The enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015 by President Barack Obama increased accountability requirements and was designed to reduce achievement and opportunity gaps, and racial disproportionality in school discipline. Despite the implementation of ESSA, Black girls still continue to experience hypercriminalization and policing, and when disaggregated by race and gender, they still receive the highest rates of disciplinary punishments in school and out of school. In this article, we discuss how Black girls in the Pk–12 public school system are invalidated and ignored in educational policy discourse and in school reform. In our discussion, we argue that ESSA tends to focus on identity categories (such as race, gender, class, and linguistics), and not on the intersectionality thereof, or how race does not operate as a silo (race, gender, social class, and other parts of our identity are layered and form a mosaic).
We draw from literature on Black girls, zero tolerance, and critical race feminism to examine Black girls’ disciplinary punishments in Chicago Public Schools, and ESSA's effect on a national scale. In our analysis of quantitative data from Chicago Public Schools, we find that, in the third largest district in the United States, Black girls are disproportionally the recipients of out-of-school suspensions. Black female students received 78% of all female out-of-school suspensions during the 2016–2017 school year. A majority of the actions that Black girls were punished for were minor in nature and not due to violence or criminal offenses. We find that when Black girls are made invisible during the policy process and made visible when they are recipients of bias punishments, they will be more susceptible to receiving hyperpunitive disciplinary outcomes. Therefore, this article recommends that schools, policy makers, and researchers examine how harsh discipline and exclusionary policies affect Black girls as racialized and gendered beings while not ignoring the needs of Black female students during the school reform process.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AlexanderM. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press.
2.
American Psychological Association. (2008). Are zero tolerance policies effective in the schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. American Psychologist, 63(9), 852–862).
3.
BellD. A. (1995). Who's afraid of critical race theory?University of Illinois Law Review, 1995, 893.
4.
BlakeJ. J., ButlerB. R., LewisC. W., & DarensbourgA. (2011). Unmasking the inequitable discipline experiences of urban Black girls: Implications for urban educational stakeholders. Urban Review, 43(1), 90–106).
5.
BoylanE., & WeiserJ. (2002). Survey of key education stakeholders on zero tolerance student discipline policies. Newark, NJ: Education Law Center.
6.
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
7.
CampbellS. (2012). For colored girls? Factors that influence teacher recommendations into advance courses for Black girls. Review of Black Political Economy, 39(4), 389–402).
CollinsP. H. (2005). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and new racism. New York, NY: Routledge.
11.
CrenshawK. W. (1995). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299).
Darling-HammondL. (2010). The Flat world and education: How America's commitment to equity will determine our future. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
14.
DelgadoR., & StefancicJ. (2000). Introduction. In DelgadoR., & StefancicJ. (Eds.), Critical race theory: The cutting edge (2nd ed., pp. xv–xix)). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
15.
Delgado BernalD. (2002). Critical race theory, Latcrit theory, and critical raced gendered epistemologies: Recognizing students of color as holders and creators of knowledge. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 105–126).
16.
DixsonA., & RosseauC. (2006). Critical race theory in education: All God's children got a song. New York, NY: Routledge.
17.
Drug-Free Schools and Campuses Act of 1989, Pub. L. No. 101-226, December 12, 1989, §103 Stat. 1928.
18.
DuncanG. (2011). Fostering cultures of achievement in urban schools: Toward the abolition of the school to prison pipeline. In HartnettS. (Ed.), Challenging the prison–industrial complex: Activism, arts, and educational alternatives (pp. 203–227)). Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
19.
EliasM. (2013). The school-to-prison pipeline. Teaching Tolerance, 52(43), 39–40).
Evans-WintersV. (2011). Teaching Black girls: Resiliency in urban classrooms. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
22.
Evans-WintersV. E. (2013). Critical race theory and African womanism: Theorizing Black girls’ education at the local and global levels. In Zamani-GallaherE.M., & PoliteV.C. (Eds.), African American females: Addressing challenges and nurturing the future (pp. 235–256)). Dearborn: Michigan State University Press.
23.
Evans-WintersV. E. (2016). Black girls’ education in the 21st century. Illinois School Journal, 95(2), 30–56).
24.
Evans-WintersV. E. (with Girls for Gender Equity). (2017a). Flipping the script: The dangerous bodies of girls of color. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 17(5), 415–423).
25.
Evans-WintersV. E. (2017b). Necropolitics and education. In Between the World and the Urban Classroom (pp. 19–33)). New Milford, CT: Sense Publishers.
26.
Evans-WintersV. E., & EspositoJ. E. (2010). Teaching other people's daughters: A critical race feminist perspective. Educational Foundations, 24(1-2), 11–24).
FrancisD. (2012). Sugar and spice and everything nice? Teachers’ perceptions of Black girls in the classroom. Review of Black Political Economy, 39(3), 311–320).
29.
GilbornD. (2013). The policy of inequity: Using CRT to unmask White supremacy in education policy. In LynnM., & DixsonA. (Eds.), The handbook of critical race theory in education (pp. 129–139)). New York, NY: Routledge.
30.
HeitzegN. A. (2009). Education or incarceration: Zero tolerance policies and the school to prison pipeline. Forum on Public Policy Online, 2009(2). Oxford Round Table, Urbana, IL.
31.
HenaultC. (2001). Zero tolerance in schools. Journal of Law and Education, 30(3), 547–553).
32.
HenryA. (1998). “Invisible” and “Womanish”: Black girls negotiating their lives in an African-centered school in the USA. Race Ethnicity and Education, 1(2), 151–170).
33.
Hines-DatiriD. (2015). When police intervene: Race, gender, and discipline of Black male students at an urban high school. Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, 18(2), 122–133).
34.
Hines-DatiriD., & Carter AndrewsD. J. (2017). The effects of zero tolerance policies on Black girls: Using critical race feminism and figured worlds to examine school discipline. Advance online publication. Urban Education.
35.
HoffmanS. (2014). Zero benefit estimating the effect of zero tolerance discipline polices on racial disparities in school discipline. Educational Policy, 28(1), 69–95).
36.
HowardT. C. (2010). Why race and culture matter in schools: Closing the achievement gap in America's classrooms. New York: NY: Teachers College Press.
37.
HowardT. C. (2013). How does it feel to be a problem? Black male students, schools, and learning in enhancing the knowledge base to disrupt deficit frameworks. Review of Research in Education, 37(1), 54–86).
38.
LadnerJ. (1971). Tomorrow's tomorrow: The Black woman. In AldridgeD.P. (Ed.), Imagine a world: Pioneering Black women sociologists (pp. 91–102)). Garden City, NY: University Press of America.
39.
Ladson-BillingsG., & TateW. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68).
LynnM., & DixsonA. (2013). The handbook of critical race theory in education. New York, NY: Routledge.
42.
MoodyM. (2016). From under-diagnoses to over-representation: Black children, ADHD, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Journal of African American Studies, 20(2), 152–163).
43.
MorrisM. W. (2016). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New York, NY: The New Press.
44.
National Association of School Psychologists. (2011). Zero tolerance and alternative strategies: A fact sheet for educators and policymakers. Retrieved from http://www.naspcenter.org/factsheets/zt_fs.html
No Child Left Behind Act. (2001). Reauthorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Retrieved from: http://www.k12.wa.us/esea/NCLB.aspx. Washington, DC. U.S.Department of Education.
47.
O'ConnorC. (1997). Dispositions toward (collective) struggle and educational: Resilience in the inner city: A case analysis of six African American high school students. American Educational Research Journal, 34(4), 593–629).
48.
RobertsD. (1997). Killing the Black body: Race, reproduction, and liberty. New York, NY: Random House.
49.
Schott Foundation for Public Education. (2012). The Schott 50 state report on public education and Black males. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Schott Foundation. Retrieved: http://www.blackboysreport.org/2015-black-boys-report.pdf
50.
SmithP. J. (1998). Our children's burden: The many-headed hydra of the educational disenfranchisement of Black children. Howard Law Journal, 42, 133, 231.
51.
SolórzanoD. G., CejaM., & YossoT. J. (2000). Critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campus racial climate: The experiences of African American college students. Journal of Negro Education, 69(1/2), 60–73).
U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. (2014). Civil rights data collection: Data snapshot (school discipline). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. Retrieved from http://ocrdata.ed.gov/Downloads/CRDC-School-Discipline-Snapshot.pdf
54.
VerdugoR., & GlennB. (2006, February). Race and alternative schools. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the conference Alternatives to Expulsion, Suspension, and Dropping Out of School, Orlando, FL. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=248222
55.
WingA. K. (Ed.). (1997). Critical race feminism: A reader. New York: New York University Press.
56.
WingA. K. (Ed.). (2003). Critical race feminism: A reader (2nd ed.). New York: New York University.
57.
WinnM. (2010). “Betwixt and between”: Literacy, liminality, and the “celling” of Black girls. Race Ethnicity and Education, 13(4), 425–447).
