James P. Scanlan, Attorney at Law

Montgomery County, MD Disparities

(August 5, 2014)

Prefatory note:  This subpage is related to the California Disparities, Maryland Disparities, Los Angeles SWPBS, Denver Disparities, Minneapolis Disparities, St. Paul Disparities, DOE Equity Report, Beaverton, OR Disparities, and the Suburban Disparities subpages of the Discipline Disparities page of jpscanlan.com.  The former seven subpages address studies showing that when discipline rates were reduced in the referenced jurisdictions, relative racial/ethnic differences in discipline rates increased.  The eight subpages addresses a Department of Education study showing that relative differences in expulsions are smaller in districts with zero tolerance policies than in districts without zero tolerance policies.  The eighth subpage  addresses the fact that relative racial differences in discipline rates tend to be greater in suburbs than in central cities simply because discipline rates tend to be lower in suburbs and in central cities. The measurement issues are also treated at length on the IDEA Data Center Disproportionality Guide subpage of the Discipline Disparities page.

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/August 2014) (forthcoming).  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 relative 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 off avoiding discipline).  My recent “The Perverse Enforcement of Fair Lending Law,” Mortgage Banking (May 2014) the same issue in the lending context.

A July 31, 2014 Washington Post article titled “High school suspensions plummet in Montgomery, falling nearly 37 percent” discussed reductions in suspension rates in the Montgomery County, Maryland School District, stating that while the gap has narrowed, suspensions of minority students continue to occur in disproportionate numbers.  After discussion reflecting the general view that reducing suspensions, the article stated:

    "Daniel J. Losen, a researcher who studies disparities in suspension, said Montgomery’s numbers show a narrowing of the suspension gap between black and white high school students. In 2012, for example, the rate of suspensions per 100 students was 12.1 for blacks and 2.4 for whites. It narrowed last year to 7.6 for blacks and 1.3 for whites, he said.

    "For Hispanics, suspensions per 100 students fell from 5.8 in 2012 to 3.2 last year. For Asian Americans, suspensions per 100 students fell from 1.3 in 2012 to 0.8 last year. The gap narrowed between students with and without disabilities. Suspensions per 100 students with disabilities went from 12.3 to 6.9 during the same two-year period.

    "'It’s still a problem, but they’ve made progress,' Losen said. 'Whatever they are doing, if they continue to do it, it could help a lot.'”

Losen’s group, the Center for Rights and Remedies of the Civil Rights Project of UCLA, commonly measures discipline disparities in terms of absolute differences between rates.  But the groups’ publications never note that the Department of Education measures disparities in terms of relative differences in adverse outcomes and has shown no recognition that any measure tends to be systematically affected by the prevalence of an outcome or that, given the rate ranges at issues, reductions in discipline rates tend to result in increased relative differences and reduced absolute differences between rates of whites and minorities, irrespective of any change in the strength of the forces causing the rates to differ.

The table below shows that for both blacks and Hispanics, reductions in discipline rates exhibited the standard patterns whereby during a period of substantial reductions in discipline rates, relative differences in discipline rates increased, relative differences in rates of avoiding discipline decreased, and absolute differences decreased.  The EES figures show that, to the extent the strength of the forces causing rates to differ can be measured, it remained essentially unchanged for the black-white difference and decreased slightly for the Hispanic-white difference.

Table 1.  Black and white and Hispanic and white suspension rates in Montgomery County with measures of difference [ref b5605 a1]