This has been dubbed the "school-to-prison pipeline." It's exacerbated by the fact that many schools now have police officers permanently stationed at the school, which leads to a "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. It also contributes to the racial disparity because predominantly black schools are more likely to have a police officer than predominantly white schools.
This was a sensitive topic while I was in high school in Colorado. I don't think the school had a majority, but the largest groups were white and hispanic groups. We always had at least 1 permanent police officer heading a group of a couple of people who could be either police or security.
Nominally this was a response to incidents throughout the rest of the state such as Columbine, but in reality the purpose was to try to combat youth gangs. In this respect I think it partially worked for the circumstances.
However, this was also used to target usage of marijuana and cigarettes by students. I'm not sure how effective this was, because data about that was not commonly released by the school. Needless to say, a lot of students didn't like this, but opinion of the student body was very divided. It would be interesting to see how things have changed in Colorado high schools since marijuana was legalized; I'll have to look into that, but in most schools marijuana is still banned (like tobacco products) so things could only get worse if school policy is unchanged.
As an outsider that seems incredibly wrong. The answer to youth gangs is not more security. Perform a root cause analysis and go back to the fact that kids often fall into gangs because parents are not around (working double jobs), they are stuck in poverty with an easy out (crime).
It saddens me to read about solving youth problems by attacking the symptoms rather than the cause. Though I understand why, fixing the cause takes time, is unpopular to those on the political right, while fixing the symptom seems can achieve immediate results (though not long term).
Your analysis certainly has merits. I think that that is why a lot of schools throughout Denver are still struggling. My own high school saw better results though, largely because it has an excellent administration which realized that improving the overall environment of the school was key.
To tackle the problem of gangs around school, there were a couple of important changes our last principal initiated, that other schools in the area did not necessarily pick up on. 1) Strictly enforce a ban on certain types of clothing that were being used to display allegiance to given gangs. 2) Increase the amount of open spaces for students to stay in while not in classes. 3) Require that students show up to school each morning, even if they do not have classes that morning. 4)Encourage students to stay inside during school hours, even when they have off blocks. 5) Have police/security officers at school introduce themselves to students, and engage students in conversation to get to know them.
On the whole the principal was very engaging so it was thanks to these programs that the gang problem was not as bad when I left compared to when I entered. In this case the heightened role of security was leveraged to have some positive effects, something not seen at other schools where there is a fundamental lack of trust between students and security. Trust and positive engagement are key, but achieving that is difficult.
