'New data' on school-to-prison pipeline is old news

ThinkProgress and a few other media sites reported this month that there was “new data” showing that the school-to-prison pipeline, which targets African-American children in particular, begins as early as preschool. This data showed that black students were disproportionately suspended from class starting as early as preschool and was collected from the U.S. Dept of Education during the 2013-14 school year. According to the article:

Black preschool children were 3.6 times more likely than white children to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions, according to the survey data. Although boys were more likely than girls to be suspended in preschool, black girls also had high rates of suspension.

This pattern continued in K-12, where black students were 1.9 times more likely than white students to be expelled from school without educational services and 2.3 times more likely to be disciplined through involvement of officers, such as a school-related arrest, according to the department. Multi-racial boys and and Native American boys also had higher rates of expulsion.

As troubling as this is, it’s unfortunately not really that “new.” When Tunette Powell wrote an essay for the Washington Post two years ago in July 2014 about how her 3-year-old son had been suspended five times, she referenced data from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—data based on the 2011-2012 school year.

Here’s what those numbers looked like back then.