These kinds of policies – clothing restrictions, codes barring certain hairstyles, policies that regulate kids’ “attitudes” and discourage “disruption” – are common in public schools in the U.S. But research shows that vague and implicitly biased guidelines are contributing to a large percentage of black girls being pushed out of the system before they even make it to graduation.
When children are punished for unfair and unspecific infractions like “defiance,” they are more likely to mistrust adults, they end up with lower grades from losing class time, and they have a higher likelihood of dropping out of school entirely. Black girls, according to research by the National Women’s Law Center, are on the receiving end of a disproportionate percentage of unfair discipline.
This is responsible for what is known as “push-out”: when a school’s disciplinary actions encourage a student to abandon their education.
In 2014, the NWLC and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund released a report that shared details on how often black girls were punished in school, and why. “African-American girls often encounter deeply embedded stereotypes that reinforce racial and gender biases in the classroom,” the report says. Because of this, in the 2011-2012 school year, “twelve percent of all African-American pre-K-12 female students were suspended.” This was six times as many suspensions as those doled out to white girls. It was higher than all groups of girls in general, and higher than suspensions given to white, Asian, and Latino boys.
Black girls accounted for 31 percent of all girls referred to law enforcement and almost half the number of girls who experienced a school-related arrest. “Although African-American students are punished more frequently than their white peers,” the report says, “they are not engaged in more frequent or serious misbehavior.” Worse still, African-American students are given harsher disciplinary measures than white students for the same behavior. Remember the South Carolina student who was thrown to the ground by an in-school police officer for having her cell phone out? That’s one type of disciplinary action that the NWLC would like schools to begin combating.
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