My nine-year-old son had a fourth-grade teacher who was bullying him. At first I thought that my son was overreacting to being lectured about his messy homework, but it increasingly became evident to me that his teacher kept changing the rules about how he should turn in his homework. I spoke with her calmly, and I also spoke with the administration. I even went to the school counselor. Ultimately, the teacher stopped bullying him when my husband and I started popping up outside her classroom. After the first couple of “Surprise, we’re right here!” moments, the peculiar behavior stopped. We documented and reported, but like with many bullies, it was only fun for her when her victims couldn’t fight back.
Unfortunately, administrator-related discrimination is more common than teacher discrimination. On elementary and high school campuses, administrators may over-penalize students of color while under-penalizing white students for the same behavior. Students from marginalized communities at these schools may be more likely to be suspended or expelled than their majority peers. It’s not just a public school problem.
The most common form of racial discrimination in education is harassment of students of color by their white counterparts. Every few days, the news carries a story of racist bullying, whether it be racially motivated physical attacks, racial epithets scrawled on school walls, or organized hateful activities directed at making marginalized students feel unwelcome and unsafe. While isolated incidents by a student on a school campus may not trigger an investigation, repeated offenses or a lack of consequences for offenders when incidents occur can indicate a broader cultural issue. Yet when students of color respond, whether it be through protests or a more direct physical response, they are more likely to have their behavior criminalized by the police officers on staff.
For young women of color, police brutality is already a risk faced from the cradle. There is no Officer Friendly, no safety in an institution that fails to recognize that the errors of young people of color are not inherently more dangerous simply because of the color of their skin. And this attitude of aggressive policing toward students of color is expensive. States spend $5.7 billion a year on the juvenile justice system instead of on our schools. On average, American states spend $88,000 to incarcerate a young person, but allot an average of $10,000 to educate them.
When we think of schools being underfunded, understaffed, and in underserved communities, the math for cops instead of resources simply doesn’t make sense. Yet while there’s no shortage of educational advocates who benefit from feminism advocating for policy changes that privilege charters over public schools in terms of access to funding, no shortage of middle-class white feminists ready to argue against expanding the boundaries of school districts to include underserved communities, they are often curiously silent about improving conditions in schools in ways that don’t include adding more cops.
They falter when the conversation about parental involvement might require them to schedule PTA meetings in ways that are flexible and available to parents who don’t have traditional work schedules. Or to confront the bias in school funding and school district lines in ways that might endanger the status quo that privileges predominantly white schools even in cities like Chicago, where the white population is in the minority. We can see these moments play out in real time, when video leaks from school board meetings in New York City show white parents arguing against diversity measures. Or when Asian American parents file lawsuits to stop the process.
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FOR MANY PARENTS from marginalized communities, the fight to not only keep schools open but to prevent their children from being criminalized starts as early as preschool. In fact, the money that has been used to increase the number of school officers across the country could be better spent on mental health services to provide counseling for at-risk students and their families. Students need schools and politicians to expand the definition of safety to include more school-based counselors, social workers, nurses, and after-school, weekend, and summer programs.
Calls for increasing school safety rarely acknowledge how policing affects students of color. There’s no safety in being profiled, in being surveilled and harassed in a place that should be about opportunities and not total obedience.
We know that inequity permeates the world, in everything from access to clean water to school closures. A prime example of this is the fact that Chicago’s school closures between 2002 and 2018 impacted 533 white students, 7,368 Latinx students, and 61,420 Black students. So why isn’t access to education a high priority in feminist circles? It certainly isn’t from a lack of effort to get attention for the problem.
Activists go to meetings, contact the press, march on state capitols and mayors’ offices and sometimes homes. They write letters to editors and stage sit-ins to keep schools open, but overwhelmingly the funding disappears unless and until someone is shilling a “safety plan” that puts an armed person in a school to protect it. We feign shock when those “resource officers” brutalize students or fail to stop a shooting, then turn and bemoan the lack of educational success for students from communities more likely to be policed than educated.
Organizations like Dignity in Schools do their best to track how many kids are being adversely affected. They’ve found that Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than that of white students. Meanwhile, 70 percent of the students arrested or referred to police at school are Black and Latinx. While Black children make up around 16 percent of the K–12 school population in America, they over-index in arrests, comprising approximately 31 percent of school-related arrests. Perhaps most disturbing, students with disabilities are more than twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension than students without disabilities. Because there is no consistent process or training for becoming a school police officer, and officers are not always trained on interacting with children and young adults, they may interpret perfectly normal age-appropriate behavior as over-the-top or even criminal behavior.
We know that students in schools with police officers are more likely to get a criminal record, even for nonviolent misbehaviors like vandalism. But what we don’t know is how often kids in schools are being brutalized by police, because no one keeps track of those incidents. Oh sure, some make the news, and the resulting public outcry might make changes with that officer in that school. Yet, even in the cases where videos from multiple cities emerged of young Black girls being brutally body slammed by a school officer, mainstream feminist groups barely reacted. Instead, the work of advocating for her rights and the rights of others like her fell solely to racial justice organizations.
It’s true that the victims of police brutality in schools, the school-to-prison pipeline, and pushout practices are more likely to be students of color, but that doesn’t make it any less of a feminist issue. Welcome to an intersectional feminist approach to education! Those of us who have the option to make safer choices, to be redirected by the community or protected by privilege, must step up and step in to defend these kids from the system that would ruin their lives. We know that some kids are at risk because of situations in their home lives that are the fault of adults. Whether that risk be a result of addiction, poverty, or violence, we cannot let school become an unsafe place.