Study finds widespread inequality in US schools

Inequality and discrimination in the US education system is widespread for minority students and those with disabilities, according to a new government report.

Blacks and other racial minorities are more likely than white students to be suspended from school, to have less access to advanced math and science classes, and to be taught by less experienced teachers, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said on Friday.

The report, based on information collected from 97,000 public schools during the 2011-12 academic year, found that black, Latino, American Indian and Native Alaskan students are three times as likely as white students to attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers.

“In all, it is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed,” US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement.

“Here we are, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the data altogether still show a picture of gross inequity in educational opportunity,” said Daniel J. Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project.

One of the striking statistics in the report is that black students face harsher discipline than other students even as early as preschool.

The achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented. Research shows that the education achievement gap between blacks and whites actually begins well before students reach kindergarten.

A report in 2010 showed that only 12 percent of fourth-grade black boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys.