Beyond anecdotes and authority
The need for data in debating school discipline disparities
Last Friday the AP published a story called Black students are still kicked out of school at higher rates despite reforms. This story highlights some of mainstream media’s biggest issues — it is innumerate, preferring anecdotes to data; it appeals to authority; and it makes some assumptions that it never explicitly states nor defends.
The story asserts that black students are disciplined at higher rates than other students and are punished more harshly for the same misbehavior.
The journalists share the story of a black high school student who seems to have been unfairly disciplined: “Before he was suspended, Zaire Byrd was thriving. He acted in school plays, played on the football team and trained with other athletes. He had never been suspended before — he’d never even received detention. But when Byrd got involved in a fight after school one day, none of that seemed to matter to administrators. (…) After a disciplinary hearing, they sent him to an alternative school. The experience nearly derailed his education.”
Let’s leave aside the fact that we don’t know if this portrayal is a fair representation of the facts. That’s besides the point — we have no idea how often students, Black or otherwise, are unfairly disciplined. A single example has no value. As a reader, to be able to make up my mind, I need the following information: How many students are suspended or expelled every year? Out of how many total students? What are the reasons for those disciplinary measures? Unfortunately, the AP doesn’t provide any data that can help a curious reader understand the severity of the misbehavior.
They then write “in [dozen of Minnesota] districts (…) almost 80% of disciplinary consequences issued for subjective reasons, like ‘disruptive behavior,’ were going to students of color.” Again they don’t provide a breakdown of those subjective reasons, or report the rate of disciplinary consequences issued for non-subjective reasons.
If one wanted to play the opposite game and use anecdotes instead of statistics, one could rely on the AP itself:
At a San Francisco middle school, a teacher was punched repeatedly by a student and “suffered a concussion, a dislocated jaw, chipped teeth and hearing loss.”
At the same school, “fights broke out almost daily among students,” and “packs of students would barge into classrooms, disrupting lessons and sometimes destroying school property.”
In Las Vegas, an “attack on a teacher (…) left her unconscious in her classroom.”
These don’t sound like “subjective” reasons to discipline a student. But using anecdotes is too easy. We need numbers.
After providing anecdotes, the AP journalists then appeal to the authority of institutions and advocacy groups. They interviewed a policy director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an education advocate, a policy leader at the Movement for Black Lives, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, and a director at the Advancement Project. All of them support the thesis that black students are unfairly punished.
Throughout the article, there is an implicit assumption that black students should be disciplined at about the same frequency as other students. The story keeps comparing the proportion of suspended students who are black to their demographic representation, implicitly implying the former should be equal to the latter. For example: “In Georgia, Black students like Byrd make up slightly more than one-third of the population. But they account for the majority of students who receive punishments.” Later in the article: “And in California, the suspension rate for Black students fell from 13% in 2013 to 9% a decade later — still three times higher than the white suspension rate.”
Journalists should spell out their assumptions and provide their reasoning behind them. For instance, I’d appreciate reading the following: “Black students classroom behavior is comparable to other students and therefore black students should be disciplined at the same rate as other students.”
Someone might support the AP’s approach by claiming that the ends justify the means: The goal is to help black students, so who cares if the article is not rigorous? I won’t address the obvious trust issue that this raises. I’d instead argue that, if black students behavior in the classroom is actually worse than other students, preventing students with poor behavior from being disciplined actually hurts black students the most. When “packs of students would barge into classrooms,” the victims are conscientious students who try to learn. Given that black students tend to cluster in the same schools, the losers are conscientious black students.
Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT to generate the subtitle of this post.
This AP story is what you get when a journalist starts with assumption that unequal outcomes is evidence of racism. It quickly becomes a circular argument.