On Tuesday, the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights released a stockpile of statistics for the 2013-14 school year that highlight racial disparities among the 50 million students across the nation’s more than 95,000 public schools. Even as early as preschool, the data shows, the experience of black students is strikingly different from that of their white classmates.
Despite a 20 percent overall drop in out-of-school suspensions since the 2011-12 school year, for example, black students were still nearly four times more likely to be suspended than white students in 2013-14. Beyond telling data on school discipline, the OCR report sheds light on racial gaps in access to certain classes, the caliber of teachers, and enrollment in gifted programs.
This fall, the office will release data for individual schools. For now, here’s a snapshot of what these inequities looked like in classrooms across the United States.
