Combatting Anti-Black Racism in American Schools by Christina Davis

Evidence of racism is found throughout American society, and long overdue deep conversations about the impact of racism in America have become more prominent in the last decade. It is unsurprising that the recent journey towards outright discussion of racial justice has extended to face the ongoing and pervasive racism found in American schools. We can witness multidimensional anti-Black racial discrimination in education through disparities by race in discipline and resources, which ultimately create gaps in opportunity for student learning. These disparities are widespread, and it is time for schools to adopt policies that work to combat anti-Black racism in K-12 education.

Anti-Black Racism in Education

Racial disparities in school discipline are well-documented (Young et al., 2018).While other characteristics, like poverty, influence the rates at which minority students are considered to be “misbehaving” and are therefore disciplined, these characteristics do not account for the entirety of the racial disparities in school discipline rates (Welsh & Little, 2018). Bias, unconscious or not, plays a role in school staff giving harsher punishments to Black students for the same infractions as their peers (Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016). Additionally, schools with predominantly Black students are more likely to use zero tolerance policies, which typically involve strong consequences for even minor infractions (Marchbanks et al., 2018). These factors combine to lead Black students to have increased contact with the justice system, especially with the rise of police officers in majority Black schools (Diliberti et al., 2019; Welsh & Little, 2018). These disparities in school discipline are found across all grades and school settings (Skiba, 2015), reinforcing that systemic racism has a pervasive impact on Black students.

Coupled with disparities in discipline, Black students face disparities in a variety of educational resources. Growing racial and socioeconomic segregation in neighborhoods makes Black children more likely to learn in racially-segregated, high-poverty schools that lack resources, quality teachers, and a safe environment. (Cai, 2020). Teachers in high-poverty and predominantly Black schools are more likely to be inexperienced, with fewer formal teaching credentials, teaching out of their trained field, and experiencing heavy turnover (Kahlenberg, 2014). Additionally, Black teachers are not adequately represented in schools, despite research showing that having just one same-race teacher in elementary school improves high school graduation and college enrollment outcomes (Gershenson, Hart, et al., 2018). To compound these issues, these schools also tend to have fewer instructional resources (from textbooks to technology) and less rigorous curricula (Kahlenberg, 2014).

In part based on the previous two factors, racial achievement gaps are persistent in schools. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has reflected a Black-White achievement gap across subjects since it began in the early 1990s (Cai, 2020). In NAEP’s Trial Urban Districts (TUDAs), which are predominantly minority urban districts, this achievement gap is 30% higher than the achievement gap we already see in the national NAEP scores in mathematics and reading (Blagg & Luetmer, 2020). Other measures of achievement, such as placement in advanced courses, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates all show weaker outcomes for Black students (Cai, 2020).

It’s important to note that these outcomes of discipline, resources, and achievement are those that we can readily quantify. It is harder to fully explain why these disparities arise, especially when trying to account for the role of educators’ conscious and unconscious biases that lead to outright discrimination and racial stereotyping against Black students. Ultimately, anti-blackness can be found at the root of these disparities. Black students are seen as dehumanized “others” and it is therefore acceptable to educate them in a system which treats them as less valuable, less capable, and less respectable – producing an entirely different set of educational experiences and outcomes for Black students that are then blamed on the students themselves (Dumas & ross, 2016; Warren & Coles, 2020).

What Can Schools Do?

Groups like Black Lives Matter at School and Dignity in Schools, with the support of larger organizations like the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, have advocated for various research-backed policies to combat the anti-Black racism found in the American K-12 education system, and subsequently improve social and academic outcomes for students. Three of the more commonly proposed policies by a variety of educational organizations are 1) recruiting and retaining more Black teachers, 2) eliminating the over-policing of student behavior, and 3) funding counselors in schools.

A key policy for disrupting anti-Black racism in schools is the active recruitment, hiring, and retainment of Black teachers. Despite evidence that Black students who have Black teachers are more successful academically, only 7% of public school teachers were Black in the 2017-2018 school year (Hussar et al., 2020). Black students who do have Black teachers are seen to perform better on standardized tests in reading and math (Egalite et al., 2015), and Black students who have at least one Black teacher between kindergarten and third grade are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college (Gershenson, Hart, et al., 2018). While this is in part due to spending more time learning and less time being disciplined, these impacts on achievement are also in part due to Black teachers having higher expectations for Black students than non-Black teachers. A pair of working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research find that Black teachers have higher expectations for Black students, and that the strength of teacher expectations actually impacts a student’s likelihood of college completion (Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016; Papageorge et al., 2018).

When Black students have a Black teacher, their behavior is less likely to be viewed as disruptive and as Black students have more Black teachers, they are less likely to be suspended (Wright, 2015). However, Black teachers alone cannot combat the zero tolerance policies and over-policing of behavior in schools that have contributed to the racial discipline gap. Zero tolerance policies mandate specific, typically harsh, punishments for a variety of student misbehaviors and their use has been found to increase student suspensions, particularly for Black students (Curran, 2016; Marchbanks et al., 2018). Black students are more likely to experience exclusionary discipline like suspensions and expulsions, receive harsher punishments for the same types of misbehavior, and have their behavior determined to be problematic for minor subjective situations like “disrespect” than their peers (Curran, 2016; Gregory et al., 2010; Young et al., 2018). The disproportionate amount of school discipline that Black students face has a direct impact on their learning due to missed instructional time and a higher likelihood of being tracked into lower level courses (Pearman et al., 2019).

One specific initiative to provide service to Black students while disrupting the over-policing of predominantly Black schools is to fund counselors, not cops. Black students are more likely to attend schools with police in the building, and disproportionately experience school-based arrests (Blad & Harwin, 2017). Police presence in schools has increased greatly in recent years (Diliberti et al., 2019), but modest school budgets may be better used to fund counselors to provide support services to students. Counselors provide academic and social supports that have been shown to improve student attendance, reduce student misbehavior, and increase high school graduation rates (The Education Trust, 2019). However, most counselors serve more than the recommended 250 students, particularly in schools serving Black students, and counselors are therefore forced to do day-to-day tasks rather than providing key socioemotional and academic supports to students (Tate, 2019). With school budgets being limited, schools would benefit from focusing on investment in school counselors to strengthen the provision of social and academic resources for Black students, especially in typically segregated, under-resourced schools.

Of course, these policy recommendations are not a “silver bullet” and have underlying challenges. It is difficult to grow the Black teacher workforce when Black teachers report having a harder time finding and retaining teaching positions, being treated as disciplinarians rather than educators, and having aggressive and/or isolating racial experiences with colleagues (Bristol & Mentor, 2018; Noonan & Bristol, 2020). Additionally, Black students are more likely to attend schools with overwhelmed budgets that struggle to afford additional resources for counselors and alternate behavior management systems, like restorative justice programs (Jones, 2020; Washburn, 2019). These issues must also be addressed by schools to make any policy initiative successful. Schools can undertake other reforms, like developing effective systems for reporting and resolving racial incidents and providing ongoing teacher training and practice in culturally-response pedagogy, to strengthen the impact of these three larger policy recommendations and commit to truly combatting anti-Black racism in education.

Conclusion

Anti-black racism permeates the American K-12 education system, making it difficult for Black students to be equitably served by their schools. It is time for schools to take concrete steps towards combatting the many avenues of racism faced by Black students. By undertaking policy initiatives like recruiting and retaining black teachers, ending over-policing in schools, and funding counselors, schools will be better able to combat the extensive racial disparities in educational circumstances and outcomes experienced by Black students.

Christina Davis is an Ed.D. candidate in Education Policy and Administration at George Washington University, where her research focuses on elementary literacy education and policies of racial and socioeconomic equity. She holds an M.A. in Education Policy Studies from George Washington University and a B.S. in Elementary Education from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Christina is a Researcher at the American Institutes for Research, where she works as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Education on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other federal education projects.

Twitter: @Chr_Davis72

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