Girls Behaving Badly? Race, Gender, and Subjective Evaluation in the Discipline of African American Girls

Abstract

School disciplinary processes are an important mechanism of inequality in education. Most prior research in this area focuses on the significantly higher rates of punishment among African American boys, but in this article, we turn our attention to the discipline of African American girls. Using advanced multilevel models and a longitudinal data set of detailed school discipline records, we analyze interactions between race and gender on office referrals. The results show troubling and significant disparities in the punishment of African American girls. Controlling for background variables, black girls are three times more likely than white girls to receive an office referral; this difference is substantially wider than the gap between black boys and white boys. Moreover, black girls receive disproportionate referrals for infractions such as disruptive behavior, dress code violations, disobedience, and aggressive behavior. We argue that these infractions are subjective and influenced by gendered interpretations. Using the framework of intersectionality, we propose that school discipline penalizes African American girls for behaviors perceived to transgress normative standards of femininity.

The Social Construction of Child Social Control via Criminalization and Medicalization: Why Race Matters

“…This also includes taking into consideration other social organizing factors (e.g., gender), influence social construction via criminalization and medicalization. Results suggest that girls are significantly less likely than boys to experience punishment or therapy/medication, but that the punishment rates of black girls may be similar to those of white boys (Morris and Perry ). Similarly, while diagnoses for behavior disorders such as ADHD are increasing for girls, boys are more likely to use therapy or medication than girls (Hinshaw and Scheffler ).…”

“…), I include a time‐invariant measure of mother's age at delivery . Because boys are more likely to be punished or medicalized than girls (Morris and Perry ), I control for gender (1 = girl).…”

“…Social control has long been a focus of sociology, drawing interest from across the discipline, including scholars of crime and deviance (Garland ; Hirschfield ), medical sociology (Conrad ; Rafalovich ), and sociology of education (Morris and Perry ). Scholars define social control as the systematic or organized way in which groups or society respond to social problems (Garland ).…”

School punishment and interpersonal exclusion: Rejection, withdrawal, and separation from friends

“…Each year, 2.6 million children and adolescents are temporarily removed from school as a result of out‐of‐school suspension and 2.7 million are excluded from class as a result of in‐school suspension (Office of Civil Rights, ). Reform efforts have led to recent declines in some states (Loveless, ), but overall rates are still high, particularly for disadvantaged and racial minority students, not because juvenile crime rates are high but because suspension is often in response to minor misbehavior like classroom disruptions and attendance problems (Kupchik, ; Morris & Perry, ; Skiba et al., ). This is problematic because in a growing body of research, scholars have suggested that suspension may be harmful for child and adolescent development (Cuellar & Markowitz, ; Jacobsen, Pace, & Ramirez, ; Mittleman, ; Morris & Perry, ).…”

Perceptions of restorative practices among black girls: talking circles in an urban alternative middle school.

“…It is important to examine how the intersections of race and gender influence the disciplinary experiences of Black females, as the behavioral standards on which Black female students are evaluated may be based in part on their compliance with gender norms (Collins, 2004). Morris and Perry (2017) propose that school discipline penalizes African American girls for behaviors perceived to transgress normative values of femininity. Costenbader and Markson (1998) noted that although most students suspended from school self-reported physical aggression as the main reason for their suspensions, female students were more likely to self-report minor behavioral infractions such as gum chewing, failure to comply with a prior disciplinary sanction, and defiance as reasons for their suspensions.…”