Over the last several years, educators have been wrestling with how to address school discipline in the wake of Obama administration policy guidance that holds educators accountable for weeding out racial disparities in school discipline practices. While this was a step toward racial equity, it has not progressed in the Trump administration. In fact, Betsy DeVos is likely to reverse this guidance, making it even more difficult for black children and children of color to be treated fairly in America’s public schools.
Under the Obama administration, investigations were opened into several major school districts (like Oakland and Minneapolis), as well as smaller ones, in order to find patterns of systemic discrimination. One of those was Bryan, Texas, where black children are four times as likely to be suspended or receive tickets in school for minor offenses than their white counterparts. According to reporting by ProPublica, though black children in Bryan are only 20 percent of the student enrollment, they make up more than 60 percent of arrests in schools.
“For the kids who are being ticketed, arrested, suspended or expelled — who are predominantly black — it tells them that they don’t belong in our public schools, which is a travesty,” said Deborah Fowler, executive director of Texas Appleseed, a social justice advocacy group that spent years examining disciplinary data in Bryan and statewide. “For the students that remain in the classroom and see their peers treated this way, they internalize unhealthy and harmful messages about what that means. That’s the way that implicit bias is formed and gets reinforced.”
The impact on black students who are more harshly disciplined in schools than their white peers is not just limited to what happens in the classroom. This can set them up for having to repeat grades, dropping out and interactions with the criminal justice system—which ultimately plays a role in their ability to secure employment, financial stability and a host of other things that limits their social, emotional and economic well-being. As ProPublica notes:
Harsh discipline can backfire, especially when meted out arbitrarily. It may reinforce bad behavior, or encourage students to drop out, creating what sociologists call the “school-to-prison-pipeline.” A suspension increases the likelihood of dropping out by 77 percent, and the incarceration rate of high school dropouts is 63 times higher than that of college graduates, studies show. [...]
For black students in Texas, repeating a grade multiplies the chance of dropping out of school nearly six-fold, according to a recent study.
One such child who has been caught up in the unfair school discipline practices in Bryan is 13-year-old Trah’Vaeziah Jackson. According to her mother, Trah’Vaeziah was repeatedly bullied in school. Her mother would routinely visit the school to ask for support and was told that the bullying would stop. It never did. But her mother’s repeated visits, including one outburst in which she threatened to sit outside the school everyday in order to keep her child safe, were met with contempt. The school visit with the outburst earned her mother a house call from a school police officer who cited her for trespassing on school property.
One day last fall, Trah’Vaeziah was playing around with classmates as they worked on decorating a classroom door for a contest. Sadly, what is simply fooling around and very normal behavior for a seventh grader, had dangerous consequences for Trah’Vaeziah. Trah’Vaeziah’s story is covered in depth by ProPublica, which details it below:
Trah’Vaeziah and other students covered their [popsicle] sticks with glue from a hot-glue gun plugged into a classroom wall, she said.
With the teacher in the classroom, out of sight of the students in the hallway, horseplay ensued. As one of Trah’Vaeziah’s classmates headed to the bathroom, she recalled, she playfully gestured that she might touch him with the gluey stick. He dodged her. But on his way back, she again jokingly waved the stick toward him and accidentally grazed his arm, leaving him with a two-inch burn, she said. She immediately apologized — she had only meant to tease him. The school nurse bandaged his arm.
Trah’Vaeziah was written up as having taken “a hot glue gun and burned another student severely on the arm with it.“ As a result, she was placed in a juvenile detention facility—even though a hallway surveillance video shows her only touching the student with a popsicle stick and not the glue gun. This story was confirmed by one of the other student’s relatives. The video also shows that the teacher was not supervising the students at the time.
Trah’Vaeziah spent two weeks in a disciplinary alternative school. She was later sent back after an incident with a classmate who pulled her hair, and that is where she is currently receiving her education—which is apparently, mostly teacher free.
As research has shown, juvenile arrests can increase student misconduct, perpetuating a disciplinary cycle as children begin to internalize a “criminal” label. Trah’Vaeziah was no exception. [...]
The school emphasizes computer-based instruction, so Trah’Vaeziah and the other students receive minimal personal instruction from teachers. They mainly watch video lectures and complete lessons online.
These kinds of policies are not only deeply unfair and unjust, they also serve to brand students as “troublemakers” and “violent offenders” and offers them no opportunity for redemption. What kind of life chances will Trah’Vaeziah and students like her have—especially when they are forced out of the classroom and into the equivalent of prison camps with no real instruction? Of course, teachers should be concerned with classroom safety. They should be equally, if not more, concerned about how their racial bias targets black and brown kids for discipline and starts them down a path that could ruin their lives. This is not just about what happens in schools, it’s also a larger societal issue that allows racial bias to unfairly target black and brown children and do everything possible to make sure they encounter barriers to success again and again.
Structural racism is bigger than policies, practices and institutions that marginalize certain racial and ethnic groups in the United States. It is also about the impact of those mechanisms to adversely affect the outcomes and life chances for people of color and ethnic minorities. For black people, this begins as early as preschool and continues well into adulthood. For kids like Trah’Vaeziah it means that they are being robbed of their potential to be happy, thriving, creative human beings. That’s why we must do whatever we can, not only to fully understand the complexity of structural racism, but also to dismantle it in all its forms. This starts with fighting as best we can any attempt by Betsy DeVos to roll back school discipline guidance and to gut the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Our kids deserve better than this and every day they are put at greater risk by an administration that doesn’t give a damn about their success in school or their lives.