The recent increase in violence at Urbana High School culminated last month with a seven-on-three brawl that led to arrests of students and a parent. It also involved a teacher knocked unconscious. This has shined a light on the racial disparity in area schools, the attempts at restorative justice reforms, and sincere concerns for student safety and education by a divided public. The Urbana District #116 School Board of Education is the local government body primarily facing these issues. And there's an election for members on it going on
right now (voting information
here, candidate guide
here).
The Cheat Sheet's goal is to remain non-partisan and help anyone interested in getting involved in local government in finding out how (the first step is to
attend a meeting). Area residents have diverse views on these topics that are often passionate and in opposition. It involves their children's safety and often fundamentals of their political philosophies, e.g. individualism, fairness, equity, etc. Without taking sides, this post hopes to connect people to information they may find helpful to understand the various perspectives.
Quick "Jump to" links:
Background of this specific incident from the News-Gazette:
In an email sent to Urbana staff Tuesday, Principal Deloris Brown explained that the "factions" responsible for the altercation "have had issues stemming from middle school and throughout the school year."
Brown added that the issues also trace their roots to an incident in late July in which a 14-year-old Urbana High student was critically injured when he was shot in the back while riding on the handlebars of bicycle being pedaled by another teen in the 1300 block of Beech Street.
"More recently, on this past Friday, the two factions had an incident outside of school and it escalated in the building yesterday," she wrote. "In addition, there was a shooting this past weekend that allegedly involved our students, but UPD did not have specific information to provide to admin yesterday." - Principal: 'Factions' to blame for Urbana High fights - 2/5/2019
And from
Urbana High Principal Deloris Brown told staff via email Tuesday that the fight had its roots in a July 20 incident in which a 14-year-old student was shot in the back while riding on the handlebars of bike that another teen was pedaling on Beech Street. She said issues between the groups of students involved had been ongoing since middle school.
She said the two rival groups of boys had been involved in a conflict Friday that climaxed with Monday's lunchtime fight, with seven members of one group facing off against three others. - Urbana interim superintendent: 'There will be consequences' - 2/6/2019
Legal and court information in the aftermath:
Background on why there's an interim superintendent:
Board on Urbana schools: Money mismanaged, orders ignored
...
But documents obtained by News-Gazette Media via a Freedom of Information Act request detail the board's reasons for the demotions.
In [former superintendent Don Owen's] case, a controversial decision last March to eliminate the dean positions at the middle and high schools directly violated a number of board directives, including one to "maintain" those positions...
At the time, Owen said he made the moves because of racial disparity revealed in the district's discipline data — he said it showed that students of color were being disciplined more harshly or more often than their white counterparts.
The district had been moving toward a wide-scale implementation of restorative justice practices since 2015, hoping the implementation of restorative circles, conversations and other actions would lead to more equality among all students. Pushing out the deans, Owen said, would accelerate that implementation in a positive way.
But parents and district employees who asked for research on Owen's decision were left empty-handed, the board noted. At an April meeting at the high school, then-Principal Matt Stark told parents that there was no model district to compare Urbana's restructuring to.
More at the full article
here. Unfortunately we don't have the other side of these arguments yet. There are opinions and perspectives that defend Owen, partially defend him, blame the push back for derailing positive reforms, or blame Owen for not working to get key constituencies on board to ensure its success. For more information on the status of the search for a replacement superintendent,
this article had more information.
Urbana schools and racial disparities:
Before we look at possible reasons for racial disparities, the first issue is to confirm there is a racial disparity in school discipline in Urbana schools. For that the Department of Education has data. Here's some quick views of the disparity data and a link to the Department of Education numbers for
District 116 (Urbana schools) and their data charts:
The next question is 'to what can we attribute these racial disparities?' Many readers will have strong opinions on this, including many who believe there is a reality that can be verified, accepted, or denied. A lot of arguments occur at the very preliminary step of defining terms, such as "racism," which can range from a colloquial, dictionary, or even sociological definitions. For example: one common argument on this definition is between overt acts of discrimination by individuals versus "colorblind" bureaucracies that cause or maintain racially disparate results, and almost everything in between. We'll try to present the data in a way that's helpful to people regardless of where they stand in those disputes.
Let's start with two examples. First an arguably social conservative view
from the editorial board of our local News-Gazette:
Consider the actions Urbana school administrators took when they adopted what certainly looks like a failed policy.
For starters, they eliminated the deans, whose job it was to respond to teacher complaints about student misconduct. That sometimes led to suspensions from school for the worst conduct.
Can't have that, the restorative justice advocates cried. Suspensions for misconduct are too punitive.
But real discipline can have a deterrent effect. A suspension can — certainly not always — result in positive change in behavior, whereas failing to address misbehavior can — certainly not always — encourage more serious misbehavior that leads to punishments more serious than suspensions...
It is natural in circumstances like this to look for some positives.
There are not any here. Nonetheless, school board President John Dimit felt compelled to praise the conduct of high school students who didn't join in the melee.
"We should be congratulating our students for being some of the best around," he said.
There's no reason to doubt the quality of the student body. But he's setting a pretty low bar for praise, to the point that his congratulation would be laughable if the circumstances that produced it weren't so regrettable.
What's far more important is ensuring the students who follow the rules get the education they deserve.
Second an arguably social liberal view from a
rebuttal editorial (to the News-Gazette's
followup editorial of the one above) of the Urbana High School's paper,
The Echo:
First, any and all condemnation of restorative justice is slightly undercut by the fact that we live in a country that manages to have a remarkably punitive prison system while still maintaining over a 70% 5-year recidivism rate and having one of the highest crime rates in the developed world. Of course, this is never addressed in the article...
The article’s premise is also entirely false; while the district advertised a total upheaval of disciplinary norms, substantial changes have failed to materialize thus far. Criticizing the administration for not having gone far enough in its reforms would be legitimate, as there are countless examples of successful programs that stray much further from the punitive model than Urbana has. For instance, the San Quentin state prison’s Victim Offender Education Group has become a model for many other prisons around the country, and BAM, a restorative program in many Chicago schools, has been found to reduce violent crime arrests among participating students by up to 50%.
Why would the Gazette choose to take such a difficult-to-defend position? The answer, or at least a piece of it, lies in a 1991 article in which then-CEO John Hirschfeld proclaimed that former KKK leader David Duke had “touched the pulse of this country.” It’s racism.
These disparities and the disputes on why they continue to exist aren't just a local phenomenon. This is playing out across America in plenty of other towns that also disagree on the role of the government, schools, teachers, parents, faith, etc to address it:
Racial disparities in school discipline are growing, federal data show
...
Experts and advocates disagree sharply on the roots of the differences in discipline rates.
“We know from many other studies that there are no discernible differences in the way that black students behave in school” compared with other students, said Kaitlin Banner, an attorney with the Advancement Project. “The disparities come from the way that adults in the school building are responding to the student behavior.”
The GAO report also pointed to racial bias: “Implicit bias — stereotypes or unconscious association about people — on the part of teachers and staff may cause them to judge students’ behaviors differently based on the students’ race and sex.”
Max Eden, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, said the research is not sufficiently conclusive for the federal government to require school districts to change policies that are not discriminatory on their face. He said teachers and administrators have been unfairly blamed for the disparities, whereas he sees the disparities as evidence of other factors, such as students’ socioeconomic status and whether they live in two-parent households.
“What we’re seeing here is huge inequities in American society reflected in these numbers,” Eden said. “It’s not the school as an institution that’s responsible for it.”
Who to believe on why the disparity exists?
The reader may be inclined to trust one side of the debate over the other due to ideology or simply distrust of the other's data or conclusions. Someone who deeply believes in individualism and modern racism being an issue of bad apples than a continuing institutional reality will have plenty of reason to be skeptical of those who claims that a lot of their neighbors and community members are part of some racist system. Accusations of racism can put people on the defensive in ways similar in the brain to being under physical attack, just as with many heated arguments (that later we may regret due to fight or flight reactions).
People who are legitimately concerned about racial disparities and view our institutions and culture as having adapted from previous overt systems to "colorblind" machinations towards similar outcomes often see malicious intent or willful ignorance in those who grew up socialized in that system. They often confront us with perspectives far from the patriotic national mythos, which can be even more upsetting, especially in wartime.
I don't think there's an easy answer on how to bridge these perspectives. A great deal of the reasons why racial disparities exist in this part of American life depends on racial disparities in other parts. The reason why those disparities exist can be equally fraught and sometimes go back to disparities in school discipline. We'll look at two examples: mass incarceration and housing segregation.
Mass incarceration feedback loop:
A lot of criminal justice reform work involves a concept of a school to prison pipeline, or as our local NAACP put it in
their recent report a "kindergarten-to-prison pipeline." From that
report:
Locally, crime and punishment has its own story of problems and challenges, albeit on a much smaller scale than the national reports and studies presented above. Champaign County is the 10th largest in the State of Illinois with a population of 208,861 (2016). Reported crimes were at their highest in 2005, with a crime rate of 396.43 per 10,000 in Champaign County and 390.01 at the national level. The crime rate reported for 2009/2010 was 298.38 per 10,000 population, as compared to 346.55 nationally. In this respect, Champaign County is not terribly different from the nation in terms of crime rate.
Champaign County, the jail census has been declining after reaching a peak of between 260-270 for the month of June 2013. Beginning in June 2015, there was a noticeable decline in the census which fell from 240 to less than 200 by December. January 2016 started off with 200 detainees, the second lowest total in five years, and from April to August the total dipped below 200. Of course what is not shown is the churn, is the total number of people passing through the county jail over the course of the year.
On the other hand, African Americans make up 12% of the county and 64% of the jail population. That exceeds the national profile of racial imbalance in incarceration. Further, while Whites have significantly more charges filed, African Americans face longer stays in jail and receive more serious charges. Reducing African-American incarceration and fostering greater equity in the system are thus important priorities.
The full report explains the various policies and initiatives that led to our current incarceration situation and people will certainly disagree on the reasons for the disparities and the motivations from the more overt discriminatory systems in the past to the present situation. One factor in increased incarceration is school discipline. From a related study from the Government Accountability Office:
Research has shown that students who experience discipline that removes them from the classroom are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out of school, and become involved in the juvenile justice system. Studies have shown this can result in decreased earning potential and added costs to society, such as incarceration and lost tax revenue. Education and Justice are responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in the administration of discipline in public schools.
So we have a situation where two systems with racial disparities are, at least in part, feeding one another:
Black students, boys, and students with disabilities were disproportionately disciplined (e.g., suspensions and expulsions) in K-12 public schools, according to GAO's analysis of Department of Education (Education) national civil rights data for school year 2013-14, the most recent available. These disparities were widespread and persisted regardless of the type of disciplinary action, level of school poverty, or type of public school attended. For example, Black students accounted for 15.5 percent of all public school students, but represented about 39 percent of students suspended from school—an overrepresentation of about 23 percentage points (see figure).
As with school discipline, criminal justice results for the same offenses have racial disparities as well. This isn't just for conviction and sentencing outcomes, but bail decisions, jail decisions, prosecutorial (e.g. charging) decisions, and sentencing for the same crimes. For example, Champaign County has been
slightly ahead of the State of Illinois on bail reforms intended to address the racial disparities in incarceration locally that has already led to a large reduction in jail population (links to a full presentation at that
link).
Computer algorithms intended to be "colorblind" so as to prevent racial disparities have run into difficulties with risk models hoping to give judges a fair estimation of a person's risk of not showing up to court or harm to the community. The data used to calculate those risks can pick up its own racial bias from the historical data from systems with racially disparate outcomes.
These factors often track very closely with neighborhoods and communities that are also racially segregated to this day.
Housing segregation feedback loop:
The topic of mass incarceration blends into the topic of housing segregation. From the Champaign County NAACP report mentioned earlier:
The incarceration of an individual has ripple effects upon that person’s family and community. When incarcerations are mapped onto city neighborhoods, correlations emerge with respect to location, race, age, gender and human capital. Consequentially, it can be shown geographically where high rates of incarceration occur and where they do not. Cooper and Lagalia-Hollon paired their map of high-incarceration Chicago neighborhoods with the amount of money spent to incarcerate individuals and concluded: “We hand out harsh sentences for all types of offenses. We give these sentences, overwhelmingly, to Chicagoans who live in our segregated, low-income neighborhoods on the west and south sides. This amounts to a war on neighborhoods.” They found in Chicago that most urban residents with felony convictions come from and return to a small number of neighborhoods. Over a 5 year period from 2005-2009, there were: 851 blocks with over 1 million dollars committed to prison sentences with 121 committed to prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses.” True sentences are harsh, and they also tend to be concentrated in certain areas of cites, sometimes amounting to millions of dollars spent on the incarceration of citizens from those neighborhoods.
Again there are arguments about what the cause of any segregation may be, informed by differing political philosophies, data, and trusted sources. The first step is looking at whether our neighborhoods are racially segregated here in the Champaign-Urbana Metropolitan Area. We know they were in the past according to the News-Gazette recently:
Tom Kacich | Years ago, C-U was 'as Jim Crow as any northern town could possibly be'
...
Champaign-Urbana may have fancied itself as a worldly, university community, but it was as backward as any other Jim Crow community. Even as late as 1966 — the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first Green Book — no businesses in Champaign or Urbana were willing to be listed in the guide that said it sought to promote "Vacation Without Aggravation."
...
Another academic paper, written in 1961 by Aaron Morris Bindman, a white graduate student in sociology, presented a thorough review of racial segregation in Champaign-Urbana over more than 20 years, particularly as it applied to black employment.
"In 1938 when I entered the University of Illinois I became aware of and maintained some contact with the Negro community until 1941 when I left the campus," Bindman wrote. "During those three years C-U was as Jim Crow as any northern town could possibly be."
It wasn't until 1961, he wrote, that the African-American community in Champaign-Urbana, "which for all these years accepted their burden with little or no protest" finally exploded over hiring practices at the new J.C. Penney store (coincidentally now The News-Gazette building) in downtown Champaign.
And unfortunately racially
segregated neighborhoods have managed to persist mostly unchanged even over the last three decades. The following are excerpts from a recent study on segregation in
downstate Illinois metropolitan areas, including the Champaign-Urbana
Metropolitan area that includes a few other adjacent towns. NPR Illinois
had an interview with a couple of the people behind the study
here:
Would you be surprised to learn that some of the most segregated communities in the country are right here in Illinois? Places where the problem persists, and has so for years, with little improvement.
A six month Governing Magazine investigation culiminated in a series published this week. Reporters Dan Vock and Brian Charles culled data and tracked down numerous sources. They crunched the the numbers and lay out some of the reasons segregation remains so prominent in towns like Springfield, Rockford, Peoria, Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington-Normal and Decatur.
And like mass incarceration, this issue is a feedback loop in racial disparities in our schools:
The line dividing blacks from whites in Champaign, while it can be a bit
porous, has been and continues to be University Avenue. Black families
and black majority schools lie to the north of University, and white
families and white majority schools to the south. In the 1940s, black
children on the North End were sent to either the cramped Willard School
or Lawhead School. White kids in the area were assigned to the
all-white Columbia School. The district built a bigger facility, called
Booker T. Washington Elementary School, to replace Lawhead in 1952; it
became a magnet school during the 1960s in an effort to try to entice
white students to the North End. By and large, though, the district
remained divided by geography and race.
The
article goes on to explain the attempts at desegregation, the legal
set backs, and a current reality where schools are becoming more
segregated again. More data, charts, and links about segregation in Champaign-Urbana is available at this post that examines a recent study and data in detail
here.
Again there are different perspectives on why. Some posit that this is the culmination of personal choices on where to live, who to associate with, what lawful or criminal behavior people choose to engage in, to work hard in school or slack off, and how they raise their kids. Choices faced by everyone, regardless of color. Reformers will generally point to limits on choices and disparate treatment for the same bad choices leading to exceptions, but overall reinforcement of prior racial disparities.
Housing discrimination is a long and complicated story in America. The reforms and push back to the end of overt discrimination is a series of confrontations, adaptations, and more confrontations. As overt laws fell, new policies and bureaucratic rules in both private enterprise and local government swept in to replace them. Private contracts and neighborhood associations would step in where governments failed. Violence, threats, and more mundane refusals of service helped maintain the color lines. Redlining affected loan security and who could get them.
Government benefits often fell down racial lines, from veteran home loans to local governments securing grants for white neighborhoods over others. Laws and regulations ruled discriminatory were often quickly replaced by "colorblind" rules that relied on racial disparities in other areas for rules to enforce the disparity upheld by prior rules. If you want a well sourced book outlining the history of these adaptations, I'd start with "
The Color of Law." You don't have to agree with its conclusions, but the information is helpful for families who are unfamiliar with the vast hurdles that continued to exist for many minority families
well into the present day.
High-income black households were also targeted with risky subprime loans at the height of the housing boom, research shows.
In 2006, amid the real estate run-up, black families earning more than $200,000 annually were more likely on average to be given a subprime loan than a white family making $30,000 a year, according to research by Jacob William Faber, a sociologist at New York University who studies racial economic disparity. Analyzing nearly 4 million loan applications nationwide, Faber found that blacks were more than twice as likely to receive a subprime loan than white applicants.
A strong believer in individualism will likely be more interested in an individual examination of each loan and what factors may have led to the different decisions. Someone who believes there is institutional racism will probably argue the importance of impact over intent. One will avoid demonizing individuals for decisions they may have made with the best of intentions and looking only at the circumstances as they saw them. The other will point to the history of people enforcing discriminatory policies abdicating responsibility and rationalizing the best of intentions for the most heinous of acts.
Conclusion:
As one evaluates the data and the circumstances, I hope people can at least understand each other's perspective better, even if they may still vehemently disagree on how much the disparities are being caused by individual choices and/or systemic pressures and limits on those choices. We all may have some individual personal failings, but I don't think there is any evidence that any one race (as Western civilizations have defined it in the last several centuries) has more personal failings than another.
Arguments attempting to simplify the problem to laziness, bad parenting, criminal propensity, or other personal failings risk implying that the racial disparity is due to racial inferiority. I believe that is an argument unsupported by the facts and unlikely to persuade. Simplifying the problem to racial animus, likewise, can assume malice before a constructive conversation can occur. My personal recommendation is patience, civility, and above all protecting the vulnerable.
