Education

The NAACP works to ensure that every disadvantaged student and student of color graduates ready for college.

Is There Racial Inequality at Your School?

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. It digs deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust, and sticks with those issues as long as it takes to hold power to account.

Journalists Lena V. Groeger, Annie Waldman, and David Eads conducted an investigative study of racial inequality in U.S. schools. Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline.

The Racial Divide

ProPublica has found that in school districts across the country, Black and Hispanic students are, on average, less likely to be selected for gifted programs and take AP courses than their white peers. They are also more likely, on average, to be suspended and expelled. Another measure of disparities is how segregated schools are in a district. The scores shown below are for racial groups with the highest disparities.

Opportunity
White students are 2.1 times as likely to be enrolled in at least one AP class as Hispanic students.

Discipline
Black students are 3.8 times as likely to be suspended as White students.

Segregation Index
Segregation between Black students and White students is High, indicating that the distribution of these two racial groups among schools in this district is very uneven.

Achievement Gap
Black students are, on average, academically 2 grades behind White students.

See for yourself.
Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts to see how they compare with their counterparts. You can also see the results for Frederick County here.

Education Access Equality

The NAACP works to ensure that every disadvantaged student and student of color graduates ready for college or a career by ensuring access to great teaching, fair discipline, equitable resources, and a challenging curriculum. We are dedicated to eliminating the severe racial inequities that continue to plague our education system. Our ultimate goal is that every student of color receives a quality public education that prepares him or her to be a contributing member of a democracy.

To achieve these goals, the Education Committee of the national board, in concert with education chairs and leaders from across the Association, have settled upon a four-prong strategy to improve educational achievement for disadvantaged students:

-Increasing Resource Equity: Target funds to neediest kids Ensuring College & Career

-Readiness: A path to success after graduation for all students

-Improving Teaching: Growing our own great teachers now in underserved communities

-Improving Discipline: Eliminate zero tolerance; keep kids in school* All applied to turnaround schools

Multilingual Curriculum Integrated into Public Schools

In 2016 NAACP National Convention delegates passed, and the National NAACP Board affirmed, a resolution to promote the integration of multilingual curriculum into public schools.

Standard Grading Policies
In 2016 NAACP National Convention delegates passed, and the National NAACP Board affirmed, a resolution to urge NAACP units to encourage their respective States to establish an Office of Consumer Affairs in Testing and Student Evaluation. In addition, the resolution reaffirms the 2014 Resolution, “Accountability and Assessment: Measuring Student Learning. The body of that resolution is provided here.