Pushout (6 page)

We know children mimic behaviors. We also can understand why someone might not want to stay in an environment they consider dangerous.

“I'd just be out,” Mia said. “I wouldn't be at school. . . . You can't even really learn. . . . So it ain't no point in getting up, it ain't no point in going to school, because you cannot learn—not when everybody's yelling, not when everybody's fighting and screaming, throwing erasers and shit at the teacher.”

Fifteen-year-old Shanice, also from California, observed a similar dynamic in her classroom. She said that her classrooms were filled with “loud kids . . . A teacher pass out the work and sit back down. . . . The whole school's just loud. . . . The kids, they loud. And it's like, sometimes the teachers don't care, they ignore it and keep going.”

Only Shanice didn't see the benefit of playing by the rules if they were going to be broken by everyone around her.

“Say it's a whole classroom,” she continued. “Say 75 percent of the classroom's loud, they just talking and on their phones and
stuff like that, but the other 25 percent, they quiet, they just sittin' there like, you know, they not doing nothing. They just sittin' there quiet . . . Like, they ain't going to get a higher grade just 'cause they sittin' there quiet, you know?”

Girls like Mia and Shanice draw important connections between their desire to learn and their inability to do so in chaotic learning environments. Across the country, Black girls have repeatedly described “rowdy” classroom environments that prevent them from being able to focus on learning. They also described how the chaotic learning environment has, in some cases, led to their avoidance of school or to reduced engagement in school. In other situations, girls described contentious and negative interactions between teachers and students as the norm. In today's climate of zero tolerance, where there are few alternatives to punishing problematic student behavior, the prevailing school discipline strategy, with its heavy reliance on exclusionary practices—dismissal, suspension, or expulsion—becomes a predictable, cyclical, and ghettoizing response.

Believing the Hype

The extent to which family traditions and values mirror school expectations is important to the relationship between schools and families, as well as to the external motivation of the student.
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However, Black students' academic performance is more directly linked to their relationships with teachers, which may be problematic given that Black children are often labeled as “less conforming and more active” than their white counterparts, resulting in interactions with teachers that are “characterized by more criticism and less support.”
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A Seattle study found that even a Black student who “tries to please her teacher, tries to get good grades, and is willing to put up with things she doesn't like about school may not be rewarded (in terms of higher GPA) in the same way her [European American] classmate would be rewarded.”
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Personal
attitudes and biases still inform how a student-teacher relationship develops.

In a conversation with Destiny, who attended a high-achieving large public school in a Bay Area suburb, she shared that in her experience race influences the way teachers respond to students and their learning needs. Her school had a small Black student population, and an even smaller representation among the advanced courses that she was taking.

“I feel like . . . because there are so [few] Black people on campus . . . I've noticed that other races get more, like, special attention in class,” Destiny said. “Like, if they're struggling or like, if they want to see the teacher after class, I noticed that the teacher will be more willing to help them after class.”

“What do they say to the Black girls?” I asked.

“Usually they'll say something like, ‘Well, you can stop by for ten or fifteen minutes, but you know, I'm not going to wait after school for an hour or something.' You know, and it's like . . . shoot . . . they just did that for the Asian girl . . . There's a lot of, like, Indian people there, and they'll stay after school till like five [o'clock], doing extra work or working on an extra project that the teacher gave them to do, and then everybody else will be there for ten or fifteen minutes just to talk. And I tried to talk to my geometry teacher after school and she really rushed me . . . and she didn't even have anywhere to go. She just wanted to rush me to hurry up and get me out of the classroom. And I was like, ‘Well, never mind, I'll just see you in class.'”

I asked how that made her feel.

“I don't know . . . I didn't like that. I should be able to go to you for help if you're a good teacher.”

To be ignored is traumatic. Without speaking to this teacher, I do not know whether or not it was her intention to rush Destiny from her classroom. However, for Destiny, this signaled that she does not have the same opportunities as other students in her
class—at least not at
that
school. At sixteen, she was already taking advanced placement courses and had expressed an interest in robotics, engineering, and art. She was an articulate communicator and mentioned that she had been taking trigonometry—before she found herself in juvenile hall, for what was (at the time of our discussion) the fifth time in six months. Once she was labeled as a “juvenile delinquent,” the quality and rigor of her education greatly declined, a function of the curriculum and instruction offered at the facility where she was confined. I asked if the teachers in her juvenile detention school responded to her differently, knowing that her learning skills were more developed than those of the other girls in her classes.

“Yeah, they know,” she said.

“Have you ever received any different assignments?” I asked.

“I'll finish my work before everyone else because I know what I'm doing. [Then the teacher] gives me something completely different to work on—like a poster to put up in her class. Like, it gives me something to do in class, but it's not furthering anything.”

It was busy work. And Destiny knew it.

“I really don't like being in school [in juvenile hall]. I don't like the teacher-student relationships,” Destiny offered. “[One of the] teachers . . . she's like, really stubborn and so it's hard . . . Sometimes I'll ask a question . . . if I have a question, she's like, ‘You already know that, you're just trying to get attention.' And I'm like, ‘No, I'm really asking.' I've gotten kicked out of class like three times for that . . . and she's like, ‘You're being really annoying.'”

“For asking a question?” I clarified.

“Yeah, and I'm like . . .” Destiny shook her head slowly back and forth.

You're being really annoying
. Calling a student “annoying” for asking questions is not only a demonstration of lowered expectations, it is also not effective in fostering student achievement. Later, I spoke with this teacher about her philosophy of discipline,
specifically asking how she understood and managed classroom disruptions in the controlled environment of juvenile hall.

“Well, I have to say that [the teachers] enjoy a really good relationship with our particular sets of [institutional] staff—and we've worked on that and tried to cultivate that, so that I think its kind of a seamless experience in terms of what the girls understand as expectations for behavior in the classroom, as well as on the unit,” she said. “We have established a positive reward system with our students for not only academic behavior but [also] personal behavior in the classroom, and as a result, the [institutional] staff has created an offset of that. Kids are motivated, not just because of our reward system, but because of their reward system. That's number one. Number two, I've made my expectations—and I think [the other teachers] have made their expectations—really clear, not only to the kids but to the staff. And our staff agrees with that, and so they support us, wholeheartedly . . . And we have high standards in our classroom—there's not a lot of acting out. And if there is acting out, it is dealt with immediately.”

“Who typically takes responsibility for dealing with the girls who act out?” I asked.

“In the classroom? It's me. On the other hand, I can make recommendations as to whether a student needs to be kept in the room or lose privileges on the unit . . . or whatever. And I even have a system—there are small infractions, where there's no loss of privileges, [and] there's not-so-small infractions, where they're gonna get a little bit of a write-up to go into the file.”

“So what would you consider a small infraction and a not-so-small infraction?” I asked.

“A small infraction is like talking when they're not supposed to be talking or taking other people off task . . . the slip of [a] curse word when they know better. A not-so-small infraction is when a kid deliberately is being disruptive . . . continually being disruptive, being oppositional, you cannot be in my classroom and intentionally take up air and space. You can be bewildered; I get
that. But you can't sit there and decide that you're not going to do something. You have to be participatory even on the most fundamental level. So if I have a child who is in some kind of anguish, I don't expect them to do their work. If they're in a surly mood and they've been so for a week, they're not going to be tolerated, actually, for very long. And I will tell them, and warn them, and then if they start escalating, or trying to take other people off work or being totally disrespectful, then I'll do a write-up for the file. And then if they
really
get bad . . . I've had two girls at the same time who were violent and throwing things around and destroying property . . . that's when I get the school suspension in place. They're taken out of the classroom for a couple of days, and they're either isolated [here] or sent down to another unit for isolation for a couple of days until they're ready to conform.”

While she had developed her own rubric for mediating the behavior of troubled girls, her interpretation of what was acceptable was largely absent a rigorous analysis of how she came to determine whether someone was “intentionally taking up air and space” (e.g., sitting quietly and not participating in class) or why she had a adopted a punishment-or-reward system that presented young women in this classroom with a narrow set of options regarding their supposed rehabilitation. I noticed the specific emphasis this teacher placed on the issue of tolerance—primarily the behavior that she would
not
tolerate. She was not the only one reflecting on this concept.

“It's really weird,” Destiny continued. “I don't have a lot of tolerance [in my juvenile detention classroom] because it's like I'm not learning anything in the class and when I am trying to ask a question, I'm being ‘annoying' and ‘trying to get attention,' and . . . I don't know, I don't like that.”

Who would?

“I feel like it's just the relationship between the teacher and the student,” Destiny said. “Because, like, the teachers [in detention] know that we're just going to be here temporarily, so I feel like
they don't make sure that we're really learning. Like me, personally, [I'm not] really learning anything, and so I think, like, people aren't going to take school seriously here if we're not getting paid attention to, like our learning.”

It seemed to me that Destiny and her teacher were affected by the “hype” of inferior ability, which facilitated a learning environment marred by low expectations.

Jazzy, a sixteen-year-old girl whom I met in the psychiatric “special needs” unit of a juvenile detention center, had a critique of her primary school's dress code, but her assessment of the policy was cloaked in rhetoric—the kind that reflected negative perceptions and judgments of the norms in her community, rather than a simple critique of the policy itself.

“I think the Black girls, they just dress more ratchet,” she said. “Not trying to say it like that, but they be dressing in all those wild colors and just trying to be seen. I'm a more conservative girl, like I don't gotta wear all that to be cute, but they don't care what they got on. They just want to be [in] ghetto fashion, and that affects them. . . . But they grew up with that mentality, so it's like, we don't know what make them think like that.”

Internalized racial oppression is “the process by which Black people internalize and accept, not always consciously, the dominant White culture's oppressive actions and beliefs toward Black people (e.g., negative stereotypes, discrimination, hatred, falsification of historical facts, racist doctrines, White supremacists ideology), while at the same time rejecting the African worldview and cultural motifs.”
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For Black women and girls, internalized racial oppression is also gendered.

Black women and girls, especially those in fragile circumstances, absorb widely accepted distortions of Black American feminine identity (that they are less intelligent, hypersexual, loud, sassy, “ghetto,” or domestic), and it undermines their healthy development and performance in school.
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In combination with oppressive patriarchal ideologies, internalized
gendered
racial
oppression acknowledges that Black women and girls may appropriate behaviors and ideologies that reflect self-loathing or degradation, reinforcing the very notions of Black feminine inferiority that deny their full humanity.
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Black girls are quickly cast as undisciplined deviants who reflect the most negative stereotypes of Black femininity. The punitive and marginalizing responses from teachers and others with Black girls under their charge go unchallenged as justified or even necessary. The ways that internal and external oppression play out in intimate spaces—in families, friendships, and relationships—is a book unto itself. This book focuses primarily on how learning institutions and the people working in them don't recognize this dynamic, how this results from a widespread lack of awareness, and how all of us might reimagine and construct different paths for Black girls by listening to them and learning from their experiences.