This doesn’t come as a huge surprise. But it should come as a sobering reality. Minority students face harsher discipline, fewer options according to a massive chunk of federal data just released by the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights’ 2009-2010 survey (surveyed 72,000 schools, or 85% of the country’s students) . The reality reinforces the need for solutions for minority students that include both in-person and digital disruptions that reform the current systems and also hep get at root problems that the students face at home, in their neighborhoods as well as in school.

Some of the findings: 

• Twenty-nine percent of high-minority schools offered calculus, compared to 55 percent of schools with smaller black and Hispanic populations.

• Black students are more than three-and-a-half times as likely as white students to be suspended or expelled.

• More than 70 percent of students arrested in school or handed over to law enforcement were black or Hispanic.

• English-language learners, which made up 12 percent of the sample, represented 12 percent of students held back.

• Students with disabilities were more than twice as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions than their peers.

Here’s what various media said about the data: 

Joy Resmovits at The Huffington Post writes: 

It’s long been known that black students have been suspended at higher rates in Los Angeles and elsewhere, but the new figures, based on the 2009-10 academic year, allow for a direct comparison between school systems.That year, black students made up about 9% of the enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest. But they accounted for 26% of suspensions — a ratio of almost 3 to 1. Latinos, whites and Asians were suspended at rates lower than their percentage of district enrollment.

In New York City, by contrast, black students account for 40% of enrollment and 46% of suspensions; the numbers for Chicago are 45% and 76%. In San Diego Unified, the nation’s 17th-largest school system, African Americans make up 11% of enrollment and 24% of suspensions.