Which students are most likely to be arrested at school?

According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, a student’s race, gender and disability play a major role in whether he or she is arrested.

The resultsreleased July 8, are based on a congressional provision requiring GAO to review the role of policing in schools, paying particular attention to the impact of race. GAO analyzed the U.S. Department of Education’s dataset from the 2015-16 and 2017-18 school years, the most recent data from before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report adds to a growing body of research showing that students of color, particularly black students, and students with disabilities face disproportionate disciplinary actions in school. Researchers have found that early punitive measures can have a negative impact on the school experienceGraduation rates and the likelihood of entering the criminal justice system.

The GAO report found that Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black, and American Indian/Alaska Native students are arrested two to three times as often as their white peers. Students with disabilities are also arrested more often than students of the same gender without disabilities.

However, the results are differentiated when you consider disability status and gender in addition to ethnic groups, says Jackie Nowicki, a GAO director who focuses on K-12 education issues.

“You notice that black girls without disabilities are arrested at higher rates than white girls with disabilities,” she said. “All of these characteristics are important. They are more important when they overlap, but they are of different importance to different groups of children.”

It is an ongoing problem that school administrators are concerned about and working on, says Bryan Joffe, director of children’s programs at the School Superintendents Association (AASA).

“Collecting data and shedding light on what’s really happening is sort of the first step. Then it’s on to finding out the root causes of the disciplinary problems themselves – but also the discrepancies across race, gender and disability status – in terms of schools’ response and their policies and practices,” he said.

In schools with police officers, the arrest rate was twice as high as in demographically comparable schools without police, the report found. Arrests also occur more frequently when police are involved in student discipline, a practice generally frowned upon by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice and the National Association of School Resource Officers, Nowicki said.

“When you see national patterns of disproportionality, you should ask yourself why this is happening,” Nowicki said. “When we arrest children, there are lifelong consequences for the child and the community. Our goal should be to find out what is going on so we can help the children.”

Educators and activists have debated whether police should be deployed with increased attention in schools following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Several school districts withdrew officers at the time, but concerns about gun violence in schools – particularly after a deadly school massacre that killed 19 students in Uvalde, Texas – prompted some to reinstate them. Police positions on campus.

The reason for the “traffic jam” in efforts to reform police use in schools is the nationwide problem of gun violence, Joffe said.

“Many schools that would otherwise have an interest in keeping police off campus and having less presence or security personnel are also, unfortunately, struggling with a terrible amount of gun violence that sometimes spills over into our schools,” he said.

As part of its report, GAO recommended that the U.S. Department of Education begin collecting arrest and referral data by race for students covered by Section 504. A law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and provides educational support to students.

The department should also disclose limitations of its 2021-22 dataset. For example, it changed the definition of arrests but did not inform districts until data collection had already begun, raising concerns about the reliability of the data collected this year, according to the report. It should also better inform school districts about changes to arrest and referral data in its data collection.

The ministry basically agrees with the recommendations, the report says.

A department spokesperson said the department’s Office of Civil Rights is “committed to ensuring that the CRDC data is an accurate and comprehensive representation of students’ access to educational opportunities.”