The New York Times has an article today on a new school-discipline report being released that documents how, in 13 southern states, black students are suspended or expelled at higher rates than white students. But of course this is discrimination only if black students are not misbehaving more than white students, and there is no effort to answer that question in today’s report. It is unlikely that all racial and ethnic groups misbehave at the same rate, given various cultural differences; see this article in the Journal of Criminal Justice titled “Prior problem behavior accounts for racial gap in school suspensions.”

The executive summary of today’s report makes a big deal about these being southern states, presumably to make the suggestion of discrimination more plausible. One could quibble a bit about the 13 states selected (why West Virginia and not Maryland, Delaware, or Oklahoma?), but I was more amused by the emphasis that 55 percent of the nation’s suspension of black students and 50 percent of their expulsions took place in the South. That’s because, if you do the math, 51 percent of the nation’s black population is in those 13 states, so they are not out of line with the rest of the country.