Locating Black Girls in Educational Policy Discourse: Implications for the Every Student Succeeds Act

Abstract

The enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015 by President Barack Obama increased accountability requirements and was designed to reduce achievement and opportunity gaps, and racial disproportionality in school discipline. Despite the implementation of ESSA, Black girls still continue to experience hypercriminalization and policing, and when disaggregated by race and gender, they still receive the highest rates of disciplinary punishments in school and out of school. In this article, we discuss how Black girls in the Pk–12 public school system are invalidated and ignored in educational policy discourse and in school reform. In our discussion, we argue that ESSA tends to focus on identity categories (such as race, gender, class, and linguistics), and not on the intersectionality thereof, or how race does not operate as a silo (race, gender, social class, and other parts of our identity are layered and form a mosaic). We draw from literature on Black girls, zero tolerance, and critical race feminism to examine Black girls’ disciplinary punishments in Chicago Public Schools, and ESSA's effect on a national scale. In our analysis of quantitative data from Chicago Public Schools, we find that, in the third largest district in the United States, Black girls are disproportionally the recipients of out-of-school suspensions. Black female students received 78% of all female out-of-school suspensions during the 2016–2017 school year. A majority of the actions that Black girls were punished for were minor in nature and not due to violence or criminal offenses. We find that when Black girls are made invisible during the policy process and made visible when they are recipients of bias punishments, they will be more susceptible to receiving hyperpunitive disciplinary outcomes. Therefore, this article recommends that schools, policy makers, and researchers examine how harsh discipline and exclusionary policies affect Black girls as racialized and gendered beings while not ignoring the needs of Black female students during the school reform process.

Taught in the Matrix: A Review of Black Girls’ Experiences in U.S. Schools

“…Rather, our analysis suggests that school policies and practices shaping negative outcomes for Black girls must also be unpacked at the interpersonal level to fully understand the dynamic nature of power. This is key because teachers and school leaders play a critical role making sense of how policies and practices are perceived and how they are implemented in schools (Braun et al, 2011; Evans-Winters et al, 2018). However, few studies illustrate ways educators grapple with these microlevel practices and how they come to understand policies through the lens of their values and preexisting beliefs and ideologies about Black girls and their identities.…”

Black girls don’t cry? Mental health, gender, and violence on the racialized periphery.

“…While the most voluminous research on genderspecific student violence has focused on school staffs' interactions with Black boys (Andrews, 2015;Basile et al, 2020Basile et al, , 2022Bryan, 2020;Caton, 2012;Collins et al, 2023;Henfield, 2011;Howard, 2014;Noguera, 2009;Patton et al, 2012;Payne & Brown, 2010;Webster & Knaus, 2021), there is growing body of work on school staffs' interactions with Black girls (Aldridge, 2018;B. N. Anderson, 2020;Butler-Barnes & Inniss-Thompson, 2020;Crenshaw et al, 2015;Epstein et al, 2017;Evans-Winters, 2005;Evans-Winters & Hines, 2022;Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2020;Wun, 2016). One teen dating violence study conducted with middle schoolers found that Black girls were more likely than White girls to perpetrate threatening behaviors, verbal/emotional abuse, and physical violence (Niolon et al, 2015).…”

Still Climbing the Hill: Intersectional Reflections on Brown and Beyond

“…Black women and girls are missing not only from Brown but also from larger conversations regarding equitable education because scholars, educators, policymakers, and broader society are not socialized to see them as powerful actors. Intersectionality teaches us that Black women and girls simply are not palatable, making it easy for them to go unnoticed despite being in plain sight (Collins 2017;Crenshaw et al, 2015;Evans-Winters et al, 2018;J. Harris & Kruger, 2023; J. C. Harris & Patton, 2019;Patton & Haynes, 2018;Steele, 2022).…”