Black. Special Ed. Punished.

He entered pre-kindergarten at Irvington Elementary School with a host of troubles that made it hard for him to express his feelings and more prone to act aggressively. The boy also has struggled with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. (For the sake of the child's privacy, WW is not publishing the boy's full name or identifying his mother.)

Like one in seven elementary school students in Portland Public Schools last year, J. is classified as a special education student, a broad category that includes students with a range of intellectual, emotional and physical disabilities. He is also African-American.

And since entering PPS six years ago, J. has been suspended about twice a year since first grade, his mother says.

"He's not easy, and I totally appreciate that," says J.'s mother, who is white. But she says white classmates who are equally disruptive often don't draw the sharp rebukes reserved for her son. "My son even notices it," she says. "The teachers don't react in the same way. That's just true."

Special education and black—J. starts his day with two strikes against him.

PPS already hands out discipline—suspensions and expulsions—at a higher rate against special education students than other students. The district also maintains rates of punishment against black students that remain far out of line.

As a result, black PPS students in special education are more than four times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students.

Last week, as first reported on wweek.com, PPS officials acknowledged that the Oregon Department of Education has brought sanctions against the district for its inability to correct these disparities.

The state's findings, sent to PPS on Aug. 5, mean the district will have to divert $1.47 million in special education funding to programs that root out the problem.

"It's not surprising, but it's unacceptable," Greg Belisle, a Portland School Board member, told colleagues at an Oct. 6 meeting.

The findings also didn't surprise close watchers of PPS. The district's longtime failure to address disparities in disciplinary rates has been well-documented ("Expel Check," WW, Sept. 25, 2013). The state found black special-ed students in PPS were five times more likely to be suspended or expelled long-term than whites in special ed.

Charles McGee, co-founder of the Black Parent Initiative, says the disparities highlight the need to reform staff responses to student behaviors. "Why is it that teachers, many of whom are progressive, nice, white folks, disproportionately punish black and brown children?" McGee asks.

Finding answers is crucial, he says, because Portland schools are increasingly diverse, although some Portlanders may think of themselves as characters in a "lily-white Portlandia skit," McGee says. "The Portland we're marketing to the world is not the reality in our elementary schools."

The state hit PPS specifically for the disproportionate rates of long-term suspensions and expulsions. Black students (African-American students as well as recent African immigrants) make up 15 percent of PPS's special education population. But they accounted for 50 percent of all special education students who were suspended for more than 10 days or expelled in the 2012-13 school year, according to the Department of Education.

PPS was the only district in Oregon to face this sanction this year.

Brian Baker, a lawyer at Youth, Rights & Justice (formerly the Juvenile Rights Project), says rural, suburban and urban districts all confront the issue. "It doesn't matter where you look," he says. "It's significant across all states."

So, why shouldn't students who do bad things be punished?

Often, Baker says, students aren't being suspended for violent or dangerous acts, such as brandishing weapons, dealing drugs or harming other students. They're being removed from school for far more subjective violations such as disobedience, talking back, disrupting the classroom or using language that a teacher deems inappropriate.

He says research shows that white students who display similar behavior aren't met with the same punishment.

"Similarly situated students, when they're having troubles in school, are not getting similar responses," Baker says.

About 14 percent of the district's overall student body receives special education services, because a wide range of students qualify, including those with Down syndrome and autism. Also included are blind students and those with cerebral palsy. Abused or neglected children could also qualify for special education services if the trauma interferes with their learning.

The state's findings come at a time when PPS plans to implement sweeping changes to its special education department. Among the reforms, the district plans to eliminate segregated classrooms for students with behavioral problems, returning them to the general population.

The change worries Gwen Sullivan, president of the Portland Association of Teachers. If PPS already has a problem suspending and expelling too many special education students, it doesn't make sense to return students to classrooms with teachers who lack special training.

"What do they think is going to happen?" Sullivan asks.

PPS officials, however, are optimistic. 

They responded to the state's findings by highlighting another key piece of data: Across the district, the number of students who have been suspended or expelled is down significantly, dropping from 3,471 in 2008-09 to 1,879 in 2013-14.

Discipline rates among special education students also have dipped, but at a steeper rate for whites than blacks.

Sullivan says that's not necessarily evidence the district has solved the problem. Teachers tell her that principals have refused to follow up on discipline cases. "What I'm hearing loud and clear is that they're not reporting," she says.

Jon Isaacs, a district spokesman, says he's confident PPS is not underreporting incidents by any significant degree, although he acknowledges some cases may fall through the cracks.

Several factors—investments in alternative student management policies and a districtwide effort to correct racial discrimination—have helped bring the numbers down, he says.

"Rates are changing because of changes in practices," Isaacs says. "It takes time…. But it's starting to change."

J.'s mother says there are no obvious villains or easy fixes, and the problem extends well beyond teachers and administrators.

By February of first grade, when she says "the floodgates opened," her son already had been suspended twice for behavior problems. She felt frustrated and stuck, she says.

"I had raised the concerns about my son's behavior early and often in order to be proactive, but I was brushed aside by my son's teacher," J.'s mother says. "I felt stuck because once we got to the point where my son was getting suspended, we were at the mercy of their schedules and timelines to get the required assessments and interventions in place."

Her son was one of only two African-American students in his first-grade class, and she thinks some of the negative attention he received stemmed from other children's responses to him. Problems that eventually caught the attention of the teacher sometimes bubbled up from other children who didn't like or misinterpreted her son's behavior, she says.

"There's sort of a spotlight on you when you're different," she says. "As much as we want to pretend kids are colorblind, they’re not.” 

 WW contributor Rachel Graham Cody provided reporting for this story.

WWeek 2015