Do Teachers Punish According to Race?

In the basement of Dater Junior High, just next to the boiler room and marked off by thick prison bars, school officials have crafted a fate worse than algebra class. Teachers at the school, part of the Cincinnati, Ohio, public school district, simply call it "the dungeon." Students have more descriptive -- if unprintable -- names for the small windowless cell. Though the prison bars are just painted on the cinder-block entrance, the punishment is real. Delinquent students must remain in the room -- absolutely quiet -- all day, even eating at their desks. "It's so hot and so boring," moans a seventh grader named Lance, 12, serving day two of a three-day sentence for tardiness. His pencil is worn to the nub from writing "I will follow school rules" 200 times. (The record is 500.) "This place is just terrible."

The dungeon is the center of a debate over not the effectiveness of pedagogic hard labor but the race of the punished and the race of the punishers. Black students are twice as likely to end up in the dungeon as white students; in fact, black students are twice as likely to end up disciplined throughout the entire Cincinnati public school system. It is a particularly awkward statistic for a school district mired in a 20-year-old desegregation suit. So awkward, in fact, that the board of education has agreed to an explosive remedy: if a judge concurs, the Cincinnati public schools (CPS) will soon start tracking the race of the teacher as well as the student in each discipline case. More important, those statistics will be factored into the teacher evaluation. Though the board insists that it is simply gathering relevant information to understand the racial disparity, teachers are receiving a far different message. "We're very worried," says art teacher John Rodak. "Do we have to start thinking about race now every time we discipline a student?"

Many teachers and administrators say, often barely above a whisper, that black students are much more trouble prone. Superintendent J. Michael Brandt, who is white, says that in some circumstances, "blacks tend to be more boisterous." John Concannon, a white attorney for the district, blames a "complicated mix of reasons," including the possibility that "some black males are more physical."

But twice as boisterous and twice as physical as white students? "That's ridiculous," says attorney Trudy Rauh, who represents parents and students in the bias suit against CPS that began in 1974. Eager to end the costly suit, the school board last fall acceded to the plaintiffs' demand for racial data to be collected on teachers as part of a broad new plan to hold them more accountable for students' behavior. The settlement warned that "staff members who are deficient in student-behavior management will not be retained in their positions if they fail to improve."

And what exactly does this mean? teachers ask. Are white teachers deficient if they spend more time disciplining blacks than whites? What if black teachers discipline a disproportionate number of whites -- or a high number of blacks, for that matter? And if the intention is to eliminate the racial disparity, will that be achieved by disciplining blacks less or whites more?