Study: Black Girls Are Being Pushed Out of School

[eridani]

Last edited Tue Feb 17, 2015, 02:05 AM - Edit history (1)

Always way too easy to ignore the girls, unfortunately

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28600-study-black-girls-are-being-pushed-out-of-school

News surrounding a confrontation in a Baltimore school is raising new questions about the role race plays in discipline for black girls. Baltimore television station WBAL has been reporting on an October incident that led to three students at the city's Vanguard Middle School being injured, and later arrested and suspended, after an altercation with a school security officer.

School officials have supported the officer's assertion that she was attacked, kicked and punched by the girls, but the school's security tape shows something more complicated. By the end of the incident, the officer had struck one of the girls repeatedly with her baton — causing an injury that required multiple stitches — and pepper sprayed the two others. All three girls required treatment at a hospital.

The state's attorney dropped the criminal charges after viewing the tape and photos of the students' injuries, and the officer involved — who is African-American — has been placed on administrative leave, pending an investigation. But the girls have been reassigned to a school for troubled teens, something their families are fighting in court.

It's just one incident of many that have played out across the country in which reported misconducted by black girls at school prompts a seemingly disproportionate — and often violent — response by school and local authorities.

But why? That's what Columbia University law professor Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and her associates, Priscilla Ocen and Jyoti Nanda, set out to explain in their study, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected.

[Warpy]

1. I agree

Different cultural norms are being seen as discipline problems when they're not.

What it looked like to me on that tape is that the girls got mouthy and the guard lost it, probably because she was terrified of being outnumbered. That speaks to a total lack of training in how to take command of a situation as well as in what is normal for teenagers.

There is no excuse for any of this and the state AG seems to have seen what I did on that tape.

I hope the girls get to go back to their regular school, sadder and wiser and bearing a few scars. I hope that guard finds another line of work away from teenagers of any color or culture. She's not up to the job.

Yes, it's probably a nationwide problem. The only way out is through, meaning everybody out there needs an education in how cultures differ. We were separated for far too long. It will take time to overcome it.

In the meantime, thank goodness for video cams. They don't lie.

[ismnotwasm]

2. It's not surprising

Institutionalized racism is always there with the ban hammer.