Title: Pushed Out: The Injustice Black Girls Face In School
NEAToday: Students and Social Issues: School-to-Prison Pipeline
By: Mary Ellen Flannery
September 9, 2016
Key Points: This article was an interview of educator and author Monique W. Morris. Morris talks about the importance of having an empathetic mindset when working with our students. We have to look at the student’s situation in order to understand the behavior. Morris goes into the faults of having a punishment driven, zero tolerance school environment. Also providing some startling percentages, “Black girls are 20 percent of preschool girls, but 54 percent of the girls facing out-of-school suspensions in preschool.” Those numbers are undeniably biased against black girls in the school system. As educators we have to do better than that, we have to be better than that for the sake of these students.
Intended Audience: Teachers, educators, administrators, and anyone working with a diverse population of students.
Relevance: The numbers depicted above do not lie. As teachers, we need to change our views and our ways of dealing with students from diverse populations. We have to study ourselves and understand what biases we may have, so we can make a conscious effort to not allow them to affect our students. This is a problem right now, today, in our schools. Like Morris said, it is up to us as teachers in the classroom to show students we care and lead with love.
This post comes from a great perspective. This is first hand information that regardless how many hours of research one does, we can never truly get this experience. It is heart breaking to see the numbers and how they compare across the board. Monique Morris is doing a great service by bring up the issues that black girls face inside our education system as early as preschool. The media shows the public all the issues of young black men in society but we only get one lens to see them through. This interview does a fantastic job of allowing us a different lens to see the issues through. While some may think that her proposal to lead with love is irrational, think back to some of your best memories with teachers and coaches, did you not feel loved by them? But change starts from within and as educators we need to be open to change and accepting of our differences.
ReplyDeleteI had to re-read the preschool statistics several times, and I still am thinking you must have made
ReplyDeletea typo. First of all, I didn’t realize preschool had “suspensions”, so that concept itself is strange to me. The numbers are equally disturbing. It makes me wonder what the suspension statistics would be for special education students who are female and black, compared to the representation in the population. I would also be curious to know the reasons given for the suspensions of the preschoolers. It would be interesting to see how many of the reasons correspond to culturally different ways of interaction.