Opinion: Suspend suspensions

In Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, black students are five times more likely to be suspended than white students. Black students are also three times more likely to be sent to the office than white students.

Mike Kelley, chairman of the district’s Board of Education, said he thought the disparity in those numbers was frightening.

“Some patterns that, frankly, were kind of silly,” he said.

There is no reason to believe Kelley doesn’t mean well, and perhaps, on the fly, he made a mistake in his choice of words, but this problem goes well beyond “silly.”

This is not a problem specific to Chapel Hill or Carrboro. Research nationally suggests that disparate practices of discipline in school are related to racial discrimination in the system of mass incarceration, perhaps the most shameful social justice issue facing the nation. This problem is commonly referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline for the continuity and similarity between their respective punitive approaches.

Chapel Hill and Carrboro are not immune, and given the horrifying scale of the issue, the response of the district to this injustice has been inadequate.

State Rep. Graig Meyer, D-Orange, suggested that the district’s awareness of these numbers gives it a leg up on other districts in tackling the issue.

But merely being aware of the problem and willing to talk about it, while a good first step, is a woefully inadequate response to the severity of the problem.

The trajectories of the lives of young black students are being dragged down by racism at institutions that are tasked with the sacred responsibility to educate, not institute social control. Problems of this scale require a more robust response than increased conversation.

Out-of-school suspensions should be ended. There is no strong evidence that these suspensions increase future discipline, but there is evidence that they have a major effect in pushing students out of education and toward the criminal justice system.

But out-of-school suspensions are neither the beginning nor end of the problem. The implicit racial biases of teachers should be addressed with training for teachers designed to make them conscious of their disciplinary biases.

Additionally, Chapel Hill Town Council member Maria Palmer is correct to call on the district to make the hiring of people of color as teachers a priority.

The pressure on teachers should not be ignored, and this issue shouldn’t be used to undercut how valuable the services they perform are. Meyer was correct to emphasize that teachers shouldn’t shoulder all of the blame for a society-wide problem.

Nonetheless, that cannot be an excuse for inaction, underreaction or delayed response. This is a crisis, and the district cannot be happy with only being aware of the problem and talking about it in serious terms. The trajectories of students’ lives are at stake.