Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

by Monique W. Morris

These institutions can be bastions of community building, where healing is at the center of their pedagogy and where our girls learn more than just how to behave in the presence of adults to be considered “acceptable” in a school environment.

Historian Manning Marable wrote, “Freedom is first and foremost a public understanding among the members of a society to protect and defend any opinions that are unpopular or at odds with opinions held by those who actually exercise power and privilege. Freedom is the fragile flower that must constantly be protected—not from those at the bottom of the social order but from the whims and desires of those at the top.”

Civil rights may be at the core of equal justice movements, and they may elevate an equity agenda that protects our children from racial and gender discrimination, but they do not have the capacity to fully redistribute power and eradicate racial inequity. There is only one practice that can do that. Love.

This book presents the voices of Black girls on the margins. It offers their perceptions of what contributes to their poor academic and behavioral performance in school and how that relates to their risk of incarceration.

There is still so much to explore about the lives of Black girls. We need scholars to center Black girls in their research, educators to immerse their pedagogy in intersectionality, and advocates and policy makers to measure impact outside of a linear framework. I sincerely hope that within the next five years, we are able to develop a robust and coordinated strategy to change the racial justice narrative in a way that authentically and earnestly includes girls and women.

“Well,” I responded, “some people think I should write a novel, and others think I should write it as nonfiction. . . . What do you think?” She didn’t respond at first, but then she relaxed her arms and stood up, responding to a prompt from the detention center staff that our time was up. As we approached the door and moved toward her cell, she said, “I think you should tell the truth . . . Yeah, just tell the truth.”

What follows is a series of questions and answers, organized into three sections: one for girls and young women, one for parents and the extended community of loved ones that embrace girls’ healthy development and well-being, and one for teachers and educators working with Black girls. Share this appendix, especially the first section, with the young women and girls whose experiences mirror or relate to the ones included in this book—and the adults who support them.

Find someone at school, at home, or in another part of your community (such as a community center or agency) who can help you create an educational plan. Ask this person to help guide you toward fulfilling your plan. Find an academic mentor or

Surround yourself with people who want to achieve, like you do. People who encourage you to stay away from school—whether they are girlfriends, boyfriends, family, or other adults with power—do not have your best interest at heart. People who love you want you to have your best chance in life, and that begins with staying in school and taking care of yourself.

How should I respond if I keep being challenged to fight in school? First, stop and breathe. Let’s start with some facts: You are the only person who controls your actions, no one else. No one can make you hit that other person who is provoking you, and no one is making you walk away. You control your own behavior. Now, let’s deal with reality: It is possible that you are feeling pressured to fight. There might be social pressures,

to get a copy of A Survivor’s Guide to Leaving. Adult survivors of sex trafficking believe this booklet is a very helpful tool as you launch your journey. A list of additional resources is included at the end of this appendix. If you’re in a different city, contact one on the list and they will help you find someplace closer that can help.

Lambda Legal’s website (lambdalegal.org) offers a host of resources that you may find helpful along your journey, including a report called Out, Safe and Respected: Your Rights at School. Become familiar with this report and identify allies and supportive adults and/or peers on campus. They can help you co-create safe spaces for your learning. Organizations

Prepare at least five specific questions about your daughter before attending a parent-teacher conference so that you can ask more than the general “How is she doing?” or “Why are you failing my daughter?” Often there are many reasons and many people involved—parents included—when a girl seems to be “failing” in a subject or in some other way.

But the most fundamental piece of this puzzle has remained constant—children are still children. They still co-construct their lived experiences by bringing their unique peer cultures to the adult world. They will still respond favorably to interventions that are rooted in a respect for them as people and that address their most basic needs.

As long as there are school resource officers and security guards on campus, they must be extensively trained to respond to and work with victims of sexual exploitation. These individuals should be rigorously screened for their own competence with respect to strategies to prevent and reduce the retraumatization of girls who have experienced sexual assault and victimization. There should be ongoing conversations with students—female, male, and elsewhere along the gender continuum.

There are many strategies that are used to manage classrooms, including mindfulness, merit-driven practices, restorative approaches, and buddy systems for accountability. Removing a student from your classroom should be a last resort. Before you start your lesson, establish or revisit norms for the classroom that you co-construct with the class on day one. This means that as the instructor,

Mindfulness practices that allow students to breathe and get centered before learning are also important to maintaining the safety of the students and the classroom. More often than not, students are disruptive because they have a lot on their minds or are masking something. Providing a space for students to acknowledge the issue(s) that they must set aside in order

Also, talk directly to the young woman or girl at a calmer moment and ask her, “What’s going on that makes you come to school so angry?” Parents, guardians, and other caregivers in the life of a child play a significant role in the partnership to keep our girls from internalizing negative behaviors (and ideas)—the kind that lead to them becoming

Also ask girls what kind of attention they think their current clothing attracts and talk to them about whether they are aware of other ways to get the attention they may be seeking. Adults should be prepared to receive answers that may not align with what they expect or want. Develop mutual agreements and compromises that allow a young woman to present in a way that reflects her personality without judgment. However, also engage them in conversations about why their clothing might be perceived as unsuitable for certain environments.

Remember the teacher in Northern California who said that we need to be comfortable with teaching more than just the curriculum? She was right that there is a greater opportunity for schools to get involved in the development of life and social skills that can facilitate a safer learning environment for girls. Schools have the unique ability to engage with students—however they identify and express along the gender continuum—about healthy relationships and personal accountability.

Call them out in front of others for doing something good—and do the same with their peers. Tell girls you teach or work with about your own journey and find a way to connect with them. However an adult identifies along gender, race, and class continua, telling your story is a

Adults in school have tremendous power over students, and they know this. As we observed from many of the narratives in this book, some girls take this basic imbalance of power as disrespect, or an affront to their independence.

Training for school resource officers could include specific, localized, and tailored protocols involving other informed organizations and agencies that work with girls and their families. School safety is so much more than enforcement. It involves prevention, nurturing, and collaboration. Work to combat implicit bias by constantly revisiting specific decision-making criteria for actions that are taken against girls in schools, and continue

Ultimately, SROs need tools and expectations so that their responses to student misbehavior are oriented toward repairing relationships among peers and between girls and the adults and institutions that are tasked with supporting their healthy development.

Dignity in Schools Campaign Nationwide

Two of our nation’s most prominent alternatives to punitive discipline are Positive Behaviors Intervention Systems (PBIS) and restorative justice.

PBIS has worked to improve staff members’ perceptions of the schools’ organizational health, and it reduced “students’ need for and use of school-based counseling services.”11 This suggests that by investing in specific interventions that target student behaviors, there can be broader outcomes that impact school climate and resources.

PBIS has also been found to positively impact academic achievement. In New Hampshire elementary, multilevel, and high schools, the implementation of PBIS with fidelity produced “associated gains in math achievement.”

PBIS and its outcomes are outliers in comparison to other conditions associated with the disproportionate discipline, exclusion, and marginalization of youth of color (e.g., implicit bias in school discipline decision making, or the impact of a school’s structure of dominance on students structural change or leadership development to reduce the use of exclusionary discipline). So we still have little information about how PBIS specifically impacts responses to Black girls.

PBIS is aimed at correcting student behavior (largely in association with the use of school discipline), but as we will explore, restorative justice aims to shift the paradigm of accountability. Because PBIS is a federally supported intervention, there is a more supportive legislative environment for the adoption of policies and practices that fall under the PBIS rubric.

Restorative justice is a process by which individuals involved in a crime or harmful incident are brought together to repair their relationship.24 Rooted in indigenous paradigms of justice from the United States, New Zealand, and other world cultures, restorative justice provides an alternative structure by which to correct negative student behaviors and to build accountability and community.

According to University of California, Berkeley, law professor Mary Louise Frampton, “For most of human history, the response to what are now called ‘crimes’ was restorative justice because people understood that crime results in injuries to victims, neighborhoods, even the offenders themselves.”32

While there are some similarities to restorative justice programs for criminal cases, the approaches used in an educational setting must be shaped to fit that context.”33 School-based restorative practices such as circles, mediation and counseling, family group counseling, and peer juries have been found to produce restorative

Restorative practices have been found to enhance youth leadership qualities and to increase accountability, school safety, and the development of prosocial skills.

Indeed, a recent national study found that the greater the concentration of students of color, the greater the likelihood of a school’s reliance on punitive exclusionary discipline in response to disruptive and problematic student behaviors.

In short, while some research has found that restorative practices may reduce discipline disparities associated with disproportionate contact with the juvenile justice system,42 a racial threat “reduces the use of restorative discipline and increases the use of harsh discipline in schools.”

According to sujatha baliga, director of the Restorative Justice project at Impact Justice, there are many models of restorative justice; some are more scripted, others are more flexible. However, she has found that the more hands-off the process, the more culturally responsive the practice.

I wondered aloud whether the girls were forced to join the circle. An important principle in restorative practice is that participation is voluntary, although I concede that people respond to the options set before them. If they

“I think also,” Leila said, “they should change the curriculum a little bit and put in Afrocentric studies because a lot of people have a lot of self-esteem issues and don’t even realize that’s why you getting so mad [because] she’s staring at you like that . . . if you’re more confident, then you’ve got more hope.”

Leila was onto something too. In the practice of repairing relationships between Black girls and schools, sometimes attention must also be paid to the curriculum.

Black girls are less likely than White girls of similar ages to participate in athletic activities.50 They’re searching for ways to release stress and develop strong interpersonal communications skills, but they are underrepresented in school-based activities that provide an opportunity for them to do that. In district schools nationwide,

Yejide Ankobia, a restorative justice professional and advocate whose work in the Bay Area has included girls on school campuses and in the criminal legal system, has seen this shift in worldview, though she acknowledges that building these relationships is sometimes a challenge.

“Some people don’t even label women or girls as ‘women’ or ‘girls.’ Everybody is a ‘female,’” Deena explained. “Everybody is a ‘female,’ no matter how old you are. You’re just a ‘female.’ So, it’s like, okay, you’re not giving us our entitlements. You’re not recognizing us for who we are. . . . Now, you have to have a job, be in school, and have a lot of stuff going for yourself just to be recognized as a good girl, or what they call ‘approachable,’ ‘wifey material,’ and stuff like that. Otherwise, you ain’t really nothing.

While only 11 percent of girls in the United States will give birth before they turn twenty years old, Deena’s recognition of the hardships that accompany being a teenage mother and student was an important proxy for the myriad interruptions that can negatively, and uniquely, impact girls.

Restorative approaches in schools might not directly facilitate these new opportunities, but they might provide girls with a venue to express their concerns about these identity and communications issues, and build relationships to address their concerns. I wondered if she had ever had open conversations with people about this, or whether she was keeping these thoughts to herself.

Restorative approaches work best for girls when they are fully engaged in the process through understanding and investment.56 This investment among girls of color appears to increase when facilitators reflect a similar background or express empathy for their experiences.57 Circles require an investment of time and trust, which may be difficult to fully implement in carceral facilities, even in their educational spaces.

Black facilitators helped to create a safer space in which the young women were able and willing to share their experiences and generate an authentic healing of relationships. According to Gaarder and Hesselton, “The black facilitator

We need to pour more money, more humanity, more passion, more spirituality into our Black girls. For me, the work is very personal in that way.” She is not alone.

For example, some school districts have experimented with school-based youth courts, wherein discipline is handled through a mock court, in which students assume the roles traditionally held in the U.S. paradigm of justice, such as a judge, attorney, bailiff, and so on.63 While not characterized as authentically restorative, youth courts have functioned as an alternative to more punitive responses to negative student behaviors.

Another critique of restorative justice is that it fails to recognize that not all individuals are seeking to have relationships return to where they began (if they were negative); rather, some prefer to transform the nature of these relationships.67 Some