Black girls are suspended from school twice as often as white girls.
Education Week has devoted a special three-week series to this disturbing injustice. This week, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Associate Professor of English Education and founder of TC’s Racial Literacy Roundtables, responds to the question: How should schools and districts respond to discipline disparities affecting black girls?
FIGHTING STEREOTYPES Sealey-Ruiz calls on educators to do "deep self-work" around their own biases.
For starters, she says: By first acknowledging and affirming the humanity of black girls; by understanding how disproportionately suspending black girls is an infringement on their humanity; and by recognizing that black girls deserve to be seen for their complexity and should not have certain aspects of their behavior stereotyped as defiant and deviant.