Pushout (9 page)

The pattern Nancy describes is even more evident in those cases where a girl feels disrespected. To put Mia's point in a different way, sometimes these girls are triggered by adults “talking down” to them, or speaking to them as if they are not worthy of respect.

The student-teacher relationship is a critical component of whether a girl's comments will be seen as part of her expression and learning, or as a deliberate and willful affront to the teacher's authority. Neither of these is against the law, by the way. Yet many schools punish girls who speak out of turn or challenge what they feel is injustice as if it were a violation of law rather than an interrogation of fairness. Punishment often involves removal from class, which facilitates young people feeling disconnected from the material their classmates are learning, exacerbates underperformance on tests or other assignments, or leads to other situations that can and often do escalate to contact with law enforcement and the criminal legal system. Black children, who tend to display fewer “conforming” behaviors in the classroom than their White counterparts, are often subjected to less support and more criticism by their teachers.
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Black girls feel this and intuit the differential treatment. While teacher-parent relationships are also of tremendous importance, studies show that Black student performance and motivation are often a function of the students' social relatedness with teachers, especially in the early grades.
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So when teachers feel physically threatened by a six-year-old or
when “bad tantrums” are cause for handcuffs, there is a larger problem.

Anecdotally, when I have asked Black students why they underperform on tests or in other measures of school-based understanding, they often respond with “My teacher doesn't like me” or “I don't like that teacher.” This is the case even among high-performing Black girls, who recognize when they are being treated differently and can't understand why.

For Sheila, who was a graduating senior at a university in California at the time of our conversation, this was a particularly confounding experience, because she couldn't understand why someone like her—generally quiet and a good student—would be stereotyped into being a problem. Sheila went to a large public high school in an affluent community in Southern California, where the percentage of Black students was very low. She struggled to establish her own student identity, even when it appeared that teachers had different expectations of her.

“I was in AP European History my sophomore year,” she said, “and during that time, my uncle passed away and also with that, I was getting my contacts fitted. I had passed out and hit my head on the floor, so I was having migraines galore for about a good year, and they weren't able to actually figure out what was going on because my brain scan was normal [and] everything else was normal. They couldn't figure out why I was having these migraines. In that class in particular, I wasn't doing all the notes at the same time that everyone was doing their notes, and she noticed that. She would constantly get on me, like, ‘Why don't you have your notes?' Even though I explained all of this to her, she wasn't very sincere about it. I wanted to talk to her about it, like, ‘Hey, there was a death in the family, and [I'm] dealing with these things.' She had none of it. It was like, ‘Why aren't you doing this?' ‘Why aren't you keeping up in class?' [Meanwhile], I was going to school every day and I had a really good understanding of European history . . . and it showed when I was in class and
participating. . . . She was always doing little check-ins, but they always felt more invasive. . . . I noticed that she showed more preferential treatment toward my classmates. One week, [a white student] just didn't want to do her notes, and the teacher was like, ‘Oh, that's okay . . .' Well, that didn't happen with me! Why does she get to skip out on this, and I don't? . . . The first semester, I ended up getting a B, and ended the second semester with an A. I remember [the teacher] coming up to me and saying, ‘I didn't think you were going to finish.' Like,
no
. This is really important to me.”

Before the end of the semester, the teacher suggested several times that Sheila take a less advanced course. Perhaps it was because of the initial interruptions, but to Sheila, it didn't feel that way.

“Even after I was turning in all assignments and my test scores were really high, she continued to suggest it. That wasn't the problem. I was like, ‘Why do you keep suggesting this to me?' I really didn't understand why she kept doing that.”

Sheila responded to her teacher's differential treatment by trying harder, but for some girls the bias they experience is too upsetting for them to ignore. Some may have parents who taught them the mantra of having to work “twice as hard to get half as far,” but for others, that burden is so fundamentally unequal they refuse to play along. Instead, they find other ways to assert their dignity and to gain respect. Even if those ways get them in trouble.

In a society so shaped by race and gender, we all live with implicit biases that inform our ideas, stereotypes, and norms of Black femininity. Our perceptions of difference can sometimes fuel unconscious biases that inform our subconscious reactions to individuals based upon latent, involuntary ideas about race, gender, sexuality, or other aspects of identity.
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This is important because, well, educators are people. It's unreasonable to think that they are not impacted by the barrage of negative images associated with Black female identity in the popular consciousness.

Certain individual interactions offer evidence of bias—as is the case with many of the stories offered by the girls and young women
in this book—but we also see it at a structural level. The greater a school's proportion of students of color, the higher the likelihood that punitive exclusionary discipline will be used in response to student behaviors deemed disruptive and problematic.
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It's unlikely that administrators of these schools are intentionally of the mind to punish youth of color more than their White counterparts. But punitive responses to student behaviors are especially prevalent in schools where principals and other school leaders believe that “frequent punishments helped to improve behavior.”
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And these leaders are disproportionately found in schools with high numbers of students of color. Their presence there is not an accident.

Standing Their Ground: Zero Tolerance, Willful Defiance, and Surveillance

For two decades, the nation has been enthralled in a punitive whirlwind that has reshaped how educators respond to students, how administrators understand and interpret adolescent misbehavior, and how institutions respond to the learning needs of children in high-poverty schools. For their part, women and girls experience multiple ways of knowing.
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They gather information not only from what people (adults and peers) tell them but also from experiences, symbols, and metaphors that are woven into the tapestry of their environments.
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Black girls notice the verbal and nonverbal cues that signal what they are supposed to do and be in life, and they are astute enough to realize when the learning environment is producing something other than its stated goal of educating children. What is often being produced creates a climate so hostile that it pushes girls out of school, and so toxic that it is giving us all an attitude.

Zero-tolerance policies are rules and practices that emerged from the “broken windows” policing theory, first developed by criminologists George L. Kelling and James W. Wilson.
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It suggests that small criminal acts are indicative of more severe,
negative behavior that may later manifest. In the 1990s, law enforcement, particularly police forces in many of the nation's large urban centers, turned toward arresting individuals for minor infractions or incidents of misbehavior. The idea is that by not tolerating any infractions, they are mitigating future, possibly worse offenses. This preventative “tough love” has ushered in a climate and culture of harsh punishment in communities already strained by economic and social exclusion.

In 1994, at the height of a hyperpunitive approach to criminal justice policy and rhetoric in the United States, President Clinton signed into law the Gun Free Schools Act (GFSA), which required schools to expel for at least one year any student who brought a weapon to campus.
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The policy was in response to a series of school shootings—more than fifty across the country—that together garnered the attention of the American people, as well as national policy makers.
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Then, on April 20, 1999, two boys opened fire on the campus of Columbine High School in Colorado, killing twelve students and one teacher and injuring more than twenty other students before committing suicide.
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Columbine spurred a heightened awareness of gun violence on school campuses, and precipitated the implementation of instruments of surveillance that were said to provide the highest degree of “safety” for students.

While structural inequalities preceded the incident in Columbine, zero-tolerance policies that were first intended to protect students from guns and weapons on school grounds have greatly expanded to include automatic suspension for students who bring drugs onto school campuses, fight with one another on campus or within a certain radius of the school, or are perceived as threatening other students or teachers with physical violence. Marked by the wide latitude of their interpretation, these policies vary across schools and districts but remain in many ways a justification for overzealous, punitive reactions to student misbehavior. The ones mentioned here are common guidelines in places where zero tolerance is enforced.

Nationwide, the number of girls (of any racial and ethnic affiliation) who experienced one or more out-of-school suspensions decreased between 2000 and 2009 from 871,176 to 849,447.
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Still, the racial disparities remain. While Black girls are 16 percent of girls enrolled in school, a figure that has declined only slightly in the last decade, their rate of discipline has remained elevated. In 2000, Black girls were 34 percent of girls experiencing an out-of-school suspension. In 2006, Black girls represented 43 percent of out-of-school suspensions among girls. By the 2009 academic year, Black girls without a disability were 52 percent of all girls with multiple out-of-school suspensions.
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In the 2011–12 school year, there were eighteen states with out-of-school suspension rates for Black girls higher than the national average (12 percent).
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Across southern states, Black girls are particularly vulnerable to the use of exclusionary discipline, representing 56 percent of girls suspended and 45 percent of girls expelled in this region. In ten southern states, Black girls were the most suspended among all students—an unusual and noteworthy problem.
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Over the course of this decade, there was an important shift in the public and policy interpretation of how to secure school campuses, and it's had a largely negative impact on Black girls. In the 2009–10 school year, Black girls without a disability were 31 percent of girls referred to law enforcement and 43 percent of girls with school-based arrests; in the 2011–12 school year, Black girls remained 31 percent of girls referred to law enforcement and were 34 percent of school-related arrests.
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Since 2000, the rate at which Black girls are harshly disciplined has remained disturbingly and disproportionately high.
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In Wisconsin, which produced the highest suspension rate for Black girls in 2011–12, no Black girls were referred to law enforcement directly.
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However, digging a little deeper into the numbers reveals a dire situation. During that time, the truancy rate for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS)—the metropolitan area with the highest incidence of African American poverty in the United States—was 81 percent.
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In 2013–14, Black students
were 56 percent of students enrolled in MPS, and 83 percent of students considered habitually truant.
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The truancy rate for female students in MPS was nearly 53 percent and for Black female students, it was 68 percent—the highest rate among all students.
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In Madison, where more than 74 percent of Black children live in poverty, where Black females are almost six times more likely to be unemployed than their White counterparts, and where Black youth are more than nine times more likely to be habitually truant than their White counterparts, the arrest rate for Black youth is six times the rate for White youth.
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In the twenty years that followed the implementation of the GFSA, Black girls have become the fastest-growing population to experience school suspensions and expulsions
,
establishing them as clear targets of punitive school discipline. The National Women's Law Center and NAACP Legal Defense Fund released
Unlocking Opportunity for African American Girls: A Call to Action for Educational Equity
, a 2014 report that explored not only the disparities in school discipline but also the extent to which other obstacles undermine Black girls' ability to fully engage as learners in schools. According to that report, “Decades after legal battles were fought to dismantle legalized racial segregation in education, African American students are still disproportionately enrolled in schools without access to quality resources, credentialed teachers, rigorous course offerings, and extracurricular activities.
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In
Black Girls Matter: Pushed-Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected
, a report by the African American Policy Forum, it was noted that Black girls are expelled from New York schools at fifty-three times the rate for White girls and resort to acting out (using profanity, fighting, having tantrums, etc.) when their counseling needs are ignored.
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Why?