Reddit reviews Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools :A Handbook for Parents, Students, Educators, and Citizens

It's...a lot of factors. The short answer is, the socioeconomic status of blacks in America, combined with the re-segregation of the US school system and the use of exclusionary disciplinary practices that create a "push out" problem. I don't have an advanced degree in the subject, so I apologize in advance for any vagueness of mistakes. I'll do the best to synthesize what I've learned so far.

First let's get into the details. To say that all blacks in America have a high drop-out rate is a serious oversimplification. Drop-out rates vary by income level; poor whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and any other subgroup you can find will all have high dropout rates that decease as income increases. Similarly, dropout rates vary by region type. Suburban schools tend to have low dropout rates, urban schools tend to have high dropout rates, and rural schools tend to be in the middle.

Remember that up until very recently in US history, schools systems were segregated, and not just in the south. Because most cities and states couldn't care less about the quality of education non-white students received, these schools were often very low-quality, especially in areas with the most virulent racism (again, not just in the south.)

So as you probably know, the civil rights movement happened, and was successful in ensuring legal rights for all students to gain aces to formerly all-white schools free from discrimination based on race, through such case as Brown v. Board of Education. But this was only true on paper, in reality it took decades to actually implement desegregation schools, mostly because the same Supreme Court that ruled segregated schools as unconstitutional gave up authority for integration to the same state governments that had created those segregated schools.

Whites did everything possible to prevent blacks from gaining equitable access to the school system. They used the "massive resistance" doctrine that was epitomized by Little Rock ("Segregation now, segregation forever"), and after Brown v. Board of Education, delay tactics ("You can't just rush these things, people will get too upset, we need more time...") and tokenism ("Of course our school is integrated, we have a whole 10 black students out of 3,000!"), as well as outright violence and intimidation. Source But when all of that failed after years or decades of legal pressure and activism, the response of whites was frequently to leave the cities for the suburbs, the phenomena known as White Flight. As whites abandoned the inner city, attention of media and policymakers left as well.

The result is the re-segregation of the US public school system, in which urban school schools, which are disproportionately composed of poor people of color receive far less funding and attention, in contrast to white suburban schools. Overview Remember that even with federal and state funding, local governments provide the backbone for schools. Since local governments receive their funding from property taxes, lots of poor people concentrated in a school district translates to a shortage of money where it is needed the most.

These inner-city schools have also seen a dramatic rise in exclusionary disciplinary practices such as detentions, suspensions, and expulsions. As crime and poverty increased in the inner city, conservatives often accounted it to a lack of morality by poor people of colon, and supported these practices to "get tough" on crime, juvenile delinquency, and school violence. Exclusionary disciplinary practices by definition take a student out of class, prevent them from learning, and frequently kick them out of school altogether. Numerous studies have documented that students of color are dramatically more likely to be punished in this way than white students, even for the same infraction. Zero tolerance policies are particularly unbalanced in this way.
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These combination of factors have created what many call a school to prison pipeline, which I highly encourage you to look up for further reading. Start here Thanks..and if someone more qualified than me could please let me know if I made any mistakes or oversights, that would appreciated.

*EDIT: A few minor formatting errors.
**EDIT: Sources

Do you want a list?

Here is a good one I always refer to.

Other than that I would challenge you to go find your own books on the subject and read into it if I am creating a storm of thought and questions for you.