Suspension rates higher in rural California schools than in urban ones

Lee Romney and Edward J. Willis report for EdSource.   Here's an excerpt that summarizes the findings:

School suspensions in grades K-12 have dropped across California by more than a quarter over the past five years, due largely to a growing consensus that excluding kids from the classroom fails to correct behavior and worsens student outcomes and attitudes toward school. But the decline in suspensions is driven by schools in cities and suburbs, which educate 90 percent of California’s more than 6 million students.  

Outside urban areas, suspensions are far more common. As in urban schools, African-American and Native American students were suspended most often, at rates far greater than their proportion of the student population, an EdSource analysis of 2017-18 data showed. Those rural rates far exceeded urban rates. Perhaps more strikingly, suspensions of white students across rural schools were also significantly higher than at urban schools, particularly in the largely white rural counties of Northern California, which posted some of the state’s highest overall suspension rates. 

EdSource analyzed data for each of the state’s nearly 10,000 schools by urban and rural designation.

In sparsely populated rural regions as well as in towns in largely rural areas — such as Butte County’s Oroville — schools reported eight suspensions for every 100 white students enrolled in 2017-18, one and a half times the rate of schools that are located in cities and suburbs. Rural schools logged 22 suspensions for every 100 black students enrolled, compared to just over 15 per 100 black students at urban schools. Rural schools reported 17 suspensions for every 100 Native American students and seven suspensions for every 100 Latino students. 

My own sense is that this disparity is probably linked to a lack of resources and a lack of awareness regarding race and ethnicity issues.   That said, I note that in rural areas, "the student groups excluded from the classroom the most have shifted, to include not just 'black and brown youth' but 'poor white youth, particularly in California’s northern rural counties.  That's according to Tia Martinez, executive director of the San Francisco-based nonprofit consulting firm Forward Change, who has studied both rural and urban schools.  This finding is consistent with my musings here, and with Edward Morris's book, Unexpected Minority:  White Kids in an Urban School.  He found white teachers in those schools as judgmental of poor whites as they are of poor blacks, if not more so.  Black teachers, on the other hand, were more sympathetic of all impoverished students. 

Also, by the way, Oroville is not exactly rural.  Oroville has a population of 15,506, and it's the county seat of Butte County, population 220,000. 

Here's another paragraph about what's going on in Oroville, as well as in similar rural areas. 

According to interviews with educators and experts on both rural schools and student discipline, behind the high suspension rates in Oroville and many other rural areas are family struggles with poverty, mental illness, addiction and parental incarceration; a dearth of resources to address those needs; and underfunded schools with less access to training on alternate approaches to discipline. Per-capita child abuse and neglect reports for Butte County far exceed the statewide average. And the Butte County Sheriff’s Department estimates that 80 percent of crime and as many as 50 percent of foster care placements are linked to methamphetamine addiction.