Pushout

by Monique W. Morris

  8. American Association of University Women. How Does Race Affect the Wage Gap? (Washington, DC: AAUW, 2014).

  9. E. Ann Carson and Daniela Golinelli, Prisoners in 2012: Trends in Admissions and Releases, 1991–2012 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2013); The Sentencing Project, Incarcerated Women (Washington, DC.: The Sentencing Project, n.d.).

  10. Annie E. Casey Foundation, Kids Count 2014 Databook: State Trends in Child Well-Being. (Baltimore, MD: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2014), 19.

  11. U.S. Census Bureau, People in Families by Family Structure, Age, and Sex, Iterated by Income-to-Poverty Ratio and Race: 2012, Below 100% of Poverty—Black Alone or in Combination (A.O.I.C.) (Washington, DC: Census Bureau, 2013).

  12. National Center for Education Statistics, Percentage of High School Dropouts Among Persons 16 Through 24 Years Old (Status Dropout Rate), by Sex and Race/Ethnicity: Selected Years, 1960 Through 2012 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2013). See also U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (CPS), 1967 Through 2012 (Washington, DC: Census Bureau, 2013).

  13. Charles Puzzanchera, Benjamin Adams, and Sarah Hockenberry, Juvenile Court Statistics 2009 (Pittsburgh, PA: National Center for Juvenile Justice, 2012), 26.

  14. Melissa Sickmund, Juveniles in Corrections (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2004). See also National Center for Juvenile Justice, Easy Access to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement: 1997–2010 (Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2015).

  15. Centers for Disease Control, Leading Causes of Death by Age Group, African American Females—United States (Atlanta, GA: CDC, 2011).

  16. Shannan Catalano, Intimate Partner Violence 1993–2010 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Statistics, 2012).

  17. Margot Adler, “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin,” Weekend Edition Sunday, National Public Radio, March 15, 2009.

  18. Biography.com, “Claudette Colvin,” http://www.biography.com/people/claudette-colvin-11378.

  19. Adler, “Before Rosa Parks.”

  20. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1969), 45.

  21. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139.

  22. Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984).

  23. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31.

  24. Education is correlated with occupational options. An analysis of census data conducted by Valerie Wilson found that median inflation-adjusted annual earnings for African American women working full-time in 2013 were 3.3 percent below the 2009 level, compared to 0.2 percent and 0.5 percent lower for white and Hispanic women, respectively, for that same period. While Black women consistently earned less than their White counterparts, increases in access to education were associated with greater earnings. See Valerie Wilson, “Post-recession Decline in Black Women’s Wages Is Consistent with Occupational Downgrading,” Economic Policy Institute, October 8, 2014. See also Dana Wood, Rachel Kaplan, and Vonnie McCloyd, “Gender Differences in the Educational Expectations of Urban, Low-Income, African American Youth: The Role of Parents and the School,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 36, no. 4 (2007): 417–27.

  25. Linda Darling-Hammond, “Quality Teaching: What Is It and How Can It Be Measured?,” PowerPoint presentation, Stanford University, 2011, https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/events/materials/ldhscopeteacher-effectiveness.pdf.

  26. Jan Hughes and Oi-man Kwok, “Influence of Student-Teacher and Parent-Teacher Relationships on Lower Achieving Readers’ Engagement and Achievement in the Primary Grades,” Journal of Educational Psychology 99, no. 1 (2007): 39–51.

  27. Gloria Ladson-Billings, “I Ain’t Writin’ Nuttin’: Permissions to Fail and Demands to Succeed in Urban Classrooms,” in The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom, ed. Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy (New York: The New Press, 2002), 111.

  28. Caroline Hodges Persell, Education and Inequality: The Roots and Results of Stratification in America’s Schools (New York: The Free Press, 1977).

  29. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1990).

  30. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation ad the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 18–19.

  31. Ibid., 19.

  32. Daniel Georges-Abeyie, “Race, Ethnicity, and the Spatial Dynamic: Toward a Realistic Study of Black Crime, Crime Victimization, and Criminal Justice Processing of Blacks,” in African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice, ed. Shaun Gabbison, Helen Taylor Taylor Greene, and Vernetta Young (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002), 229–42.

  33. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 331.

  34. U.S. Department of Education, Turning Around the Dropout Factories: Increasing the High School Graduation Rate (Washington, DC: Department of Education, n.d.).

  35. Alliance for Excellent Education, Prioritizing the Nation’s Lowest Performing High Schools: Issue Brief (Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education, 2010).

  36. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Characteristics by Race and Ethnicity, 2013 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014), 4.

  37. Ibid., 19.

  38. U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 104.20. Percentage of Persons 25 to 29 Years Old with Selected Levels of Educational Attainment, by Race/Ethnicity and Sex: Selected Years 1920 Through 2014,” Digest of Education Statistics (Washington, DC: NCES, 2014).

  39. FairTest, Racial Justice and Standardized Testing (Jamaica Plain, MA: National Center for Fair and Open Testing, n.d.).

  40. In more than thirteen states, students are required to meet a baseline score on third-grade reading assessments in order to advance to the fourth grade. In Ohio, for example, a student must score at least a 394 to advance to the fourth grade. Four percent of the state’s third-graders were prevented from advancing because of it, but the grade retention rate for students increased by 600 percent between the 2012–13 and 2013–14 academic years. Only 32 percent of Black third-grade students scored “proficient or better” on the Reading Achievement Test, compared with 71 percent of Asian Pacific students, 64 percent of White students, and 41 percent of Hispanic students. Performance on the state’s high school graduation tests also revealed racial disparities. Statewide, 78.7 percent of Black students scored “proficient” on the Ohio Graduation Test, compared with 92 percent of White youth, 86.8 percent of Asian Pacific youth, 80.9 percent of Hispanic youth, and 72.6 percent of Native American youth. See Ohio Department of Education, “Ohio Graduation Tests Preliminary Results March 2014 Test Administration,” March 2014, http://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Testing/Testing-Results/Ohio-Graduation-Tests-OGT-Assessment-Results/Highlights-of-March-2014-OGT-2.pdf.aspx.

  41. The average national score in reading for twelfth-grade Black girls is 273, which is lower than all other groups of girls taking the test. See U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2005, 2009, and 2013 Reading Assessments. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/report.aspx?app=NDE&p=3-RED-2-20133%2c20093%2c20053%2c20023%2c19983%2c19982%2c19942%2c19922-RRPCM-GENDER%2cSDRACE-NT-MN_MN-J_Y_0-1-0-37.

  42. Mark Hugo Lopez and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, FactTank: Women’s College Enrollment Gains Leave Men Behind (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014).

  43. Ibid. Recent data show that Black women may be earning degrees at a higher rate than Black men. See National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Fac
ts: Degrees Conferred by Sex and Race (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2012).

  44. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Graduation Rates of First-Time Postsecondary Students Who Started as Full-Time Degree/Certificate-Seeking Students, by Sex, Race/Ethnicity, Time to Completion, and Level and Control of Institution Where Student Started: Selected Cohort Entry Years, 1996 Through 2007 (Washington, DC: NCES, 2011), http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_345.asp.

  45. Lerner, Black Women in White America, 594.

  46. The concept of age compression has largely been framed within the context of commercialization and consumer marketing; however, as I include it in this narrative, its reach extends into other domains as well. See Adriana Barbaro and Jeremy Earp, “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood,” Media Education Study Guide, 2008, https://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/134/studyguide_134.pdf.

  47. Guadalupe Valdes, Con Respect: Bridging the Distances Between Culturally Diverse Families and School (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996).

  48. Hughes and Kwok, “Influence of Student-Teacher and Parent-Teacher Relationships.”

  49. Sherri F. Seyfried and Ick-Joong Chung, “Parent Involvement as Parental Monitoring of Student Motivation and Parent Expectations Predicting Later Achievement Among African American and European American Middle School Age Students,” Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work 11, nos. 1–2 (2002): 126.

  50. Tamba-Kuii Bailey, Y. Barry Chung, Wendi Williams, Anneliese Singh, and Heather Terrell, “Development and Validation of the Internalized Racial Oppression Scale for Black Individuals,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 58, no. 4 (2011): 481–493.

  51. Monique W. Morris, “Representing the Educational Experiences of Black Girls in a Juvenile Court School,” Journal of Applied Research on Children: Informing Policy for Children at Risk 4, no. 2 (2014): article 5.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Unemployment Among Youth—Summer 2013 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 2013).

  54. California Demographic Labor Force, Summary Tables March 2015, http://www.calmis.ca.gov/specialreports/CA_Employment_Summary_Table.pdf.

  55. John Ogbu describes Black Americans as falling into two categories: those who descend from involuntary immigrants (those arriving on American shores as enslaved Africans in the seventeenth century) and voluntary immigrants (those of African and Caribbean descent who voluntarily immigrated to the United States). John Obguk, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003).

  56. Jacquelynne S. Eccles, Janis E. Jacobs, and Rena D. Harold, “Gender Role Stereotypes, Expectancy Effects, and Parents’ Socialization of Gender Differences,” Journal of Social Issues 46 (1990): 183–210.

  57. Toni Falbo, Laura Lein, and Nicole Amador, “Parental Involvement During the Transition to High School,” Journal of Adolescent Research 16 (2001): 511–29. See also Gwynne O. Kohl, Liliana J. Lengua, and Robert J. McMahon, “Parent Involvement in School: Conceptualizing Multiple Dimensions and Their Relations with Family and Demographic Risk Factors,” Journal of School Psychology 38, no. 6 (2000): 501–23.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Ibid.

  60. DeMarquis Hayes, “Parental Involvement in Urban African American Adolescents from a Parent’s Perspective,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 94, no. 4 (2011): 154–66.

  61. Jung-Sook Lee and Natasha K. Bowen, “Parent Involvement, Cultural Capital, and the Achievement Gap Among Elementary School Children,” American Educational Research Association Journal 43, no. 2 (2006): 193–218.

  62. Suniti Sharma, “Contesting Institutional Discourse to Create New Possibilities for Understanding Lived Experience: Life Stories of Young Women in Detention, Rehabilitation, and Education,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 13, no. 3 (2010): 327–47.

  63. Ladson-Billings, “I Ain’t Writin’ Nuttin’,” 110.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Society, Education and Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 1990), xv.

  2. A Blues for Black Girls When the “Attitude” Is Enuf

  1. “Kindergarten Girl Handcuffed, Arrested at Fla. School,” WFTV.com, March 30, 2007, http://www.wftv.com/news/news/kindergarten-girl-handcuffed-arrested-at-fla-schoo/nFBR4.

  2. Janice D’Arcy, “Salecia Johnson, 6, Handcuffed After Tantrum: What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” Washington Post, April 18. 2012.

  3. Judith Brown Dianis, “When Temper Tantrums Become Criminal,” The Root, April 18, 2012.

  4. Talia Kaplan, “8-Year-Old Special Needs Student Handcuffed, Arrested for Tantrum at School,” The Grio, March 8, 2013.

  5. “School District, Alton Police Stand by Decision to Handcuff Child,” CBS St. Louis, March 7, 2013, http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/school-district-alton-police-stand-by-decision-to-handcuff-child; Gabrielle Levy, “8-Year-Old Handcuffed for Tantrum,” United Press International, March 7, 2013, http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/03/07/8-year-old-handcuffed-for-tantrum/2621362666107/.

  6. U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, Discipline Snapshot: School Discipline, Issue Brief No. 1 (Washington, DC: Department of Education, 2014).

  7. Daniel Losen and Russell Skiba, Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis (Los Angeles, CA: Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Equity Project, Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, Indiana University, 2010), 7.

  8. The highest-suspending school districts included in this study: Memphis City Schools, Tennessee; Columbus City, Ohio; Henrico County Public Schools, Virginia; City of Chicago SD 299, Illinois; Alief Island, Texas; Detroit City School District, Michigan; Fulton County, Georgia; Wichita, Kansas; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Clayton County, Georgia. See Daniel Losen and Jonathan Gillespie, Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School (Los Angeles: Center for Civil Rights Remedies, Civil Rights Project, University of California, Los Angeles, 2012).

  9. bell hooks, Developing an Oppositional Gaze (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31.

  10. Jan Hughes and Oi-man Kwok, “Influence of Student-Teacher and Parent-Teacher Relationships on Lower Achieving Readers’ Engagement and Achievement in the Primary Grades,” Journal of Educational Psychology 99, no. 1 (2007): 39–51.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Anthony G. Greenwald and Linda Hamilton Krieger, “Implicit Bias: Scientific Foundations,” California Law Review 94 (2006): 945–67.

  13. Kelly Welch and Allison A. Payne, “Exclusionary School Punishment: The Effect of Racial Threat on Expulsion and Suspension,” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 10, no. 20 (2012): 155–71.

  14. Losen and Gillespie, Opportunities Suspended, 39.

  15. Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

  16. See John Heron, Empirical Validity in Experiential Research (Guildford: University of Surrey, 1982).

  17. James Wilson and George Kelling, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1982.

  18. U.S. Department of Education, Guidance Concerning State and Local Responsibilities Under the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 (Washington, DC: Department of Education, 1994).

  19. Angels of Columbine, “Violence in Our Schools: August 1, 1993 Through July 31, 1994.” Columbine-Angels.com, http://www.columbine-angels.com/School_Violence_1993-1994.htm.

  20. Greg Toppo, “10 Years Later, the Real Story Behind Columbine,” USA Today, April 14, 2009.

  21. U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, National Estimations (Washington, DC: Department of Education, 2000, 2009–10).

  22. Black girls without a disability were 39 percent of girls with only one out-of-school suspension. See U.S. Department of E
ducation Office of Civil Rights, National Estimations, 2009–10.

  23. These states included Wisconsin (21 percent), Indiana (16 percent), Michigan (16 percent), Missouri (16 percent), Tennessee (15 percent), Nebraska (15 percent), West Virginia (14 percent), Arkansas (14 percent), Delaware (14 percent), Ohio (14 percent), Florida (14 percent), Oklahoma (13 percent), Pennsylvania (13 percent), South Carolina (13 percent), Rhode Island (13 percent), Illinois (13 percent), Alabama (13 percent), and the District of Columbia (13 percent). U.S. Department of Education, Discipline Snapshot.

  24. Edward Smith and Shaun Harper, Disproportionate Impact of K-12 School Suspension and Expulsion on Black Students in Southern States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, 2015).

  25. U.S. Department of Education, National Estimations, 2009–10.

  26. Ibid., 2011–12.

  27. U.S. Department of Education, Discipline Snapshot.

  28. Kelly Meyerhofer, “Special Report: Nearly Three-Quarters of MPS High School Students Labeled ‘Truants,’” Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, November 17, 2014, http://milwaukeenns.org/2014/11/17/special-report-nearly-three-quarters-of-mps-high-school-students-labeled-truants.

  29. U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights database, accessed May 10, 2015, http://ocrdata.ed.gov/flex/Reports.aspx?type=district#/action%3DaddSearchParams%26tbSearchSchool%3DMilwaukee%26btnSearchParams%3DSearch%26cblYears_4%3D1. Milwaukee Public Schools has defined a habitually truant student as “a student who is absent from school without an acceptable excuse under s.118.16(4) and s.118.15, Wis. Stats., for part or all of 5 or more days on which school is held during a school semester.” See Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2015, http://wise.dpi.wi.gov/wisedash_glossary.

  30. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, “Wisconsin School District Performance Report, 2013–14: Milwaukee,” accessed April 10, 2015, https://apps2.dpi.wi.gov/sdpr/district-report.action.

  31. Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, Race to Equity: A Baseline Report on the State Disparities in Dane County (Madison, WI: n.d.), http://racetoequity.net/dev/wp-content/uploads/WCCF-R2E-Report.pdf.