Useful background reading for this page include “Misunderstanding of Statistics Leads to Misguided Law Enforcement Policies, ” Amstat News(Dec. 2012), “The Paradox of Lowering Standards,” Baltimore Sun (Aug. 5, 2013), “Things government doesn’t know about racial disparities,” The Hill (Jan. 28, 2014), and “Race and Mortality Revisited,” Society (July/Aug. 2014).All address the fact that contrary to the view promoted by the Departments of Education and Justice that reducing discipline rates will tend to reduce racial and ethnic differences in discipline rates, reducing discipline rates will tend to increase relative racial differences in discipline rates (though reduce relative differences in rates of avoiding discipline).My recent “The Perverse Enforcement of Fair Lending Law,” Mortgage Banking (May 2014) addresses the same issue in the lending context.The statistical issues have also been recently addressed in my November 17, 2014 amicus curiae brief in Texas Department of Housing and Community Development, et al. v.The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., Supreme Court No. 13-1731.
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A December 22, 2014 MinnPost article titled “In Minnesota, the discipline gap is not just an urban phenomenon” discussed racial differences in discipline rates in Minnesota.The title reflects the notion that racial disparities in discipline rates would be not be as large in suburbs as in cities.But, as explained, in the Suburban Disparities subpage mentioned in the introduction, relative differences in discipline rates will commonly be larger in suburbs than cities simply because discipline rates are lower in suburbs than in cities.
The article also referenced a Hechinger study that found that “though suspension and expulsion rates fell statewide from 2010-11 to 2012-13, they dropped faster for white students than they did for black students in all 73 districts that had data available.”The corollary to the pattern whereby the rarer an outcome the greater tends to be the relative difference in experiencing (though the smaller tends to be the relative difference in avoiding it) is a pattern whereby when an outcome generally declines, the group with the lower baseline tends to experience a larger proportionate reduction in its rate of experiencing the outcome (while the other group tends to experience a larger proportionate increase in rates of avoiding the outcome).Correspondingly, the relative difference between rates of experiencing the outcome will increase.
Even though the pattern of larger proportion declines for whites than blacks is consistent with the patterns described in the references, it is a bit surprising that one would observe the pattern in all 73 districts.But it is another case where statewide declines in suspensions and expulsions were accompanied by increased relative racial differences in rates of experiencing those outcomes.