Minority Students Face Inequities in School

Minority students in the United States face harsher discipline, have less access to rigorous high school curricula, and more often are taught by lower-paid and less experienced teachers, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Those are the findings culled from data from a national survey of more than 72,000 schools.

Among the findings:

•African-American students, particularly males, are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their peers. Black students made up 18 percent of the students in the study, but accounted for 35 percent of the students suspended once, and 39 percent of the students expelled.

•Students learning English were 6 percent of the high school enrollment, but made up 12 percent of students retained.

•Only 29 percent of high-minority high schools offered calculus, compared with 55 percent of schools with the lowest black and Hispanic enrollment.

•Teachers in high-minority schools were paid $2,251 less per year than their colleagues teaching in low-minority schools in the same district.