Black girls have a big problem: racist discipline policies in our public schools. At least, that’s the narrative pushed by Democrats in Congress, who are calling for a radical overhaul of public school discipline to address racial disparities among K-12 students.
According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), black girls are 5.2 times more likely to be suspended from school compared to white girls. Representing only 15 percent of all girls enrolled in public schools, black girls receive almost half of exclusionary discipline: suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to law enforcement. They are, the report concludes, “overrepresented among girls disciplined compared to their representation in the overall population of girls.”
The cause? Racism, of course.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., lauded the report, stating that it “push[es] back on the harmful narrative that Black girls are disciplined more because they misbehave more.” In her press release, Pressley asserted that the GAO report proves that the disparity is caused by “biases such as adultification and colorism.” She also argued that black girls are punished more because of “a lack of understanding of the historical, social, and economic inequities such as poverty, trauma, hunger, and violence that often impact student behavior.”
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attributed the disparity to “the unacceptable discrimination that Black and brown girls face in K-12 schools every day.” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said that in her deep-blue district in Minneapolis, black girls are discriminated against every day because of “discriminatory hair and dress
