Pushout
Page 8
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 849,447.21 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.22 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).23 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.24 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.25 Since 2000, the rate at which Black girls are harshly disciplined has remained disturbingly and disproportionately high.26
In Wisconsin, which produced the highest suspension rate for Black girls in 2011–12, no Black girls were referred to law enforcement directly.27 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.28 In 2013–14, Black students were 56 percent of students enrolled in MPS, and 83 percent of students considered habitually truant.29 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.30 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.31
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.32 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.33 Why?
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. Fourteen-year-old Latisha from Portland, Oregon, said, “A lot of people say I got an attitude, but I don’t really see it. The only reason people be saying I have attitude is because I stand my own ground.”
In an era when “stand your ground” laws are associated with judgments of justifiable homicide in the shooting deaths of unarmed Black men and boys (for example, George Zimmerman’s killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida), “standing one’s ground” now has other connotations. But for too many Black girls in schools, it has become associated with being perceived as “willfully defiant”—a relatively nebulous term that harks back to how others view their disposition or so-called attitude.
“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. It is essentially a formalized way for a school to reprimand students for failing to follow orders. As an undefined catchall category for student misbehavior, willful defiance has been scrutinized for how often it is used to suspend children of 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.34 However, this arbitrary category remains a fixture in many other states and educational systems nationwide.
At the time the GFSA was being implemented, little research centered adolescent Black girls in discussions about school safety. In fact, there were only a few narratives that explored the experiences of Black girls, particularly in schools that were experiencing higher levels of violence. Zero-tolerance discipline policies, specifically the controversial category of willful defiance, have become a routine way by which to punish and marginalize Black girls in learning spaces when they directly confront adults or indirectly complicate the teacher’s ability to manage the classroom—not necessarily actions that pose a threat to the physical safety of anyone on campus.
Zero-tolerance policies ignited a consciousness and school discipline ethos that supported the removal of students from the classroom if their actions were perceived as defiant in any way. In many cases, this quashed student voices and limited the ability of teachers and administrators to use discretion and respond to the unique events that led to a conflict. Consequently, the new culture also thwarts their ability to develop responses that might heal or repair the relationships between those involved in the conflict—students and teachers alike. Zero tolerance results in choices and decisions based on fear and punishment, not personal accountability.
To describe the complicated and nuanced impact of zero-tolerance policies and the greater school culture of punishment on Black girls, it’s instructive to examine one of the most notorious and complicated school districts in the nation—Chicago Public Schools.
Chicago, Then and Now
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.35 With a student population that is 39 percent African American, 46 percent Hispanic, and 9 percent White, Chicago Public Schools is composed primarily of youth of color.36 Chicago is now in the arduous process of dismantling zero-tolerance policies; however, it will take decades to unravel the legacy of punishment and reduce the Black student marginalization produced by years
of relying on exclusionary discipline. Black students in the Windy City represent 80 percent of Chicago’s multiple out-of-school suspensions, 66 percent of school-related arrests and nearly 62 percent of referrals to law enforcement.37 According to the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the overwhelming majority of these were for offenses that did not pose a “serious threat” to student safety.38
Although Black boys have been drastically and disproportionately affected by conditions that lead to punishment and criminalization in schools, Black girls are also affected by these conditions—a reality frequently obscured by biases in how harm is defined, what information is gathered, and who is deemed worthy of study and understanding. In Chicago, 23 percent of Black high school girls received out-of-school suspensions in the 2013–14 school year, compared to 6 percent of Latina girls and 2 percent of White and Asian girls. For Black girls in middle school, the rate was 14 percent.39 Similar trends have been found for in-school suspensions, where the rates for Black girls in high school doubled from 10 percent to 20 percent between the 2008–9 and 2013–14 academic years.40
Chicago has long served as a case study of ghettoized learning spaces. In 1922, Charles S. Johnson published “The Negro in Chicago: The Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot,” in which he examined the living conditions of Black people in Chicago following a 1919 race riot that resulted in more than five hundred injuries and the death of fifteen White and twenty-three Black Americans.41 More than a thousand Black families lost their homes to vandalism by White rioters, which had a significant impact on the landscape of residential segregation and educational opportunity on the South Side of Chicago for decades following the riot.42 Johnson, a sociologist, conducted a study that documented not only the general physical and social conditions that exacerbated the tensions between Black and White Chicagoans but also the specific ways that Black communities in the city, including its girls, were affected by educational disparities. On the topic of school discipline, Johnson found that differential discipline was used when teachers themselves appeared to harbor racial bias.
There was considerable variety of opinion among the teachers as to whether Negro children presented any special problems of discipline. The principal of a school 20 percent Negro (Felsenthal), for example, said that discipline was more difficult in this school than in the branch where 90 percent were Negroes (Fuller). This principal is an advocate of separate schools. She was contradicted by a teacher in her school who said she had never used different discipline for the Negroes. In schools where the principals were sympathetic and the interracial spirit good the teachers reported that Negro children were much like other children and could be disciplined in the same way. One of two teachers reported that Negro children could not be scolded but must be “jollied along” and the work presented as play. This is interesting in view of the frequent complaint of the children from the South that the teachers in Chicago played with them all the time and did not teach them anything.43
Strained racial relations are endemic to the learning climate for Black girls in Chicago, and they are part and parcel of the girls’ own internalization of where they belong—or don’t belong. Black girls have always struggled to learn alongside other children and been forced to explore their “otherness” in ways that set them apart from their Black male counterparts and their female counterparts of other racial and ethnic groups. Their struggle to be seen occurs even in learning spaces that have since become less “integrated” than they were in the early 1920s. Today, Black girls—particularly those who did not self-identify as high performers—interpret their teachers’ actions to suggest that their learning and involvement in school are marginal to the overall success of the courses being taught.
In the summer of 2014, I met with young women in Chicago, high school age or just above, to talk about their experiences in school. Each of the young women I spoke with had been born and raised in Chicago and was intimately familiar with the public schools in her communities. I asked them to tell me what school was like for them, and in a manner consistent with that of most girls and young women to whom I have posed this question, they began to describe a hyperpunitive, chaotic learning space that was preoccupied with discipline.
“First of all,” twenty-one-year-old Michelle said, “they all look like mini-prisons.”
Other girls in the group nodded in agreement and said, “Yes . . . yes . . .”
“I graduated in 2010,” Michelle continued. “It felt like you were always being watched, like, as if we were going to do something, and I felt like it was favoritism with people in the schools—especially coming from security guards. . . . The same actions would take place, but different people would get different consequences. . . . And the whole police station in the school, and everything . . . it wasn’t the space for that, and I just didn’t understand why they would put something like that in place.”
“I went to [that school] too,” said eighteen-year-old Leila. “The crazy thing for me is, school [in a more affluent neighborhood] was not like jail. I could walk the halls. I was going outside. I was cool with all the police. When the counselor took me in, I was making good grades, so she was just like, ‘Just go to class.’ I went to [another school]—an all-Black school as well, but it’s in [a high-poverty neighborhood] and they had stricter security. Everybody was in class because we couldn’t just roam the halls. . . . At [the high-poverty school], they had metal detectors. At this [more affluent] school, we didn’t. I could have more freedom.”
Metal detectors, security guards checking bags, and police patrolling the hallways of high schools might have become the norm for the young women who were in conversation with me that summer, but it wasn’t always this way. Since the mid-1990s, police officers have been increasingly assigned to schools, expanding the role of school resource officers (SROs) into a part of the educational climate. Seen as a “new type of public servant; a hybrid educational, correctional, and law enforcement officer,” SROs were defined as “law enforcement officers who engage in community-oriented policing activities and who are assigned to work in collaboration with schools and community-based organizations.”44 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 1997.45
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, White males between the ages of thirteen and eighteen are the most likely to initiate a school-based shooting.46 However, schools in which the student population is largely composed of youth of color have the highest degree of implementing metal detectors, security officers, SROs, and other police forces.47 While only 1 percent of schools in 1975 had police that were stationed in schools, the latest Crime Victimization Survey (2014) shows that 43 percent of students reported the presence of one or more police officers and/or security guards in their schools.48 Additionally, 88 percent of U.S. public schools in the 2011–12 academic year “reported that they controlled access to school buildings by locking or monitoring doors during school hours.”49
Though the implementation of zero-tolerance policies was largely a response to a moral panic surrounding male aggression (particularly that which involved gun violence), girls were targeted under the new policies as well, principally because they were attending schools that emphasized punishment and removal from school, rather than the repair of relationships or addressing the root causes associated with the violence.
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 crim
inal justice system, a practice that is referred to as “net-widening”: “For no crime type was an increase in the presence of police significantly related to decreased crime rates. The preponderance of evidence suggests that, to the contrary, more crimes involving weapons possession and drugs are recorded in schools that add police officers than in similar schools that do not. 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.”50
Police in schools may not be responsible for an increase in the use of exclusionary discipline, but they nevertheless reinforce the idea that youth of color need surveillance. Where law enforcement is present on the school campus, they are sometimes challenged to shift their own punitive thinking—a transition that takes time. For example, Victor, a dean of students for a school in California, spoke with me about having to work with officers on his campus to get them to understand that the school was trying to operate as a family. Victor described how one officer would routinely tell students who misbehaved, “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. Victor made several efforts to remind this officer that on their campus, his role was to secure the location and ensure that students were not presenting a physical threat—not to advise them of when to drop out. Still, this officer, according to the dean, resorted to the use of verbal threats that reflected his desire to remove certain students from the school for good.