Exclusive: Watchdog finds Black girls face more frequent, severe discipline in school
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Black girls face more discipline and more severe punishments in public schools than girls from other racial backgrounds, according to a groundbreaking new report set for release Thursday by a congressional watchdog.
The report, shared exclusively with NPR, took nearly a year-and-a-half to complete and comes after several Democratic congressional members requested the study . Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, later with support from Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, asked the Government Accountability Office in 2022 to take on the report.
The findings offer a first of its kind snapshot of the disciplinary disparities that Black girls face in public schools across the U.S. — often for similar behaviors.
Over the course of the 85-page report , the GAO says it found that in K-12 public schools, Black girls had the highest rates of so-called "exclusionary discipline," such as suspensions and expulsions. Overall, the study found that during the 2017-18 school year, Black girls received nearly half of these punishments, even as they represent only 15% of girls in public schools.
According to the report, Black girls accounted for 45% of out-of-school suspensions, 37% of in-school suspensions and 43% of expulsions for actions like "defiance, disrespect, and disruption." Nationally, Black girls received such exclusionary discipline at rates 3 to 5.2 times those of white girls. The study also found that when they had a disability, discipline rates for Black girls grew even larger.
"This new report, it's damning. It affirms what we've known all along that Black girls continue to face a crisis of criminalization in our schools," Pressley said. "And the only way we can address this crisis is through intentional, trauma-informed policy. And Congress must act."
The GAO report is the first to examine underlying infraction data among discipline disparities and identify what contributes to them, according to Pressley's office. It found that school poverty levels, the percentage of girls facing disabilities, the number of new teachers and the presence of a school resource officer were among the factors tied to increased discipline for girls.
For her part, Pressley said it's clear that racism, colorism and other biases such as adultification — or perceiving girls as older and more mature than their peers — also contribute to the harsher discipline of Black girls.
Pressley and other women members of Congress are set to present the findings on Thursday.
“I hope that, because of these important findings, schools across the country and policymakers at every level of government examine the use of exclusionary discipline policies that are disproportionately harming Black girls,” said DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The report found that punishments grow more dramatically in cases of girls who present with additional levels of diversity, such as Black girls who are also part of the LGBTQ community. Pressley said that the biased discipline patterns are deeply harmful, contributing to low self-esteem while detracting from students' ability to learn.
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Ayanna Pressley, Nancy Pelosi and Rosa DeLauro (a personal favorite) all are MacBeth's favorites ... /s
the innocent victims of gone with the wind syndrome ...
There's reason for that. Have you ever watched videos from in-school fights and disrespectful actions in class?
Are you saying it's only black girls that engage in that behavior?
I went to an all white school. Plenty of white girls fighting with each other and back talking teachers
Where in the fuck did I say that? I am saying the percentages are probably right and I know all kids do it. SMMFH
Once again you threw something out there hoping it would stick without explaining your statement. Do those videos show more black girls than white girls doing bad deeds? Do you have evidence?
I got the same impression that TG did.
You're reading something that isn't there. NOWHERE did he say that only black girls engage in that. That assumption come from you and you alone. The ONLY thing that was recommended was to take a look at some videos. That's it.
It seems no matter what - when it is measured with blacks and whites - it is always the blacks who are punished more harshly and more often - like in this article - they are 15% of the school population but charged 50% of the time.
Yeah, nothing to see here.
I don't think Jim needs you to stick up for him.
lol
Me too
You went to an all white school? Was that up north?..
I doubt TG needs you to stick up for her..
Yeah...pretty much. We had one Vietanamese family come to our school when I was in 8th grade. But there were no other kids of color. I lived in rural PA....very, very, very white. My school had maybe 700 kids
For her part, Pressley said it's clear that racism, colorism and other biases such as adultification — or perceiving girls as older and more mature than their peers — also contribute to the harsher discipline of Black girls.
Progressives have overwhelmingly controlled education for 50 plus years. If she wants to blame racism, start there.
The GAO report points out wide discrepancies between states in out of school suspensions between black girls and white girls on a per student basis. States with the highest black girl suspensions were:
There must be a disproportionate amount of racist teachers in the northern midwest and east coast.
What is CN?
Sorry, meant CT.
Amazing that they can get schools to tell the GAO how racist they are, but the FBI can't get major cities to report their crime statistics.
What's not amazing is unamazing people who find a fault wherever they look.
More Proof of systematic racism in public schools!
The soft racism of low expectations.
Apparently the teacher’s unions aren’t doing enough to root out racism in their ranks.
Like cops and their blue wall of silence, do our public education personnel have a similar code?
Over the course of the 85-page report , the GAO says it found that in K-12 public schools, Black girls had the highest rates of so-called "exclusionary discipline," such as suspensions and expulsions. Overall, the study found that during the 2017-18 school year, Black girls received nearly half of these punishments, even as they represent only 15% of girls in public schools.
Sorry, but that doesn't prove discrimination.
The question that needs to be asked is whether those Black girls WARRANTED those high rates of discipline. In other words, if I had 10 students and 5 were black and 5 were white and 3 of the Black girls were constantly in violent fights and got suspended for fighting: would that be discrimination since Black girls received 100% of the suspensions?
The answer would be NO
Logic and critical thinks has no place here. But on the other side, Schools are predominately run by liberal democrats so it is easy to believe racism is involved.
I knew a schoolteacher who told me they couldn't expel students anymore and that they even had trouble suspending them. I knew there were such problems in the schools and I took the time to find out why.
Here:
Enter the political appointees from the Obama Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division (DOJ), many of whom came from the aforementioned progressive advocacy groups. They took the tool they had: executive action.
They recast the school-to-prison pipeline as a race discrimination problem and invoked Title VI , which prohibits race discrimination by federal funding recipients, to force schools not to use disciplinary practices disproportionately affecting racial minorities. These activists-turned-bureaucrats relied on contorted past interpretations of civil rights and administrative law to decree that because school discipline had a disparate impact on racial minorities, anti-discrimination law essentially gave them plenary power over student discipline.
That interpretation of Title VI is unlawful. A deep dive into the court decisions invalidating aggressive use of disparate impact is unnecessary to understand the core problem: virtually everything has a racial disparate impact. Unless there is real scrutiny to ensure disparate impact rules target real discrimination, the power to issue disparate impact rules is essentially limitless.
Without that real scrutiny, virtually any politically fashionable grievance can be reframed as a race issue even if it really isn’t, leaving executive branch appointees to make new laws without involvement from Congress. Think too many employers use criminal background checks unfairly? Get the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to issue guidance restricting them because of their racial effect. Schools setting the bar too high for admission to advanced placement (AP) classes? OCR-ED can issue guidance to stop that. The federal civil rights laws can’t be stretched, at least not lawfully, to reach such ends.
With school discipline, it’s unlikely that teacher racial bias is a significant cause of disparities. Empirical studies purporting to show discrimination in discipline have been debunked thoroughly , and teaching is among this country’s most liberal professions , an unlikely haven for quiet racists. Finally, there is evidence that Black teachers discipline Black students at the same or higher rates as their non-Black colleagues.
Unfortunately, fearing expensive and burdensome federal investigations, many school districts started punishing minority students less when the Obama administration discipline guidance was in effect. When misbehavior isn’t punished, there tends to be more of it. Reports of increased classroom chaos abounded. Saddest of all are the stories of students trying to learn amid disorder — many of them from poor or racial minority backgrounds themselves.
The Education Department is seeking comments on school discipline disparities. As many parents, teachers and other interested persons as possible should send the Education Department comments to prevent the revival of President Obama’s failed policy. If that effort does not succeed, the fight should be taken to court and the judiciary should uphold the rule of law by restricting disparate impact only to cases where its use is congruent and proportional to stopping real racial discrimination.
Obama’s education guidance was terrible policy — and it’s about to come back (thehill.com)
You see, Obama believed that if more Black kids were being disciplined in some way it meant discrimination. Logic dictates that you must first find out if the disciplines were warranted and yes certain groups may commit more violations than others.