Civil Rights review of US Education

Posted by on March 31, 2014

Federal data confirm the obvious

In the first analysis in nearly 15 years of information from the country’s 97,000 public schools, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has found a pattern of inequality along racial lines, reports Motoko Rich in The New York Times. Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. A quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer Algebra II courses, and a third of those schools do not offer chemistry. Black students are four times as likely as white students — and Latino students are twice as likely — to attend schools where one out of every five teachers does not meet all state teaching requirements. Even as early as preschool, close to half of all children suspended more than once are African-American. The Education Department’s report found that black, Latino, American Indian, and Native Alaskan students are three times as likely as white students to attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers. And in nearly a quarter of school districts with at least two high schools, the teacher-salary gap between schools with the highest concentrations of black and Latino students and those with the lowest is more than $5,000 a year.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/21/us/school-data-finds-pattern-of-inequality-along-racial-lines.html