When Manufactured Concern Over Race Trumps School Safety

This Detroit Free Press article starts off rather normally:Parent of student expelled from Detroit public schools for firearm offense asks to return

A student in Detroit was expelled for bringing a gun in his backpack into his school.

Most if not all students know by now that you're not supposed to do that.

His parents want him returned to school. 

The article helpfully notes that out of 50,000 Detroit public school students all of 11 were expelled in the 2021-2022 year. Sounds rather normal with less than a quarter of a percent of students being expelled for bad behavior.

So far, pretty reasonable.

Then the article goes off the rails.

Black students were disproportionately expelled statewide, making up 31% of the state's total expulsions, while making up about 18% of the student population as a whole. White students made up about 49% of the state's total expulsions, while constituting about 64% of the student population as a whole. School suspension and discipline data has long shown inequities between the ways Black students are disciplined compared with white students.

Is the article suggesting a white student that smuggled a gun into Detroit Public Schools, or indeed any other public school statewide these days, would not be expelled?  Any evidence for such an assertion, at all? If not, and I bet there is not, then why bring this up in the article? Perhaps the Freep needed to meet a quota for DEI content.

We may also want to note the bad use of statistics in declaring that Black students are being "disproportionately" expelled and announcing of inequity.  

In fact this analysis makes a critical error:  They're comparing the wrong populations to arrive at their conclusion of racial inequity and iniquity.  

They should be comparing expelled students not from the population as a whole but rather compare the expelled students from the miscreant population as whole. 

Indeed 31% of the expelled population being Black actually fits rather well with the overall population of criminals who happen to be Black, as Blacks in this country overall are statistically responsible for 50% of violent crime overall, even being 13% of the overall population. This fact makes people rather uncomfortable.

If anything, the stats would suggest school officials are under-expelling Black student miscreants by about 38%  (from 50% to 31% is a 38% decrease) if it was normed to Black criminality in the population as a whole.

Or, it may instead hopefully and happily suggest that Black students are less likely than the overall Black population as a whole to commit violent offenses on school grounds that may meet the threshold for expulsion.

This is the problem when you focus solely on statistics, neh?

Either way, the statistics do not actually suggest an inequity based on race in school discipline, and may instead suggest Black students in Michigan are the recipient of leniency in their favor in school discipline matters. 

Or, you know, we could instead maybe focus on addressing student's bad behavior on a case-by-case and individual basis, and applying appropriate punishments for bad actions, such as smuggling a gun into school results in a student's expulsion, rather than trying to make a racial argument out of it.