Education & Pushout
The right to education is a fundamental promise in the United States. Yet across the country, girls of color are excluded from school by harsh discipline or even arrests; and they are constructively pushed out of school by a hostile school environment. In response to this crisis, the Center prioritizes work to end the criminalization and pushout of girls of color from school and creating health school climates where all girls can learn, focus, and thrive.
Highlights of Our Work on Education & Pushout
Trauma-Informed School Discipline and Preventing Sexual Assault
In 2016, the Center co-hosted at the White House with the Council on Women and Girls on Trauma-Informed Approaches in School: Supporting Girls of Color and Rethinking School Discipline.
Widespread discipline disparities by race and gender
We worked with our partners at NYU RISE research team in 2020 to analyze discipline disparities among girls based on the most recently released data from the US Department of Education’s CDRC. We found that girls of color are at a far higher risk of discipline in schools—more so than boys of color.
About Our Work on Education & Pushout
Girls of color are disproportionately disciplined and excluded from schools. According to the US Department of Education, Black girls are five times more likely to be suspended from school than white girls. And they are often disciplined for subjectively determined offenses, such as dress code violations or disrupting schools. Black girls are also restrained and transferred to alternative schools at alarmingly disproportionate rates. Exclusionary discipline is strongly associated with increased disengagement, feelings of stress and isolation, poorer academic achievement, and increased likelihood of involvement with the justice system.
Through research led by Dr. Jamilia Blake of Texas A&M University, then a Senior Scholar at the Center, we identified adultification bias as one potential causal factor for disproportionate school discipline of Black girls. Educators with skewed perceptions of Black girls’ innocence may hold Black girls to a more adult-like standard, interpret Black girls’ age-appropriate behavior as “disobedient”, disruptive, or threatening, or fail to extend compassion to Black girls equitably. Learn more about our work on adultification bias.
We also focus on the role that trauma plays in interfering with girls’ access to education. Girls whose behavior is rooted in trauma are often punished in schools. Rather than addressing the cause of their symptoms, schools react by suspending and expelling girls – especially girls of color. We focus on increasing girls’ access to mental healthcare in school.
Finally, the criminalization of girls of color in schools has been exacerbated by the increased presence of police on campus. We work to reduce and ultimately eliminate school police, whose presence often makes girls of color feel over-surveilled and generally less safe on campus. We have engaged in research to examine the promise of police-free schools and challenges districts have faced in living up to pledges to remove police. Read our recommendations to guide school districts on how to successfully transition to police-free status are laid out in our report, Fulfilling the Promise A Blueprint to Build Police-Free Schools.
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