School Push-outs

 

Zero-tolerance, three-strikes, and similar “pushout” policies popular in many school systems have transformed simple disciplinary issues into grounds for arrest, expulsion, and incarceration. Experts increasingly refer to the combined use of such tactics which remove “difficult” students from their schools and move them onto the streets or into juvenile justice systems as “exclusionary discipline.”

The unavoidable effect of such exclusionary policies is that youth of color are being separated from their educational careers in alarming and unprecedented numbers, with impacts on economic outcomes that are both devastating and lifelong. Pushout or exclusionary policies also play an outsized role in the overrepresentation of students of color in criminal justice and what is increasingly called the “school-to-prison-pipeline” (STPP).

Sometimes this victimization happens quickly through the arrest of students for simple misbehavior offenses, as the above examples illustrate. Sometimes they happened gradually, through the slow accumulation of minor infractions for perceived attitude, infractions that are both more frequent and more harsh than those meted out to their white peers. In many cases, school officials have attempted to justify these new “get-tough” policies by pointing to escalating levels of violence. Yet the policies are seldom if ever visited upon the white students— even when the same or similar infractions are involved.

Just as disturbingly, the impact of pushout polices is reaching downward, to ever-younger children of color. For instance, Morris notes that Black children make up just 18 percent of preschool students, but they comprise 42 percent of preschoolers who been suspended—a trend which is as shameful as it is unsustainable.