James P. Scanlan, Attorney at Law

Keep Kids in School Act

(Mar. 22, 2015)

(Draft)

This is a draft of a subpage to the Discipline Disparities page of jpscanlan.com that will discuss the Keep Kids in School Act (S. 672) , introduced in the Senate by Senator Robert P. Casey, Jr. on March 4, 2015.  Among other things, the page will discuss the fact that bill is based on the belief that generally reducing discipline rates will tend to reduce relative demographic differences in discipline rates.  As explained in a March 20, 2015 letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, generally reducing discipline rates will tend to increase, not reduce, relative differences in discipline rates.  The point, which is the subject of the Discipline Disparities page itself and most of it twenty-plus subpages, is made fairly succinctly in references “Misunderstanding of Statistics Leads to Misguided Law Enforcement Policies,” Amstat News  (Dec. 2012) (mentioned in the earlier letter), “Things government doesn’t know about racial disparities,” The Hill (Jan. 28, 2014), and “The Paradox of Lowering Standards,”Baltimore Sun (Aug. 5, 2013).  It is treated in the context of the larger implications of the underlying statistical patterns (and failure to understand them) at pages 341-43 of recent “Race and Mortality Revisited,” Society (July/Aug. 2014).  This page may be compared to the Disabilities – Public Law 104-446 subpage of the Discipline Disparities page, which discusses the way the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 requires findings of significant discrepancies in the suspension of students with disabilities requires that school districts implement policies that commonly increase relative differences in suspension rates (a matter also treated at page 342 of "Race and Mortality Revisited."

Among things that this page will eventually treat is the problems in comparing an disadvantaged group’s adverse outcome rate with an overall adverse outcome rate (or the proportion the disadvantaged group comprises of the population potentially experiencing an outcome with the proportion the group comprises of persons experiencing the outcome), a problem addressed somewhat in the IDEA Data Center Disproportionality Guide subpage of the Discipline Disparities and that will be addressed as well with regard to the so-called Disparity Index in the DOJ Ferguson Disparities Report subpage of the Scanlan’s Rule page. 

The table below is based on data made available with the UCLA Civil Rights Projects 2015 report “Are We Closing the Discipline Gap.”  The table shows counts of situations where the Latino suspension rates exceeds the white rate but does not exceed the overall rates.

Table 1.  Counts of Districts Where Latino Suspension Rate Exceeds the White Suspension Rate but Does Not Exceed the Overall Suspension Rate [ref b6321b4]

The table show that in 39.7% (369/880) of cases at the secondary level 26.7% (479/1797) of cases at the elementary level where the Latino suspension rate exceeded the white rate, it did not exceed the overall suspension rate, and hence would not be deemed a disparity according to the approach of S. 672 or the measurement guides IDEA Data Center Disproportionality Guide subpage.

This problem applies to a valid measurement such as the discussed in "Race and Mortality Revisited."