Discipline disparities between Black and white boys have driven reform efforts for years. But Black girls are arguably the most at-risk student group in the United States.
Zulayka McKinstry’s once silly, sociable daughter has stopped seeing friends, talking to siblings and trusting anyone — changes Ms. McKinstry dates to the day in January 2019 when her daughter’s school principal decided that “hyper and giddy” were suspicious behaviors in a 12-year-old girl.
Ms. McKinstry’s daughter was sent to the nurse’s office and forced to undress so that she could be searched for contraband that did not exist.
“It’s not fair that now I have to say, ‘It’s OK to be Black and hyper and giddy,’ that it’s not a crime to smile,” Ms. McKinstry said. “And she doesn’t believe me.”
The Binghamton case is now the subject of what might be a groundbreaking federal lawsuit by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has drawn on the disparate treatment and discipline rates of Black girls to pursue it.
The disproportionate discipline rates of Black boys have long dominated discussions about the harmful effects of punitive discipline policies, but recent high-profile cases have begun to reframe the debate around the plight of Black girls.
In Florida, Kaia Rolle was only 6 last year when police officers escorted her, hands bound behind her with zip ties, from her school in Orlando after employees there said she had a temper tantrum.
In Sacramento, the first “virtual suspension” to draw national attention was meted out to a 9-year-old Black girl who was kicked out of her Zoom classroom for reportedly sending too many messages. In Michigan, a teenager was sent to juvenile detention for not completing her online schoolwork.
Just this week, the Common Application for colleges and universities cited disproportionate discipline rates for Black girls in its decision to stop asking students to report whether they had been subject to disciplinary action.
Statistically, Black boys have led the country in suspensions, expulsions and school arrests, and the disparities between them and white boys have been a catalyst for national movements for change. But Black girls’ discipline rates are not far behind those of Black boys; and in several categories, such as suspensions and law enforcement referrals, the disparities between Black and white girls eclipse those between Black and white boys.
A New York Times analysis of the most recent discipline data from the Education Department found that Black girls are over five times more likely than white girls to be suspended at least once from school, seven times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions than white girls and three times more likely to receive referrals to law enforcement. Black boys experienced lower rates of the same punishments compared with white boys.
In New York City, Black girls in elementary and middle school were about 11 times more likely to be suspended than their white peers in 2017, according to a report from the Education Trust-New York, a research and advocacy group. In Iowa, Black girls were nine times more likely to be arrested at school than white girls, according to a state-by-state analysis conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We are in a battle for the souls of Black girls,” said Monique W. Morris, the executive director of Grantmakers for Girls of Color and author of the book “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in School.”
ImageKaia Rolle and her grandmother, Meralyn Kirkland, at the State Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla., in March as state legislators worked to pass a law requiring officers to set procedures for arresting children under 10.
Kaia Rolle and her grandmother, Meralyn Kirkland, at the State Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla., in March as state legislators worked to pass a law requiring officers to set procedures for arresting children under 10.Credit…Bobby Caina Calvan/Associated Press
The disproportionate discipline rates among girls indicate what researchers have long said about all Black children: It is not that they misbehave more than their peers, but their behaviors may be judged more harshly. Federal civil rights investigations have found generally that Black students are punished more harshly than their white peers for the same behavior. Black girls in particular are more likely to be punished for subjective infractions like dress code violations and insubordination.
Alliyah Logan, a recent New York City high school graduate, said she routinely saw her Black female friends punished for dress code violations that did not affect her white classmates.
“There would be white girls who wore the same exact outfits or even worse than us,” she said. “They would wear sheer tops and stuff like that, and I would never see anyone call them out. But if a Black student wore a tank top, then that was a problem.”
Sophia Lusala, a junior at Iowa City High School, said she often felt the effects of the “loud, sassy, Black girl” stereotype. In math class last year, when a teacher said he would not review a certain lesson, she asked why — and landed in the hallway “to calm down,” she said.
“We’ve been in school growing our minds so that we can challenge things,” she said. “But when we do so, we’re punished for it.”
Black girls are viewed by educators as more suspicious, mature, provocative and aggressive than their white peers, said Rebecca Epstein, the executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and an author of the first robust study of “adultification bias” against Black girls. The study found that Black girls as young as 5 were viewed by adults as less innocent than white girls.
“Developmentally, Black girls and white girls are the same — regardless of any differences in outward presentation,” she said.
The Binghamton lawsuit, filed last year by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Morrison & Foerster law firm against the Binghamton City School District, will test whether such studies can translate into legal recourse.
The organization argued that administrators “were motivated by false race- and gender-based stereotypes in directing, facilitating and conducting these unlawful searches” on Ms. McKinstry’s daughter and three other 12-year-old Black girls. The school nurse who conducted the searches called the girls “loud, disrespectful and having ‘attitudes,’” the complaint said. It accused the nurse of commenting that the breasts of one of the girls were unusually large for her age and of invoking the “stereotypical view of Black girls as older and more mature than white girls of similar age.”
“This case is about the criminalization of Black childhood,” said Cara McClellan, a lawyer who is representing the girls.
Last month, a Syracuse, N.Y., judge ruled that the case could go forward on unlawful search claims but granted the school district’s motion to dismiss the race discrimination charge, in part because the complaint’s data was not recent or granular enough to show that administrators targeted the girls because of their race. He wrote that the “defects in plaintiffs’ complaint” were technical and that a “better pleading could cure them.” The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund plans to amend its filing to bolster its race discrimination claims.
In a statement, Shannon T. O’Connor, the lawyer for the Binghamton City School District, maintained its position that the four girls “presented symptoms that suggested the school nurse should provide a standard health and safety check,” and that they were not strip-searched. She said the girls were cleared without “incident, complaint or discipline of any kind.”
“This has been a trying time for students and educators, one made more so, here, by the interference of an outside interest determined on making a spectacle,” Ms. O’Connor said.