Ducks On The Pond
09/14/2010
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Virginia Heffernan pointed out that the in-thing among bloggers is to "show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody ... setting off excerpts so they play as parody..."

Yes, but it's getting to be like shooting fish in a barrel.

So, without further ado:

Racial Disparity in School Suspensions by Sam Dillon New York Times

In many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys, according to a new study, which also found that black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls.

School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites.

The study analyzed four decades of federal Department of Education data on suspensions, with a special focus on figures from 2002 and 2006, that were drawn from 9,220 of the nation’s 16,000 public middle schools.

The study, ”Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

The co-authors, Daniel J. Losen, [Email him]a senior associate at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Russell Skiba, [Email him] a professor at Indiana University, said they focused on suspensions from middle schools because recent research had shown that students’ middle school experience was crucial for determining future academic success.

One recent study of 400 incarcerated high school freshmen in Baltimore found that two-thirds had been suspended at least once in middle school.

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