Black Child National Agenda | Policy 7


Black Child National Agenda, Policy 7
Address Harsh and Unfair Discipline Practices

State and local governments along with the US Congress should pass discipline reform to ban all exclusionary practices, including expulsion, suspension, corporal punishment, seclusion, and inappropriate restraint. These practices are disproportionately used against Black children and undermine social-emotional wellness. There is no evidence that these forms of discipline are effective, and they are associated with negative child outcomes. The data and visualizations below show the amount in which students of different races and ethnicities are disciplined in various states throughout the US. For Black children these disciplinary rates are often disproportionate to their enrollment populations in many states and school districts.

Key Insights & Analysis

  • The average income of Black Americans is significantly less than that of other Americans.
  • Black American children age 0-5 experience poverty at higher rates than other Americans.
  • Unemployment rates for Black Americans are higher than other races/ethnicities.
  • Black children experience poverty at almost double the rate of all other races/ethnicities in the US.

About the Data

The data used in the above dashboards are from the following sources:

IPUMS USA, American Community Survey – https://usa.ipums.org/usa/
Bureau of Labor Statistics – https://www.bls.gov/
US Census Bureau – https://www.census.gov/
Child Opportunity Index – https://www.diversitydatakids.org/child-opportunity-index
US Dept. of Ed, Civil Rights Data Collection – https://ocrdata.ed.gov/

When working with data from the American Community Survey, because Chinese & Japanese are the two largest subgroups of Asian-Americans, those two groups were isolated & combined in order to present a more concise representation. As a result, the label “Chinese & Japanese” was used in the data visualizations rather than “Asian”.

Race/Ethnic Descriptors

We use the term “Black” as a pan-ethnic description of anyone having any ancestral heritage from Africa. This includes individuals who identify as African American—those who were primarily born in America and are descendants of enslaved Africans—as well as those living in America who identify as Black African or Afro-Caribbean. “Black” also includes those who reported being Black alone or in combination with one or more races or ethnicities in their responses to the U.S. Census, such as Afro-Latine.

Consistent with experts in the field, we use Latine to refer to individuals whose cultural background originated in Latin America. While Latinx is being used as a gender-inclusive term to refer to people with Latin American backgrounds, Spanish-speakers find that Latinx is unpronounceable in Spanish. Therefore, we have opted to use the gender-inclusive term Latine, commonly used throughout Spanish-speaking Latin American.

Equity Research Coalition