Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

by Monique W. Morris

The Obamas’ smiles felt inappropriate in an institution that provided so little response to girls with such significant needs. In that juvenile hall, the image and the privilege it represented felt unreal, out of touch, and unfair.

My auntie and my godmama said, if you don’t get it, or you don’t understand, you ask a question. And that’s what I do, I ask the question. And I always do that. I always question. And then sometimes, teachers get mad off of that. Questioning them

In 2012, six-year-old Salecia Johnson was arrested in Georgia for throwing books, toys, and wall hangings, amounting to a “tantrum”

However, from coast to coast, Black girls tell stories of being pushed out of school and criminalized for falling asleep, standing up for themselves, asking questions, wearing natural hair, wearing revealing clothing, and

“I get referrals for the simplest reasons,” he said. “For a girl yelling, ‘I don’t understand!’ a teacher replying, ‘Did you come to school to learn?’ earning the retort, ‘You come to school to teach?’ . . . You know, our babies can be kind of snappy, so the way [they] say it, you know, it might have an expletive in there somewhere.

That the comment was made by a well-meaning African American administrator reflects the pervasive and internalized nature of the “angry Black woman” cliché, which serves no one particularly well.

In this instance, teachers demonstrated compassion and effective communication, and were able to defuse a situation that could have become hostile. They saw her agitation and recognized her need to feel respected. She, in turn, responded by accepting their apology.

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.”

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

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.17 It suggests that small criminal acts are indicative of more severe, negative behavior that may later manifest.

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.

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 849,447.21 Still, the racial disparities remain. While Black girls are nearly 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 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.

Black girls are approximately 29 percent of girls enrolled, but 35 percent of girls referred to law enforcement, 52 percent of girls placed in restraints, and 45 percent of girls arrested on campus.

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,

In her book Sugar in the Raw (1997), Rebecca Carroll shared the narratives of Black girls, including some who foreshadowed how zero-tolerance policies would treat them in the years to come.

“Willful defiance” is a widely used, subjective, and arbitrary category for student misbehavior that can include everything from a student having a verbal altercation with a teacher to refusing to remove a hat in school or complete an assignment.

color. In 2014, when California discovered that 43 percent of its suspensions in the 2012–13 academic year were for willful defiance, the state became the nation’s first to limit suspensions tied to this offense.

Chicago Public Schools is the third-largest school district in the United States, with more than six hundred schools serving about four hundred thousand children.

Under the best circumstances, says a Congressional Research Service report, SROs help develop community justice initiatives for students and train them in conflict resolution, restorative justice, awareness of crime, and problem-solving with regard to criminal activity. Over time, the number of SROs has grown tremendously—in 2007, there were about 6,700 more SROs than in 1997.46 In the 2013–14 school year, 42 percent of our nation’s high schools were assigned a school resource officer.47

Research on the impact of SROs has found that the presence of SROs in schools has contributed to the formal processing of youth into the justice system. A 2011 study by criminologists Chongmin Na and Denise Gottfredson found that schools with SROs record more crimes that involve weapon and drugs, but they also report more nonserious crimes to law enforcement—thereby expanding the reach of the criminal justice system, a practice that is referred to as “net-widening”:

The analyses also showed that as schools increase their use of police officers, the percentage of crimes involving non-serious violent offenses that are reported to law enforcement increases.”

“It’s time”—a phrase that was intended to communicate with students, for whom enrollment at this alternative school was one of their last chances to salvage a high school experience, that it was time to drop out of school.

The presence of law enforcement (including school resource officers, school-based probation officers, security officers, and others) has been cited as one of the largest contributing factors to the increased rates of student citations in schools.

In describing her learning environments, Michelle mentioned that she felt teachers responded best to students who were already high performers, at the expense of other students who may have needed more attention. She linked this practice to the school-to-prison

So that’s already unfair. But when you get into a fight, they don’t solve the situation. They just say, ‘You go home for ten days, and you go home for ten days’ . . . instead of trying to really figure out why did y’all fight and what’s going on.”

Chicago has since extended its school day to provide more opportunity for recess, but there are still many young adults whose cognitive, physical, and emotional development have been harmed by the absence of recess.

without intentional efforts to combat old ways and norms, schools routinely function as institutions that reproduce dominant social ideas, hierarchies, and systems of oppression. Schools that approach learning as an exercise in classroom management are often preoccupied with discipline—exclusionary discipline, to be exact.

“One time I was in the computer lab,” she said. “So I raised my hand, and I’m like . . . ‘Can I go to the restroom?’ He said, ‘Yeah, go ’head. You’re gonna get your education in the hallway anyway.’ So I’m like, ‘What?’ Like, I clicked out . . . I clicked out.”

mad ’cause I’m telling the truth, you know?” Malaika’s narrative reflects the complicated nature of speaking one’s truth as a Black girl in the United States. The messages that she received regarding her duty to speak up and the reactions to her resistance to an oppressive silence or humiliation were confusing.

The permission to fight—granted by both Paris and her mother—was a matter of personal safety. It’s important to note that Paris was responding to bullying. That her physical safety was in danger is a statement both about the prevailing culture of oppression around her gender identity and about the absence of protection in schools for students who are transitioning their gender during these adolescent years. Paris was triggered by her inability to discover

Dress codes in the United States are arbitrary, and in general they are sexist and reinforce the practice of slut shaming. They can also reinforce internalized oppression about the quality of natural hairstyles on people of African descent. While personal taste may lead many of us away from wearing leggings or dreadlocks at school, any school policy that is designed to keep girls from being “too distracting” for boys or presenting in ways that are deemed too ethnic is at minimum sexist and inappropriate.

This practice is primarily about maintaining a social order that renders girls subject to the approving or disapproving gaze of adults. It is grounded in respectability politics that have very little to do with education and more to do with socialization.

She lifted her head and shared details about being “tired and hungry.” The exchange between the student and her teacher was neither contentious nor judgmental. The teacher, a Black woman, simply stated that the young woman’s expressed fatigue was “all in [her] mind,” to which the student replied, “Really? I thought it was my body.”

The examples in this chapter also show how Black girls often interpret responses to their perceived attitude and have normalized a disregard of Black femininity. The experiences related in this chapter have mostly focused on attitudes and violent behaviors as expressions of how girls adapt to this disregard.

“Girls are ride or die for their boyfriend,” Diamond said. “So [the police] try to get her too. . . . Usually, Black girls, they have older boyfriends . . .’cause their boyfriends have

“The pimp or ‘boyfriend’ that is keeping you from going to school, does he have an education?” I asked. “Mm-hmm,” Diamond said, nodding. “My boyfriend, he graduated from college.” She looked proud.

My conversations with other girls who were victims of sex trafficking revealed that the primary motivating factor for being in the sex industry was the need for money. For many girls who were actively “on the street,” school stopped being a priority, especially

Diamond, like other girls who come from poverty, understood that education is a tool for economic success, but she was also feeling pressured to find a way out of poverty sooner

A recent report, The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline, highlighted the way in which girls, particularly girls of color, are criminalized as a result of their sexual and physical abuse.

We flag chronic absenteeism as an indicator of underperformance and alienation from school, but not necessarily as a pathway to (and symptom of) exploitation, delinquency,

This manipulated worldview often furthers her exploitation and facilitates a dynamic in which she is neither a dropout nor a pushout but instead a pullout—not of her own volition, but rather by someone who is already “out” himself or herself.

In terms of what’s reported, 40 percent of sex trafficking victims in the United States are Black.5 In New Orleans, the Bay Area, and Chicago, the reported number of Black girls being sexually trafficked is much higher. For example, the Los Angeles County Probation Department reported in 2015 that 92 percent of commercially sexually exploited girls in the county are Black.

“No,” she said. “I got into prostitution because the guy that raped me, he forced me on the track. Basically, I didn’t go willingly at first, but ever since he did that to me, my whole life just changed, and that was at twelve years old. Ever since then, my life’s been off-track.”

“Has anyone worked with you to try to help you get what you need to get back in school or talked to you about how you can make the transition off of the street?” I asked. “No. Nobody really helped me. Honestly, it took me about four years to get back on track. I’m just now getting back on track. So all this stuff I go through, I go through myself. I encourage myself.”

Some schools unlawfully bar pregnant girls from attending school or discriminate against them in other ways, including penalizing their success or ridiculing them.7 When girls are able to attend school, they often face the additional hurdle of finding child care or recuperating credits that were missed.

Public education remains one of the nation’s most ripe environments for inequality. From Julio’s perspective as a principal, chronic absenteeism made it difficult for the school to reach out to students who might have special learning needs.

“Like, probably, more attention. More attention and providing of what I ask. Like, if I ask that I need something, it’s not that I’m trying to annoy you. I’m trying to ask you for things that I really actually need.”

“What kind of people do you need in your life, at school, to be successful?” I asked. “Like, what would your ideal counselor look like?” “I just need somebody that is not there just to listen, but who actually feels me . . . who knows where I’m coming from and really understands. . . . Like, ‘Oh, you been a prostitute, I feel you’ . . . somebody like that. . . . Somebody that’s going to be there when I need them, like . . . three times a week, four times a week. Like when I feel bad and stuff.”

Though nationwide the numbers tell us that Black parents are involved in their children’s education—checking homework, talking about the importance of education with their children8—that was not Diamond’s experience.