and 1.2 percent of the
Portuguese students suspended.
OCR data for our survey districts show eight of
the 15 districts reported suspending 5 percent or
more of their black students. In two of the eight
- Denver and Richland County No. 1 - approximately
15 percent of the black students were suspended.
Only five districts reported suspending 5
percent or more of their white students.
Expu.lsions and suspensions are frequently a unilateral
process with little or no chance for children
or their parents to be heard. And they are often
imposed so arbitrarily that they lack all semblance
of fairness. For example:
-In Macon, Georgia, a 16-year-old black youngster
was expelled for the rest of the school term
(three months) because he could not pay $5.00
to replace a ruler he had broken accidentally in
shop class.
-In New Bedford, Massachusetts, a l7-year-old
white boy was suspended for two days when he
left the school grounds to help an old man
change a fiat tire. When his mother called the
school to inquire about the incident, she was
told her son had done a good deed but the
rule was that he had to be suspended for leaving
school grounds and it could not be broken.
Whether children are "allowed" to be out, "exempted"
out, "counseled" out, "pushed" out, not
permitted to enroll, expelled, suspended or "encouraged"
to drop out, the result is the same: exclusion
from school. What does this do to children and to
society?
For children, it means being outcasts. Schools in
effect say to a child ". . . that he is unfit to be where
society has determined all acceptable citizens of his
age should be."9 What do children think of themselves
in that position? What do they believe they
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can become? Where do they get the confidence and
skills to succeed in society? All they get is a label
- dummy, truant, dropout, retarded - and the opportunity
to miss growing up as more privileged
children do in America. By treating them so, schools
make it more likely that these children will grow up
to be illiterate, unemployed, delinquent, rebellious,
and dependent. And for society, it means that
enormous amounts of services will be inevitable to
remediate children's needs ignored today.
That certain groups of children have been singled
out for special deprivation of education should not
encourage the complacence of those outside these
groups. There are far too many children out of
school to isolate or to forget. It is important to care
about the children who are excluded from school
not only for themselves but also because the attitudes
and practices that exclude them affect all children
who attend public schools in this country. Most of
us think that exclusion because of discipline, mislabeling,
pregnancy, or truancy, happens to "other"
children, never to "ours." We try to overlook the
problem, since we tell ourselves it does not affect us.
But it does. Schools that carelessly mislabel poor
children as retarded also carelessly mislabel rniddleclass
children as dyslexic or hyperkinetic. Systems
that have inadequate or segregated special education
classes stigmatize and fail to help all children with
learning disabilities, regardless of their social class.
Teachers who cannot tolerate diversity may be as
unable to enrich the program for especially bright
children as they are unable to cope with especially
slow ones. Even if "your" child is not one who is
excluded, he sees the processes at work and learns
the values and expectations that are communicated.
Schools that punish unfairly teach both the victim
and the observer injustice.
We are aware that some people have doubts that
our schools can effectively foster equality and promote
upward mobility. This report does not address
these complex issues. It rests on the more fundamental
and indisputable premise that total denial of
schooling is an almost certain guarantee of failure
in American society. Even the most skeptical of
9 William Buss, "Procedural Due Process for School Discipline:
Probing the Constitutional Outline," 119 University
of Pennsylvania Law Review (February 1971), p. 577.