Federal report: Black girls face disparity in school discipline

Rep. Pressley sponsors ‘Ending PUSHOUT Act’ to address concerns

A new federal report, released Sept. 19, highlighted a disparity in disciplinary action Black girls face in schools.

The report by the United States Government Accountability Office — a federal organization that provides non-partisan reports to legislators and governmental agencies — analyzed surveys nationwide and found that Black girls feel less safe and less connected to their schools than peers from other racial demographics.

Legislators, including Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who was one of the congresspeople who requested to the report from the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, pointed to the results as an indicator of a broader issue of how Black and brown girls are treated in schools.

Those issues often push girls out of schools, she said.

“From natural hairstyles to body shaming, our girls are over policed, under protected and too often pushed out of school and onto a pathway to confinement,” Pressley said at a press conference Sept. 19.

The report found that, in the 2017-18 school year, while Black girls made up 15% of all girls in public schools nationwide, they received almost half of suspensions and expulsions. They tended to face punishments that were more severe than white girls, even when the infractions were similar.

It’s a disparity that holds true across several categories of infractions, according to the report — across subjective infractions like defiance and disrespect and objective ones like vandalism, major ones handled by administrators versus minor ones handled by staff. And in all those cases, Black girls were more likely to face expulsion and suspension than white girls.

According to the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, which runs a state-by-state disciplinary data hub, the same trends hold true in Massachusetts.

Take, for example, in school suspensions. In the 2017-18 school year — the latest year for which data is available — about 78 Black girls per 1,000 students in traditional public schools faced in-school suspensions. That’s compared to about 32.2 female students overall, per 1,000 students, or 22.6 white girls.

In traditional public schools statewide, Black girls faced rates of expulsion about three times higher than the rate of all female students, and about 4.6 times the rate of white girls.

Speakers at the press conference highlighted the broad effect the report identified in high schools all the way down to kindergarten classrooms.

“The groundbreaking GAO report … highlights the unacceptable discrimination that Black girls face — K-12; we’re talking about little girls — every day,” said California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who, alongside Pressley, requested the report.

Disparate disciplinary action and the way Black and brown girls are described by teachers and school staff to each other or to students — like calling them “bad girls” after just one perceived misstep — can prominently shape how girls see themselves, said Ivanna Solano, executive director of Love Your Magic, a Boston-based organization that works to create spaces and experiences for Black and brown girls to express themselves and feel supported.

“One bad choice does not make you a bad person,” Solano said. “Even as adults, when we make mistakes, they don’t make us bad people. So why do we label girls as such? That is something that I really would love for our community to think about. Language matters.”

That kind of disciplinary action can have a significant impact on students. In publishing its report, the Government Accountability Office said that exclusionary discipline — where students are removed from the classroom, such as with suspensions and expulsions — can impact girls’ mental health, substance abuse and experiences of violence, all measures of well-being where many girls are already struggling.

“Girls’ well-being can be affected by their experiences in public schools and the detrimental effects of removing students from the classroom for discipline,” the office wrote in an explanation of why they did the study.

And it can be a significant factor that causes Black and brown girls to give up on schooling — so-called “pushout.”

Monique Couvson, founder of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, said that she sees two main factors influencing pushout: surveillance and infrastructure that supports long-held biases, especially about Black girls, and adultification, where staff and teachers punish students for normal adolescent behavior and fail to treat them with empathy and protection.

“As a former educator and principal investigator of evaluations for school-based programs, I know that the safest schools are those that operate with the belief that no child is disposable,” Couvson said.

The report was the first of its kind to examine underlying infraction data among discipline disparities, but for legislators and advocates at the press conference, while the results were many things — devastating, alarming, damning — they weren’t surprising.

“The Government Accountability Office has shared a truth we have known in our communities for far too long: Our schools are failing our Black girls,” said Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar. “They are pushing them out, criminalizing their behavior and robbing them of their right to an equal education.”

Supporters at the press conference said the findings of the report points to a need to pass legislation like the “Ending Punitive, Unfair, School-Based Harm that is Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma” or “Ending PUSHOUT” Act.

That bill, which was first introduced by Pressley in 2019, would create new grant funding to support states and schools that make commitments to improve school climate, increase and expand data collection by the Department of Education and create an interagency task force to work to end school pushout.

“Our bill … would address this crisis head on by investing in safe and nurturing school environments,” Pressley said. “As Dr. Couvson has so often said, our girls need to know that they are loved, and they are sacred.”

Couvson, who holds a doctorate in education, called the legislation, which she said she has supported since it was first proposed in 2019, an important move past just producing this report or identifying the issue.

“It’s not enough to map disparity and then resolve to do nothing about it,” she said. “I have recommended for schools to be locations for healing, so that they can realize their potential as locations for learning, for Black girls and for everyone else.”

Solano called the bill an important first step that she thinks would be “transformative” in making efforts to keep Black and brown girls in school a priority nationwide. If it were passed, she said she hopes it means that efforts to create spaces and protections for Black and brown girls wouldn’t be limited to certain schools or districts but would make the efforts more widespread.

“It will push us all to really make sure that we are all on the same page,” she said. “If a girl is getting the services and the support that she needs here in Boston, if that girl were to move, her experience wouldn’t really change, because she would still be in a community or in a space where she has the same foundational beliefs and is following the same guidelines.”

But for her, passage of the bill, while important, is a first step. She said other work, too, will be required to address the issues around pushout, including efforts that push schools and districts to really think about how to create spaces where girls can heal and thrive. In that work, she said the voices of Black and brown girls should be at the heart of crafting solutions.

“As adults, oftentimes we think that we know how to best support young people, and as such, we fall short,” Solano said. “It’s important to really pass the mic to young people and center their experiences. We would be surprised as to how much knowledge they can already share about what they want to be true for schools in order for them to be places of healing for our girls.”

Pressley framed the report and the bill as a continuation of work she has pursued since her days on the Boston City Council, where she led focus groups with 100 girls of color from schools across the area as well as two “listening-only” public hearings to bring attention to how the issue was affecting girls locally.

“The overall message was the same: feelings of unworthiness, being stereotyped and experiences of being silenced and shamed,” Pressley said. “In 2017, I was a Boston City Councilor; in 2024, I’m a member of Congress and get to take those issues that I began working on in the micro level, on the municipal level, to now address at the macro level, federally. I still carry those stories with me every day.”