The Obama administration might be disappointed to find out there’s not much support for one of its key school-discipline reform initiatives—at least not from teachers or members of the general public.

A growing body of evidence has long revealed discriminatory tendencies in the ways school districts dole out race-based discipline. Black and Latino students are much more likely to be disciplined and suffer greater rates of in- and out-of-school suspensions. Of the 49 million students enrolled in public schools in the 2011-12 school year, close to 7 million were suspended, about half of them out of school. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection,black students were suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than were white students.

Read the article “When Schools are Forced to Practice Race-Based Discipline” on theatlantic.com.