African American males in primary and secondary schools were suspended more than twice as often as white males in 1992, according to the Office of Civil Rights.

If national statistics paint a bleak picture of suspensions for African American boys, some district-level figures are even more revealing: In the Minneapolis school system, for instance, enrollment of black and white males is nearly the same, but 43 percent of all students suspended during the 1995-96 school year were black males-as opposed to 14 percent who were white males. And more black boys were suspended in this city for lack of cooperation and disrespect than for various categories of fighting, profanity, and verbal abuse put together.

"I think a lot of these suspensions have as much to do with class, cultural, and even linguistic differences as they do with race," says Luis Ortega, the principal of Folwell Middle School, a mixed inner-city campus in Minneapolis. "I don’t think many teachers understand the language of poverty, the ways these kids communicate, so they tend to take it as disrespect. Disrespect is something you don’t want to tolerate, but we adults have a lot of work to do in the area of listening to young people."

Derrick Hall is a curly-haired 11-year-old with dark brown eyes and a budding interest in racquetball and golf. When Derrick was in the third grade at an upper-middle-class suburban school in southeastern Texas, a handful of white classmates began taking his backpack and hiding it. Derrick told his parents, who advised him to report the incidents to his teacher. Derrick dutifully told the teacher, but she failed to step in, his father says.

One day, Derrick reached the end of his patience: he hid the backpacks of four of the boys who’d been picking on him. After the white kids found out, they complained to the teacher, who in turn sent Derrick to the principal’s office. When Derrick came home with a discipline slip his parents were outraged. Derrick was, after all, an honor student who they say had never been a behavior problem in school. "We were concerned that the school was going to start a whole discipline file on our son based on this minor incident," says Derrick’s father. Eventually the Halls convinced the school to not write Derrick up.

The school principal said she vaguely remembers the incident but refused to comment on the particulars or on any broader issue of discipline. "Our school does not have a significantly high black population," she says, "so I don’t think that we’re representative of the rest of the nation."

In Minneapolis, an African American mother of an eight-year-old recounts how she got a phone call at work from her son’s second grade teacher last fall. "The teacher had my son in the office with her, and she was hysterical," the mom recalls. Apparently, her son had been talking to a fellow student while class was in progress and had been asked repeatedly to quiet down. When that didn’t work, the teacher put him on time-out and admonished him once again to settle down. The students laughed at her, hence the phone call.

"I think it was a nervous laugh because the teacher had probably embarrassed him in front of the class, but once he saw the power his laughter gave him, he used it for all it was worth and told her it was a free country," the mother says. "In no sense does my son’s imagination justify his actions, but I think the teacher was upset far out of proportion to the incident."

After the phone call, the boy’s mother made it a point to write the teacher a note every week in order to develop a rapport with her; doing so, she says, helped her son see that she and the teacher could work together to improve his behaviors: "I didn’t want my son to be put in a corner, in that category black boys get put into-bad, aggressive, and dumb," she says.

Dire reactions to small infractions are not unusual for black boys in the public schools, says Claude Steele, a social psychologist at Stanford University. "The same kind of behavior that might be dismissed as a one-time setback in a white kid," says Steele, "will be taken as more serious and chronic in the case of a black male."

This uneven treatment, says Steele, can easily set off a downward spiral of events. "A black student acts out once and is disciplined over and above what the act would reasonably require. In response to how he’s treated, the kid acts out again," he says. "Now the teacher sees the acting out as a justification for her original assumption. Then, once he’s started to behave badly, he may begin to hang around with other students who also behave badly."

Clearly, though, many teachers don’t buy notions that black students are treated differently when they misbehave. If the discipline of black male students is disproportionate to their numbers, says Minneapolis teacher Thurman, it’s because the boys’ behavior warrants it: "Parents tend to see what they want to see," she says, "but I see a lot of aggressive, off-task behavior. Obviously these children are bringing to school what they have learned at home."

Fifth-grade mentor-teacher Susan Glass of Lakeland, Florida, adopts a similar no-nonsense approach to disciplining students, no matter what their color. "I’ve had parents march into my classroom with an NAACP lawyer to tell me I am racist," she says. "I tell them I’m only prejudiced against bad behavior. I expect a child to come in prepared to learn, and if he doesn’t, I have no qualms about hurting his feeling."

Other educators contend that some of the problem between teachers and black male students stem more from ignorance than malice. "For many teachers, the classroom represents the first time they’ve ever had close interaction with black boys," says Jawanza Kunjufu, a national educational consultant in Chicago and the author of a series of books on childrearing and education. "So sometimes they may have problems with the way a seven-year-old might walk or wear his pants, and they make assumptions that this child will be difficult."