In the United States, African American children continue to face more barriers to success than any other race, new research suggests.

A new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation lists 12 categories that can contribute to a child’s success, including enrolment in preschool, living with two parents and distance from the poverty line. Under these metrics, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders scored highest (with a total score of 776 out of 1000), followed by whites (704).“It’s not just poverty, not just that black kids are worse behaved. It is important to see that there is something going on that is pervasive, chronic and systematic.” -- David Osher

African American children not only scored the lowest under this ranking, but with a score of just 345 they were found to have less than half of the indicators for potential success as other races in the United States.

“We know that the current status of poor kids is bad, the current status of black kids is bad, and the combination of poverty and racial discrimination is particularly toxic,” David Osher, vice-president of the American Institute for Research, told IPS. “But we also know enough to make a difference, like the emerging understanding that kicking kids out of schools is not a good solution.”

Osher refers to new civil rights-related data released by the U.S. Department of Education last month. These findings suggest that African American students are being suspended from school at inordinate levels, even at the very earliest grades.

While a fifth of public preschool students in the United States are African American, nearly half of all preschool students who received more than one out-of-school preschool suspension are African American. White students, on the other hand, represent 43 percent of public preschool enrolment but make up just 23 percent of preschoolers given out-of-school suspension.

“This data collection shines a clear, unbiased light on places that are delivering on the promise of an equal education for every child and places where the largest gaps remain,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on releasing the new data. “In all, it is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed.”

The study marked the first time that a federal initiative known as the Civil Rights Data Collection included preschool, but the numbers reflect similar trends at all levels of lower and secondary school.

“Black children are not behaving worse,” Jim Eichner, the managing director of programmes at the Advancement Project, an advocacy group, told IPS. “But they are being punished and punished more severely.”

Zero tolerance

While the reasons children are suspended in preschool are not reported, anecdotally such actions appear to be being taken for relatively minor infractions, such as like “not paying attention, being late or talking back,” Eichner says.

Out-of-school suspension has multiple and varied negative impacts on the student and school community. Not only do students miss class time, but they tend to receive the message they are not welcome in school.

Such actions also tend to create new mistrust between the student and teachers that can challenge future learning.

In addition, out-of-school suspension can jeopardise a family’s income if a parent needs to leave work. Or, if a parent cannot leave work, the child may not be sent to a well-supervised home.

Finally, some advocates worry that excluding a child fails to teach him or her how to manage the behaviour that originally caused the problem.

Suspending children at such a young age comes from a “zero tolerance” discipline policy. Such an approach stems from anti-drugs policy adopted by the U.S. criminal justice system during the 1980s, and brought into schools as an attempt to combat increased violence and school shootings.

Yet the broader approach has been seen as something of a failure by the U.S. criminal justice system, a view increasingly being adopted by those working in the school system, as well.

Both Osher and Eichner, for instance, are involved in studying and promoting alternatives to zero-tolerance policies. Eichner particularly points to restorative justice techniques that have students work together to mend any problems, adding that punitive atmospheres have been found to harm all students.

Implicit bias

Although the Civil Rights Data Collection does not investigate why these disparities occur, Osher and Eichner both explain that this is one effect of overarching social, economic and political structures.

“There are disparities in all aspects of youth life: education, juvenile justice and corrections, health. When you control for any of the explanations people come up with, they don’t work,” Osher says.

“It’s not just poverty, not just that black kids are worse behaved. It is important to see that there is something going on that is pervasive, chronic and systematic.”

He notes that here are several characteristics related to classrooms from which more kids are suspended. These include class size, the ratio between teachers and students, teacher stress levels, and the availability of mental health consultation.

Both Osher and Eichner also note the role of implicit bias in teachers.

“People can be very well-intended, but in moments of stress they can make a subtle set of calculations that are probably intuitive on whether to get more help or whether to tell the kid to get out,” said Osher.

This implicit bias appears to be particularly notable when dealing with young black preschool students. Researchers have found, for instance, that people tend to overestimate the age of black students, adding as much as three years, thus perceiving the student as less childlike and less innocent.

The first step in ending implicit bias is to name it and talk about it, scholars say.

Some are working on “peer coaching” models, for instance, in which teachers film themselves teaching. Peers can then point out ways a teacher might be acting with bias – and recommend ways to overcome it.

New approaches like this make Osher optimistic that ongoing today’s racial disparity can be decreased.

“These indicators don’t have to be predictors of the future,” he says. “Rather, they’re indicators for what public policy should do.”

A homeless man looks from his makeshift playground shelter on Third Street in Detroit, Michigan. Credit: Jeffrey Smith/cc by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

President Barack Obama is vowing to spend his remaining time in office encouraging bipartisan efforts to strengthen the U.S. middle class by ensuring it is open to those from all backgrounds.

“Thanks to the grit and resilience of the American people, we’ve cleared away the rubble from the financial crisis and begun to lay a new foundation for a stronger, more durable economic growth,” the president said in a major address Wednesday. “We are not a people who allow chance of birth to decide life’s winners and losers.”“In the civil rights movement, some blacks would refer to whites as allies, but in this fight for America’s soul and dignity and economic fairness, there are no allies. We are all in this thing.” -- Congressman Keith Ellison

Yet a new analysis is suggesting that a half-century after the apex of the U.S. civil rights movement, relatively little progress has been made in education, poverty and wages.

“The outlook of young people today would be so much different if they knew that when they finished high school or college, they could get a job,” Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy Programme at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, said at a symposium this week.

“For young people of colour in particular, when they face such high levels of unemployment, it increases their changes of getting tangled in the criminal justice system.”

According to a new EPI study, from the 1960s until today, African American unemployment has been 2.0 to 2.5 times the white unemployment rate. In 2012, the black unemployment rate was 14 percent, 2.1 times what it was for whites and higher than the average national unemployment rate of 13.1 percent during the recession.

“We have to go from protest to action to outcome,” Ernest Green, a former assistant secretary of labour, told IPS. “What the [EPI] is doing is important – it’s obvious that in this atmosphere, no one person or organisation can carry the full load.”

Even when the national unemployment rate has been low, the rate for African Americans has remained high, according to the study. In 2000, for instance, when the national unemployment rate was at four percent and the white unemployment rate was 3.1 percent, the unemployment rate for non-Hispanic blacks was 7.6 percent.

The study’s release was timed to coincide with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a touchstone 1963 event that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to Washington to urge equal civil and economic rights for African Americans. At the event, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famed “I Have a Dream” speech.

“We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as we should be, and yet we have a racial wealth gap that’s growing,” Clarence Lang, a professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas, said at Monday’s symposium.

“We also have an unemployment rate that is catastrophic – if it characterised the majority of the country, we would declare a national disaster.”

Racial profiling

According to the EPI researchers, the lowest black poverty rate on record was 22.5 percent in 2000, meaning that nearly a quarter of the African American population was still living at or below the poverty line. When the economic downturn began in December 2007, that rate rose to 27.6 percent, while the white poverty rate was only 9.8 percent.

Currently, federal policies aren’t doing enough to stem these figures, the report suggests.

In order to lift a family out of poverty, a full-time worker would have to be paid a minimum wage of 13 dollars an hour, experts have said. Yet the current minimum wage, after adjusting for inflation, is 7.25 dollars per hour.

Education has long been highlighted as one of the top ways to combat the high black unemployment and poverty rates, although the EPI study outlines several problems with this approach. During the 1960s, for instance, more than three-quarters of black children attended majority-black schools, while today almost the exact same proportion attends majority non-white schools.

Segregated schools have long been found to lack equal resources as schools with majority white students, which the EPI suggests violates the U.S. belief in equal opportunity.

According to William Spriggs, the chief economist at AFL-CIO, one of the country’s largest labour unions, education is only one of the solutions to this problem.

He cited the recent U.S. court case in which a neighbourhood watch member shot and killed a black teenager in Florida and was acquitted, arguably largely due to a law allowing the use of deadly force if one feels threatened, as an example of the race culture that  still exists.

“What people need to understand about the [Trayvon] Martin case is what that jury was saying about young black men,” Spriggs said. “Do you really have to ask why young black men are having a hard time getting jobs? In the African American community, yes, education is important, but there is a lot more going on.”

According to Lang, one of the key problems being little discussed in the public debate today is the general notion that a black youth walking around at night is “up to no good”.

“If we want to talk about what the key issue is, we have to talk about [racial profiling],” Lang told IPS. “It affects job prospects, it affects families and, indeed, it affects someone’s ability to walk around minding his or her own business and not being harassed.”

Such profiling, critics say, re-introduces a divisiveness that many saw as being weakened during the March on Washington and related awareness-raising of the 1960s.

“We are at a moment when there are no allies, there is just ‘us’,” Keith Ellison, a member of the U.S. Congress, said Monday. “In the civil rights movement, some blacks would refer to whites as allies, but in this fight for America’s soul and dignity and economic fairness, there are no allies. We are all in this thing.”