Letter: Racial conclusions don’t add up

You reported on Feb. 4 (“Officials: Biases affect how students punished”) that Beaufort County School District officials discovered a racial bias in disciplinary decisions by administrators and teachers. I am skeptical about the soundness of that conclusion, which itself seems biased by liberal orthodoxy.

The school board’s statistical data showed that African American and Hispanic students received a disproportionate number of in-school and out-of-school suspensions as compared to Caucasians. Interestingly, however, the data also revealed that disciplinary decisions were in fact meted out consistently across “racial lines.” That is, disciplinary decisions depended on the label given to the incident, regardless of the student’s race.

To reconcile the discrepancy between the cross-racial consistency in punishment and infraction labels on the one hand, and the racial differential in the number of punishments on the other, the school district officials suggested expediently that there must be an inherent incidence-labeling bias in the system. Ergo, teachers and school administrators must be racially biased.

The trouble is that this supposition has no empirical evidence cited in the data presented. The attribution of “unconscious racism” in teachers and administrators (whether that exists or not), while convenient, is potentially fallacious and unfair, without providing data-based evidence of actual labeling practices.

Differences in students’ in-school behavior are to a large extent a function of socio-cultural circumstances that affect all races (such as single-parent households, lack of parent involvement in child rearing, parental drug addiction, domestic violence, etc.). These circumstances are probably much more of a factor than race.

This story was originally published February 7, 2017 at 12:49 PM with the headline "Letter: Racial conclusions don’t add up."