Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. Black students are more than four times as likely as white students - and Latino students are twice as likely - to attend schools where one out of every five teachers does not meet all state teaching requirements.
One of the striking statistics to emerge from the data, based on information collected during the 2011-12 academic year, was that even as early as preschool, black students face harsher discipline than other students.
In high school, the study found that while more than 70 percent of white students attend schools that offer a full range of math and science courses - including algebra, biology, calculus, chemistry, geometry and physics - just over half of all black students have access to those courses.
"We want to have a situation in which students of color - and every student - has the opportunity and access that will get them into any kind of STEM career that takes their fancy," said Claus von Zastrow, director of research for Change the Equation, a nonprofit that advocates improved science, technology, engineering and math education, or STEM, in the United States.
The Education Department's report found that black, Latino, American Indian and Native Alaskan students are three times as likely as white students to attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers.
In nearly a quarter of school districts with at least two high schools, the teacher salary gap between high schools with the highest concentrations of black and Latino students and those with the lowest is more than $5,000 a year.