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[quote=Anonymous][quote]She’s not trolling. I work for MCPS, and the county is carefully tracking these numbers.[/quote]

I know and this is part of the problem. MCPS needs to shut down its office of data assessment. MCPS is so incompetent that it almost instinctively looks for ways to reshape the numbers rather than figuring out how to solve the problem.

There was a study that found racial bias in punishments. AA and hispanic students were more likely to receive harsher penalties than white students for committing the same offense in the SAME school. Blair students did an excellent journalistic piece on racial bias at their school. They highlighted how a white student walking through the halls was simply told to go back to class while a black student was given a penalty. The problem of racial bias is worse in schools with high FARMS where there is a large % of  URM lower performing students and UMC higher performing students. These schools all suffer deeply from racial bias as every day the staff see URM students underperforming and UMC students performing well. Interestingly, the same bias is not as present in schools where the minority students are as wealthy as the white students.

MCPS can't control or reshape WHO create an offense but they are responsible for ensuring that the penalties for the offenses are not racially influenced. The way to solve this problem is through diversity training for principals, establishing a review board to look at penalties given out within a school not based on the overall numbers but weighing variations in penalties for similar offenses to ensure the cases were treated equally. There are other programmatic approaches to addressing bias but these would require the MCPS central office to think.

MCPS did not do this. Their first attempt was to lesson all the penalties which created significant community push back in schools with more violent offenders. By trying to reshape the numbers by making it harder for schools to suspend or expel students, they were putting an attacker back into the same environment with his/her victim. It also created an unsafe situation for staff if they were pressured not to fully report threats to themselves to avoid the numbers looking bad.

So now they are looking at the numbers which creates and will create a whole host of bad outcomes downstream .[/quote]

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