Black girls are the only racial/ethnic group among all girls who are disproportionately overrepresented in every type of school disciplinary action.
Help Us #PushBack Against Pushout
Pushout refers to the punitive and harmful school policies and practices—such as suspensions, expulsions, and other exclusionary discipline measures—that create toxic school environments, limit students’ ability to succeed, and ultimately push them out of school altogether. These practices often lead to contact with the juvenile or criminal legal system, reinforcing cycles of criminalization and confinement.
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Black girls are especially at risk: From 2011 to 2022, Black girls made up 15% of female student enrollment—a significantly smaller share compared to white girls (47%)—yet in the 2021–22 school year alone, they accounted for 38% of transfers, 49% of out-of-school suspension, and 37% of arrests and expulsions.
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Black girls with disabilities face compounded risk: Students receiving special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act are twice as likely to be arrested at school compared to their peers without disabilities—placing Black girls with disabilities at an especially heightened risk of experiencing school pushout, criminalization, and confinement.
Pushout is not just about discipline—it’s about the denial of opportunity, safety, and dignity for Black girls in schools across the country.
The Problem
Factors like race, gender, and adultification bias—the perception that Black girls are more mature, less innocent, and in less need of protection and nurturing—create conditions where their age-appropriate behaviors are criminalized instead of met with support. Because of their race, Black girls are often stereotyped as disruptive, aggressive, or defiant. Due to their gender, Black girls are especially vulnerable to sexual abuse, harassment, and the overall policing of their expression and bodies.
The intersectionality of their identities is often misunderstood or ignored in schools, leading to punitive discipline and exclusion instead of care. This puts Black girls at greater risk of harsh punishment, which ultimately leads to school pushout.
The Impact
Harsh and exclusionary school discipline practices—like suspensions, expulsions, or school-based arrests—do more than remove Black girls from school. They sever their connection to education, community, and opportunity.
Ultimately, harsh school discipline may cause or amplify trauma, worsen mental health outcomes, and increase the likelihood of contact with the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Without intervention, discipline becomes a gateway to deeper harm.
Our Approach
The National Black Women’s Justice Institute is a Black women-led national nonprofit working to end the criminalization and confinement of Black women and girls. We lead through research, capacity-building, and public education to create healing-centered policies and practices that dismantle harmful systems and increase access to opportunity, care, and safety.
Our work to end school pushout is informed by the lived experiences of Black girls. One of the ways we are pushing back against pushout is our Creating Affirming, Responsive, and Equitable Schools (CARES) Initiative—a training, assistance, and resource hub for schools and educators striving to change and improve their school policies and practices to create supportive environments and foster safety, belonging, and opportunity for every student, especially Black girls and gender-expansive youth.
As part of this initiative, we have created the CARES Mental Health Assessment Tool—informed by the feedback and lived experiences of Black girls—which guides educators in evaluating their current systems and building school-based mental health programs that respond to the needs of students across all social identities and youth most at risk of pushout.
Our goal is to ensure that Black girls can learn, heal, reconnect with their schools, communities, and have every opportunity to thrive.
Disrupting the School-to-Confinement Pathways
Punitive discipline practices and policies remove students from the classroom and set them on a path that can lead to long-term disconnection, criminalization, and harm.
Harsh school discipline practices are often linked to lower rates of completing school, a reduced likelihood of enrolling in post-secondary education, an increased risk of incarceration in adulthood, and greater vulnerability to mental health struggles, substance use, and behavioral challenges later in life.
To truly push back against school pushout, we must disrupt these pathways at the root. Here are a few actions schools and educators can take to begin shifting toward more supportive, healing-centered learning environments:
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Examine the root cause of student behavior
When a student displays disruptive behavior, look deeper. Identify what unmet needs—such as trauma, instability at home, or mental health struggles—may be contributing, and seek ways to address them rather than punish them.
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Implement discipline practices rooted in care, not reaction
Establish alternatives to exclusionary discipline that address harm or distraction while keeping students in the classroom. Discipline should be an opportunity for reflection and growth—not removal and rejection.
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Train staff in trauma-informed practices
Provide professional development that equips teachers and school staff with tools to de-escalate conflict and respond to students with compassion, empathy, and understanding.
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Include Black girls in the process of designing support systems. Invite Black girls to share their experiences and insight. Support systems must be created with, not just for, the students they serve. When students are treated as experts in their own lives, schools become safer, more connected spaces.
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Use disciplinary data to track patterns and address bias Regularly analyze who is being disciplined, for what behaviors, and how often. Eliminate vague or subjective disciplinary categories that are vulnerable to personal bias. When patterns emerge, intervene to create more equitable responses.
Examining School Discipline Data and Using it for Change: A Case Example
Discover how Stephanie Patton, Area Superintendent of Ohio Public Schools, used data to change discipline practices.
"One of the things that we looked at was discipline; we looked at what kind of infractions are Black girls being suspended for. Most of them are being suspended for subjective behaviors like insubordination, talking back, or those type of things. So we started to read the narratives that were being written and sent to the principal that made the decision to do a suspension, and what we learned is that it wasn’t always necessarily an infraction that should have amounted to a removal from school, but could be an alternative behavior being taught. Taking out the judgmental language like, ‘She was nasty.’ That’s not what the infraction is. What did the student do? What did the students say? You know what I mean? Retraining how we interpreted their behavior violations, and then does the consequence match the action, or are we being extreme? Is the student getting 10 days because they wouldn’t stop disrupting class? That’s a major consequence for maybe a medium infraction. So that’s where we’ve been working.
I pulled discipline and tracked to see, is there even accuracy in the data? We found out it’s not. Like we had something under insubordination, but the student had a vape pen. Well, that’s not insubordination, that’s ‘tobacco product’ or a ‘narcotic, not tobacco.’ So, first of all, are we just going to the stereotype of what we feel that Black girls are? Loud, disrespectful, insubordinate. That’s when I look at trends and patterns, because that’s going to impact their grades, is going to impact their attendance if they’re being suspended. That’s how we use a data point to change our practices."
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Help Push Back Against Pushout
The resources below are designed to help educators, policymakers, advocates, and community organizations create supportive, affirming environments where Black girls and gender-expansive youth can heal, learn, and thrive. These tools can guide your school, program, or policy work toward long-term solutions:
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CARES Mental Health Assessment Tool: A school-based guide to evaluate and improve mental health systems. This tool helps you identify gaps, strengthen support services, and build affirming environments rooted in care—not punishment.
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School Pushout Data Hub: A first-of-its-kind tool that tracks school discipline trends by race and gender. Use the interactive data to compare suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to law enforcement across multiple school years and student groups. This resource offers a deeper understanding of how race and gender shape the impact of school discipline—and who is most affected.
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Bill of Rights for the Mental Health of Girls and Gender Expansive Youth of Color in Schools: Developed by the Youth Advisory Committee of the Schools for Girls of Color Learning Network, this document outlines five demands every school should honor. Share this powerful call to action with your school board, leadership team, or community.
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National Trends in School Pushout Fact Sheet: A data snapshot of national school discipline trends from 2011 to 2018, broken down by race and gender. This one-page summary highlights the overrepresentation of girls of color in school discipline practices and serves as a quick reference for advocates and educators.
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EMERGE Program Evaluation: Repairing Black Girls’ Relationship with Schools: This report evaluates the EMERGE (Educating, Mentoring, Empowering, and Reaffirming Our Girls for Excellence) reentry program—an innovative model designed to reconnect system-impacted girls with education and pathways to college and careers. Examine our process evaluation of the EMERGE reentry program to better understand how future and existing programs can support Black girls transitioning from confinement and foster care.
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Deepen your understanding of school pushout and liberation-centered education with these powerful reads:
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Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Dr. Monique Couvson (formerly Monique W. Morris)
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Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Liberatory Education for Black and Brown Girls by Dr. Monique Couvson (formerly Monique W. Morris)
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Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood by Dr. Jamilia Blake, Rebecca Epstein, and Thalia González
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Watch Now
Beyond Pushout: Transforming Schools So Black Girls Thrive, ft. Dr. Monique Couvson
In this conversation, Dr. Sydney McKinney, Executive Director of the National Black Women's Justice Institute and Dr. Monique Couvson, founder of the National Black Women's Justice Institute and author of “ Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools” and “Sing A Rhythm, Dance A Blues: Liberatory Education for Black and Brown Girls.” discusses how schools can move away from punishment and the forces that push Black girls out of school and into the juvenile and criminal legal system, and how we can, instead, transform schools into places that foster safety and healing and ultimately enable Black girls to thrive.
School pushout is a threat to every student’s right to learn and thrive.
Ending school pushout requires a community effort to support students holistically. Achievement and behavior in school may be connected to factors occurring outside of school, such as mental health needs, housing insecurity, or abuse. This means that to end school pushout and dismantle school-to-prison pathways, we must ensure that youth are safe and able to thrive both in and out of school. Explore the organizations and resources below, which can help transform your learning environments and better support students in your community who may be at heightened risk of being pushed out of school.
Black Girls Smile is dedicated to encouraging positive mental health education, resources, and support geared toward young Black women and girls. It is uniquely led by a staff of all Black women, a volunteer team, and Board.
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Girls for Gender Equity (GGE) works intergenerationally, through a Black feminist lens, to center the leadership of Black girls and gender-expansive young people of color in reshaping culture and policy through advocacy, youth-centered programming, and narrative shift to achieve gender and racial justice.
Justice for Black Girls positions Black girls ages 13-24 to see themselves as civic, education & justice leaders who have the power to innovate and actualize solutions to systemic issues. Recognizing that Black girls are the experts on issues they face, JBG centers the academic and policy work of the girls themselves and provides a safe space for them to do that work with joy.
Justice for Black Girls is a social justice education space that serves Black girls ’ needs for protection, safety, and belonging through a holistic culture of care coupled with Black feminist curriculum, grassroots collaborations, and academic partnerships. Justice for Black Girls offers a number of programs both for Black girls and for those supporting Black girls.
Our Mission
The National Black Women’s Justice Institute is a Black women-led national nonprofit that leads research, capacity-building, and public education to advance healing-centered policies and practices that dismantle pathways to criminalization and confinement and increase opportunities and safety for Black women and girls who are directly impacted by the criminal and juvenile legal systems.
We do this work to end the harm inflicted upon Black women and girls by these systems and to ensure that every Black woman and girl who is impacted is safe and may heal from their trauma, reconnect with their families and communities, achieve economic prosperity, and have every opportunity to live out their dreams.
We envision a society where healing—not punishment—is upheld as justice.
To learn more about how we can help you end school pushout through our CARES initiative contact Tenaj Moody director of capacity building and learning at tmoody@nbwji.org.