More than 70% of Black female respondents in general math classes had “a negative math identity” compared to 14% of Black boys. And 86% of Black girls in general math did not see the connection between their desired careers and mastery of advanced mathematics — even when they wished to enter STEM fields. That is compared to 67% of Black boys. 

“What students believe about math — and their ability to learn math, to be good at math — is really important, both in the moment and in the long term,” said Ashli-Ann Douglas, a research associate at , a San-Francisco based national nonprofit. “And those beliefs are related to the quality of math instruction that they receive.” 

Douglas was the lead researcher on the report when she was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. The 251 students in her study — 83% were in the 11th grade and 17% had been retained at some point and were in 10th grade — participated in fall 2019. One child had skipped a grade and was a high school senior. 

More than 80% of respondents were Black: 78% lived in a home with an annual household income of less than $50,000 while more than a quarter lived in a home with a household income of less than $20,000.

Pamela Seda, president of the , which works to empower Black children by boosting their access and success in mathematics, said there are two stereotypes at work here: that Black people are not gifted in mathematics and that girls in general struggle with the subject. 

“When you put those stereotypes together it compounds the negative effects,” she said.

Shelly M. Jones, a mathematics education professor at Central Connecticut State University and member of the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics board of directors, said math curriculum is often not culturally relevant. 

Jones, in teaching graduate students, highlights the work of trailblazer , an expert in ethnomathematics, the study of how math is used in different cultures. 

One of s papers examined the math behind African-American hairstyles. It was, Jones said, a transformative lesson: One of her Black female students told her łÒŸ±±ôłŸ±đ°ù’s work made her feel recognized in the topic for the first time.

“Black girls don’t see themselves in mathematics,” Jones said. “The things that they like, they don’t see in math.”

Douglas, the researcher, found that 99% of respondents considered basic math — number and operations skills — to be useful while only 58% said the same of higher level math, including algebra and statistics. The study, published earlier this month in the American Educational Research Journal, helps explain why the nation is missing out on the talents of many underserved students, she said.

“This is one of the ways we lose out on the genius of young people,” Douglas said. “Math is a gatekeeper in a lot of ways: When students do not have the math skills they need to access different careers, that is a barrier. And when they don’t have the beliefs about the utility of math, the value of math, they are less likely to persist and advocate for improved quality of instruction.”

Douglas’s paper also revealed that 29% of Black boys said their teachers’ recognition or acknowledgment of their performance in class was an indicator of their math proficiency. 

None of the Black girls said they received such positive feedback. 

Black students also did not believe their teachers were adequately prepared to teach the subject, regardless of their credentials, the study notes. And Black girls were more likely to cite their own poor understanding of math as a sign that they were not good at the subject. 

Students’ personal testimony was powerfully revealing, researchers said. 

“He doesn’t know how to teach in a way that people understand,” said one student in a focus group. “He doesn’t know how to teach right.” 

The result was devastating.

“I’m failing now,” the student said. “I never failed last year. I’m failing this year.”

Researchers noted that several students described that same teacher as “nice,” indicating the issue was not about personality, but effectiveness. 

Douglas said her findings emphasize the need for more inclusive and equitable math teaching methods to help marginalized students — particularly Black girls. 

Even with the required credentials to work in the field, teachers need ongoing coaching to help them work with students and relay the importance of the subject in their lives, she said. 

She and others from her research team spent a few hours leading a districtwide training shortly after the study was conducted, providing hands-on lessons for educators in the summer of 2021. In addition, 10 educators, including teachers and their advisors, subsequently completed a semester-long coaching program led by Douglas and her team. 

Douglas’s report is part of a larger longitudinal study of math knowledge development that started when the students were in preschool: The children were recruited in 2006 from 57 pre-kindergarten classes at 20 public schools and four Head Start sites and were followed through high school. 

Kelley L. Durkin, research assistant professor in the department of teaching and learning at Vanderbilt, and Bethany Rittle-Johnson, a professor of psychology and human development at the university, oversaw the last phase of the project, which wrapped up in 2022.

Rittle-Johnson said she was surprised when some students said their math teachers refused to help them or shamed them for not paying attention. 

“All the students in our focus groups valued their education, but they did not all receive the quality of math instruction and support that every student deserves,” she said. “Inequitable access to resources for both students and teachers have serious consequences for students’ learning opportunities, and it is not fair nor just.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Foundation provide financial support to WestEd and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

​​“During my time in school I noticed that some of the Black girls would get in trouble for dress code even though their peers of a different body shape would not get in trouble for wearing the same thing.”

“From being in school, it always seemed to me that Black girls were always the ones who got disciplined. Not saying White girls never got disciplined, but maybe they were given a little more wiggle room for error unlike the other Black girls.”

These were some of the observations young women shared with the researchers of a new U.S. Government Accountability Office , which found that Black girls in public schools face more and harsher forms of discipline when compared to other girls. While it’s long been known that Black female students are disproportionately punished in school, the GAO report determined that removals from class were happening to Black girls for similar behaviors as white girls and in the same schools. This points to the disparity being more about how Black girls are treated in school than how they act.

“This damning new report affirms what we’ve known all along — that Black girls continue to face a crisis of criminalization in our schools,” U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley said at a press conference last month unveiling the findings. “And the report provides powerful new data to push back on the harmful narrative that Black girls are disciplined more because they misbehave more.”

Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat, is hoping the GAO report that she commissioned with House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and fellow congresswoman Rosa DeLauro can drive a legislative remedy to end racial disparities in the disciplining of Black girls. She told the that she realizes the a bill she re-introduced in April, stands little chance while Republicans control the House, but that states can take the findings and move on their own to address the inequity. 

While Black girls represented 15% of all girls in public schools, they received almost half of all suspensions and expulsions during the 2017-18 school year, including 45% of out-of-school suspensions, 37% of in-school suspensions and 43% of expulsions. 

Black girls received exclusionary discipline at rates 3 to 5.2 times that of white girls. This pattern held true in every state and most drastically in the District of Columbia, where the out-of-school suspension rate for Black girls was 20.5 times the rate for white girls. These disparities were felt even more harshly by Black girls with disabilities, who were more likely to be removed from school than both Black girls without disabilities and white girls who were also disabled. 

Exclusionary discipline can result in both short- and long-term negative outcomes for students, according to the report, not only disciplinary outcomes but also the preceding behaviors.

While previous GAO work demonstrated racial disparities in K-12 discipline, a dearth in data meant that researchers couldn’t establish whether that inequity remained across similar behaviors. This time, though, researchers were able to use an additional national data set — the School-Wide Information System — which tracks infractions and associated discipline across 5,356 schools in 48 states alongside U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data. 

This filled a “big gap in the research,” according to Jackie Nowicki, the report’s lead researcher and a director on the GAO’s Education, Workforce, and Income Security team. “That was huge for us,” she said, “because — as far as we know — that kind of research has never been done before.”

Nowicki said she hopes people will understand the results are, “not an opinion. It’s not a hypothesis. This is serious, robust, objective, non-partisan analysis from nationwide data.”

The report also included an analysis of 26 empirical studies, data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and 31 responses to an anonymous questionnaire circulated to women ages 18-24 this year by the national organization,

Through this work, researchers identified multiple forms of bias that contributed to discipline disparities, including colorism and adultification, a form of racial prejudice in which kids of color are perceived as older, less innocent and more threatening. One study included in their review found that Black girls with the darkest skin tone were twice as likely to be suspended as white girls, which didn’t hold true for Black girls with lighter skin complexions.

Researchers also found that Black girls reported feeling less safe at and connected to their schools than their peers, factors which can impact both attendance and academic performance.

Amid a mental health crisis that is harming young girls in particular, “this is a really important piece of that overarching picture about how girls see themselves, how they experience the world, and what they take with them into their [adult] lives after they’ve left K-12 school settings,” Nowicki said.

To combat these issues, Pressley’s legislation would provide grants to states and schools that commit to banning discriminatory discipline practices, work to strengthen the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and establish a federal task force to study and eliminate these practices. 

Rohini Singh, director of the School Justice Project at Advocates for Children of New York, said she is optimistic that with increased awareness from reports such as this one, those on the ground, like school deans or administrators, will “check themselves” before doling out consequences.

The report will also be helpful in implementing solutions, she said. Often in New York she hears debates about how to keep schools safe: “What that means for a lot of people is more police in schools, more discipline, more suspensions. It’s becoming clearer through reports like this — and data that we have — that that’s not necessarily the case 
 oftentimes students can feel less safe because they can be targeted.”

Nowicki shares Pressley’s skepticism that the necessary action will happen at the federal level and her hope that the report can drive reforms locally.

“The kind of change that needs to happen here is going to happen school by school, building by building, individual by individual, by people who realize that this is a systemic issue shown in the data, and that we all can be part of this solution if we choose to be.”

“We know that there are obstacles at every stage of the educational system in America, especially for urban youth and Black girls,” says Cynthia Chapple, founder and managing director. “Students need to feel supported, seen and heard in certain spaces.” 

Since launching Black Girls Do STEM in 2019, Chapple has engaged students at five partner middle schools in St. Louis. Monthly Saturday activities bring students together with mentors to work on projects and experiments in materials science, engineering, technology, cosmetic science and more. The girls also go on field trips and meet Black women who are leaders in the STEM community.

This year, more than 100 girls are participating, guided by over a dozen volunteer mentors. In the first year, the students are introduced to a variety of STEM fields, engaging in a new activity each month. In the second year, they choose from one of five tracks — aviation and aerospace, cosmetic science, cybersecurity, agriculture technology, and construction and civil engineering — helping to anchor their STEM interests. When the students reach high school, the organization can provide tutoring, with the goal of supporting them throughout their STEM pursuits while encouraging them to stay focused on advanced math and science. 

“It is so powerful to sit with someone who you feel like you connect with on personal levels,” Chapple says. “You build trust with them and relationship. When you tell them something is possible, they start to believe it more than if a random stranger told them. I think it is tremendous, and why our mentoring network is so critical.”

The program focuses on creating a space that prizes curiosity and exploration — and the girls start to value that in themselves, Chapple says. “We will be successful if girls walk out of this with a renewed sense of who they are,” she says. “The core is how do we develop this young person into believing big of themselves and a mindset to push through challenges and building resilience that doesn’t come from trauma.” 

At Ferguson, Sam Brotherton, a math instructional support leader, says Black Girls Do STEM has proven “extremely valuable” for his students. “The girls who attend the Saturday program get to experience science in ways that are relevant to them, while developing a support network in addition to what the school offers,” he says. “Overall, our girls are more interested in the STEM field and get the opportunity to meet more local professionals to extend their network and knowledge of STEM careers.”

Chapple left her job in applied sciences — she has worked in forensic, food and materials science — to focus on Black Girls Do STEM. The community-based program has target demographics and identifies school partners in areas of St. Louis where the occupations of the community’s adults do not commonly fall within STEM fields.

The organization comes into the schools through hands-on learning experiences or special events to introduce the program and invite students to join the Saturday sessions. Representatives are also present at community fairs and festivals. About 75% of the girls are students at target schools, but Black Girls Do STEM also accepts students from across greater St. Louis. 

Chapple focused on middle schoolers because students at that age are at a pivotal development stage where they form their identity, yet are curious enough to ask questions and try new challenges. “That is the best age to get them to develop their confidence and awareness around things that are challenging and finding the fun and joy in doing things that may not come to them super easily,” she says. 

The program mixes activities and field trips — students have visited Boeing, Washington University’s engineering labs, the Saint Louis Zoo veterinary science clinic and more — to expose the girls to a wide range of STEM worlds. 

Black Girls Do STEM is funded by grants and community support. During the pandemic, much of the program went virtual, and the organization has retained a small cohort of students from across the country who access the program virtually. Chapple says her dream is to keep building the program, offering new opportunities for students while expanding its networks and reach beyond St. Louis. 

“We are real people right here in front of you, investing our time in you and belief in you,” Chapple says. “This is possible. We have done it. I have made products on the shelf that people use every day, that go into devices you use every day. This is regular, everyday stuff.”

When Shields’ mother, Nastassja Miller, was pregnant, doctors said her daughter was sickly, and could be born with Down syndrome or be developmentally delayed. While the doctors were wrong about that, at 6 months old, Shields needed her left kidney removed. And then, when Shields was 2 years old, her father was incarcerated, leaving Miller to raise Shields on her own for over a decade.

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Despite all those challenges, Shields, now a senior at Crosstown High School in Memphis, is in the top 20 in her graduating class – with four years of straight As – and on her way to college.

Shields’ achievements are part of a greater trend in Memphis: Over the last four years, Black girls have graduated from high school at a higher rate in Memphis-Shelby County Schools than any other demographic group on record, a reversal of traditional academic disparities where Black students lag behind their white peers.

Supportive classrooms and attentive teachers of color who can relate to their students are certainly a large part of the equation to Black girls’ academic success. But Memphis-Shelby County Schools graduates and soon-to-be graduates agree that behind the trend is a personal determination to excel in spite of the double burden of racism and sexism that Black girls often face.

Limited studies of Black girls are more likely to ‘problematize’ than promote

It’s hard to say for certain what’s behind Black girls’ high graduation rates in Memphis, experts say, as their academic outcomes are chronically understudied in comparison to other demographics.

A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson said the department does not collect high school graduation rate data disaggregated by race and sex, though a National Center for Education Statistics provides graduation data for the U.S. and Tennessee by race/ethnicity. Generally, though, girls graduate from high school at than boys.

National studies and statistics more often “problematize” rather than promote Black girls in K-12 schools, focusing on topics like the school-to-prison pipeline, hair or aesthetic bias, or disproportionate rates of suspension, drop-out, or teen pregnancy, said Danielle Apugo, an assistant professor of education at Virginia Commonwealth University and co-editor of the book “Strong Black Girls: Reclaiming Schools in Their Own Image.”

“Black girls and Black girlhood are lumped into categories with Black males and Black women, which flattens the dynamism of our experiences in K-12,” said Apugo, whose studies focus on the educational experiences, culture, resistance, and intellectual uprising of Black women and girls in the United States.

Attention is often directed at broader groups, such as all students of color, or specifically to Black boys, who are the subject of many efforts in and across the country to improve test scores and high school graduation rates.

And while the gaps between Black and white students’ test scores and graduation rates are broadly recognized, that narrative is flipped among economically disadvantaged girls, with low-income Black girls graduating from high school 5 to 6 percentage points ahead of their white peers. That trend is fueled by “Black females’ resilience to disadvantages,” a 2021 by researchers at the U.S. Department of Justice and Syracuse University found.

Greater rates of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug use during early adolescence among low-income white girls compared to economically disadvantaged Black girls contribute to that gap, researchers say. That, in turn, can lead to more risky behavior and school-related delinquencies such as truancy and suspensions for economically disadvantaged white girls.

Black girls’ socialization plays into high graduation rates

In Shelby County, it’s clear that something noteworthy is occurring, and it suggests that Tennessee’s largest school district — which serves nearly 110,000 students, most of whom are Black and economically disadvantaged — is taking steps to better serve a population that has long been underserved, said Valerie Adams-Bass, an assistant professor of education at the University of Virginia whose research focuses on Black children’s social and academic outcomes.

Perhaps the largest factor at play, though, is not the schools. Instead, Adams-Bass said, it could be the way parents socialize Black girls during their upbringing, encouraging them to do well and excel in school so they can pursue career paths that are financially stable or lucrative. Meanwhile, parents aren’t always able to have those same conversations with Black boys because of the heightened risk of criminalization that they face.

“When we talk with girls, the conversations tend to lean into ‘get your education, get a good career, make sure that you are independent,’” Adams-Bass said. “With the boys, it’s not that they don’t have those conversations, they’re just not able to emphasize it as much because of how there’s so much violence toward and against Black boys, so parents are naturally talking to them about their sense of self and identity and being careful.”

For Shields, the strong female role models in her life have helped her get to where she is today — recently accepted into 30 colleges, including the University of Mississippi’s pharmacy program, a great feat for an incoming college freshman, and the recipient of five full-ride scholarship offers.

“I know it means so much to my mom. She’s always really proud of my grades,” Shields said. “Actually, after I get good grades and now that I’m getting into college, just to see her reaction 
 it’s like she’s more happy and excited than even I am.”

She isn’t quite sure where she’ll attend college or what she’ll study — maybe something in the medical field, like pharmacy. But above all else, Shields knows she wants to be a leader, following the example of other powerful Black women in her life.

Like her grandmother, who is director of the drug rehabilitation program at the Salvation Army in Memphis. And her mother, who was a single parent for most of Shields’ life, until her father was released from prison when Shields was in eighth grade.

Miller also juggled a full-time day job with studying at night. When Shields was 10, Miller graduated with a master’s degree, and now is an officer in the Shelby County Health Department’s COVID unit.

“I’ve always told her to never give up, that it’s never too late to go to school or get help, and you have to have goals in life to be successful,” Miller said. “I think she’s a reflection of that, and us, wanting to succeed and having goals and reaching them.”

Black girls often learn to navigate racialized spaces — school included — by observing how Black women in their own lives navigate them, from informal spaces such as a grocery store to formal environments such as work or school, Adams-Bass said. Having Black women teachers who “mirror” Black girls and show them what’s possible, may move the academic needle for Black girls.

In Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the vast majority — 80% — of teachers are women, district officials in 2020, and over half are Black, according to state from the 2019-20 school year.

A December 2021 from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform suggests teachers of color may be better at educating all students because of their emphasis on social-emotional learning.

“Whether Black, Hispanic, Asian or White, students report feeling better cared for and more academically challenged when they have a teacher of color,” writes David Blazar, the author of the study and an assistant professor of education policy and economics at the University of Maryland at College Park. “In other words, the practices and behaviors that teachers of color may deliver with students of color in mind may just be ‘good teaching’ all around.”

Black girls may also look to the increasingly positive representations of Black women in media, Adams-Bass said — from Raven-SymonĂ© in the popular Disney show “That’s So Raven,” to former First Lady Michelle Obama.

They harness power from “part of Black Girl Magic, that contributes to their resilience and tenacity to persist in school and in life,” Adams-Bass said.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools officials said they’re excited about the trend, saying it may be a sign that administrators’ and teachers’ concerted efforts to boost graduation rates and overall academic performance are paying off.

In 2021, 83% of Black girls graduated from high school on time, recent Memphis school district data shows. The rate held about steady with the previous three years, when the rate hovered around 85%.

That’s higher than the graduation rate for every other demographic group separated by race and gender. For comparison, 74% of Black boys in Memphis-Shelby County Schools graduated from high school on time, and had the lowest graduation rate at 64%. White girls have the closest graduation rate to Black girls at 80%, while the rate for white boys stands at 67%. The district doesn’t appear to track graduation rates among nonbinary students.

Administrators couldn’t say whether having more Black women teachers made a difference for Black girls. Data breaking down the demographics of the district’s teachers wasn’t available by publication.

District officials touted several specific initiatives across the district, including its new social-emotional learning curriculum, increased academic counseling in ninth grade and beyond to ensure students stay on track, and pushing students of color to participate in Advanced Placement and dual enrollment classes, among others. But administrators couldn’t say what has caused Black girls in particular to graduate at the highest rates in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, compared to all other demographic groups.

Black girls’ own drive and resilience push them to success

Shields credits all her schools and teachers for the academic excellence she has demonstrated from kindergarten through 12th grade. Her elementary school, Idlewild Elementary, gave Shields a solid foundation, and at Crosstown she participated in numerous AP classes and dual credit classes through her school’s partnership with Christian Brothers University.

But Shields’ success is about more than that. Behind the classes and the grades, Shields had her own personal drive and resilience — in large part, she said, inspired by her mother and grandmother’s examples and encouragement.

Even if Shields had to be out of school for doctor’s appointments or health issues, her mom — a strong woman who inspires Shields daily — would remind her that school should be her top priority.

So, that’s what Shields has always done: If she had to miss class for an appointment, which has happened frequently throughout her school career, she asked her teachers for schoolwork ahead of time and completed it. If she was struggling with a concept, she got tutoring and asked for help.

“She (my mom) was always making sure I knew that tutoring doesn’t mean you’re not smart or something like that. Tutoring could just mean that you need help, and you don’t have to be scared to take tutoring classes,” Shields said. “I’ve learned to keep an open mind if you need help; don’t be scared to ask for help.”

School didn’t always come easily for Destinee Woods, either. Woods, a 2021 graduate of Memphis-Shelby County Schools’ Bolton High School, has always struggled with math and science.

“With math, if there’s a formula or graph it was something I wasn’t good at it,” Woods said with a laugh. “And science has never been my thing.”

But she never let it stop her. Motivated by her grandparents, who never had the opportunity to go to college, and her parents, who were first-generation college students themselves, Woods worked hard to keep her grades up and take challenging AP and dual enrollment classes so that she could not only attend college but earn scholarships to help pay for it.

Woods’ hard work and determination paid off. Not only did she graduate from Bolton with a strong grade point average of 3.7, but Woods also managed to start her own hair while still in high school, and was involved in numerous extracurricular activities like National Honor Society and Beta Club, a national nonprofit educational youth organization dedicated to helping children become leaders.

As a result, Woods was accepted into 22 colleges and universities, but landed on Miles College, a private historically Black liberal arts college in Fairfield, Alabama, where she earned a full-ride scholarship.

Woods is quick to admit that college isn’t easy. But nevertheless, she continues working toward her dream of someday owning her own salon.

“I still struggle with science,” Woods said. “So I just take more time to study and ask for help when I need it. It’s that simple.”

Like Woods, Shields has had to overcome numerous hurdles over the years. Still, Miller knew the day would come when Shields would don a cap and down and cross the stage to receive her diploma. And while Shields’ graduation is still months away, her mother is sure the day will be emotional.

Miller is more proud of her daughter than she could’ve imagined.

“I was prepared for whatever the wind blew in,” Miller said, reflecting on the doctor’s warning during her pregnancy that Shields might be developmentally delayed or have Down syndrome. She weathered all the worries about her daughter’s health, the medical appointments that took Shields out of school and, on top of it all, the stress of being a single mother until she remarried in 2019.

Now, Miller sees it’s all been worth it.

“It’s been like a marathon,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “But I’m so proud of my baby.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

It isn’t true. 

In fact, county juvenile court data tell a completely different story — one in which police actually carried out nearly 500 arrests in Pittsburgh schools that year, disproportionately against Black students and children with disabilities, often for minor offenses. That’s by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which found that school districts in Allegheny County had dramatically underreported interactions between kids and cops to the U.S. Department of Education. Student arrest rates in the county exceeded the state average, the ACLU analysis found, and among the county’s 43 districts, Pittsburgh Public Schools played an outsized role in shuffling children from campuses into the criminal justice system. 

The underreporting combined with the high student arrest rates, the report argues, raise serious questions about whether Black students and those with disabilities, who are disproportionately subjected to school-based arrests in Pennsylvania and nationally, receive “the protections from discrimination guaranteed by law.” 

School leaders “have to realize that connecting young people to the justice system is harmful” and understand that “how educators choose to deal with students is a responsibility that they have,” said report co-author Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. 

“The conversation is really about the harms to Black children” Jordan said, and while the Pittsburgh district “does not want to be seen as anti-Black or insensitive to the concerns of Black parents,” leaders have failed to adopt sufficient student interventions that don’t involve the criminal justice system, he said. 

The Pittsburgh district attributed the underreporting of its data to the federal government to an error. After taking heat for racial disparities in arrests, school leaders in 2020 to study arrest data and created a task force focused on improving school safety. 

The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Outside southwest Pennsylvania, federal education data suggest the issue of underreporting student arrests is widespread nationally. The Education Department’s is key to enforcing federal civil rights laws, but advocacy groups say inconsistencies and underreporting by local districts could weaken its utility.

School policing has become increasingly fraught in recent years, and dozens of districts cut ties with local law enforcement after a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd in 2020. Yet in the wake of destabilizing pandemic-induced campus closures, schools across the country have in student misbehavior, including fights and weapons possession, and some districts have beefed up campus police to combat the mayhem.

By underreporting campus arrests, however, districts could give parents an inaccurate picture of campus safety and the effects of school-based police on the young people who interact with them. 

“The harms of having police in schools are much more widespread than districts report,” said Jordan, who called Allegheny County a “hot spot” nationally for youth arrests. During the 2018-19 school year, Pittsburgh students were arrested at nearly eight times the state rate, the ACLU found. 

Black and disabled youth face the brunt of arrests

Attorney Kara Dempsey, who represents children in education and juvenile delinquency matters, knows firsthand the long-lasting effects of school-based police on Allegheny County youth — especially Black girls. 

In one instance, a middle school girl who said she took her teacher’s credit card as a joke ended up getting arrested, Dempsey said. Due to probation violations, she wound up in a secure detention facility. Youth often struggle to comply with probation guidelines, Dempsey said, and school-based arrests can then grow into a yearslong cycle of juvenile justice involvement.

“Because she has trauma, she runs from these facilities,” said Dempsey, a supervising attorney at the . “That just continues this cycle. It’s just really insane.”

Local activists have been sounding the alarm for several years. In a 2020 report, the local Black Girls Equity Alliance found Pittsburgh school district police were the for Black girls, accounting for a third of all referrals countywide. Black girls in Allegheny County were referred to the juvenile justice system at a rate 10 times higher than white girls, researchers found. 

In response, a consultant group, RMC Research Corporation, to study the drivers of school-based arrests. Black students accounted for about 80 percent of district arrests, RMC found in its report, but just 53 percent of the student population. 

Part of the problem can be explained by in which adults view them “as more culpable, less innocent and less in need of help and support” than their white classmates, said Sara Goodkind, an associate professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who helps lead the equity alliance’s juvenile justice work. 

“These really high rates of referrals of Black youth are not because there’s a problem with young people. It’s that there’s a problem with the adults who are responding to them and with the systems we have in place,” she said. 

The number of police officers stationed inside public schools has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and research suggests their presence precedes an increase in student arrests. More than two-thirds of public middle and high schools had at least one school-based officer during the 2017-18 school year, according to the most recent federal data, and while suspensions and expulsions have declined in recent years, arrests have grown. 

Police presence has long been bolstered by high-profile yet statistically rare mass school shootings, yet research is mixed on their ability to improve campus safety and civil rights groups have often warned their presence could do more harm than good. 

To better understand student arrests in Pittsburgh, ACLU researchers analyzed data reported to the federal and state government, as well as internal district figures obtained through public records requests and those produced by the RMC Research Corporation. The results were perplexing, Jordan said, because each source produced different numbers. 

During the 2017-18 school year, the Pittsburgh district reported 86 arrests and 395 law enforcement referrals to the state education department. That same school year, the district reported zero arrests to the U.S. Department of Education while the county juvenile court tallied 499 school-related arrests. 

“For a district in which the arrest rates have been high for a very long time, why should they be so inaccurate,” Jordan asked. “I can’t speak to intentionality, but they are in the position to know that what they have put out to the public is inaccurate. They are well aware of that.”

During the 2017-18 school year, Black children made up 15 percent of the country’s students but 31.6 percent of those reportedly arrested at school, according to the most recent federal data. Black students with disabilities accounted for just 2.3 percent of the total student population but 9.1 percent of those subjected to arrests. 

In Allegheny County, the racial disparities were far starker: During the 2018-19 school year, Black students were arrested nearly nine times more often than their white classmates, according to juvenile court records. That year, 1 in 51 Black boys and 1 in 69 Black girls were arrested at school compared to 1 in 316 white boys and 1 in 894 white girls. Black girls were the only demographic group where more than half of juvenile arrests stemmed from school incidents. 

“The numbers speak from themselves,” Dempsey said. “There’s obviously bias in decision-making from people in power who have the ability to decide whether to either charge these individuals or not.”

Racial disparities were most severe in the 1,500-student South Allegheny School District, where a quarter of Black middle and high school students were arrested during the 2017-18 school year. 

ACLU researchers found about half of arrests countywide were for simple assault or for drug charges, primarily involving small amounts of marijuana. 

The drivers of racial disparities in student arrests and other forms of discipline, including suspensions and expulsions, have long been the subject of research and passionate debate. One study, , attributed nearly half of the discipline gap between Black and white students to actions by teachers, suggesting that the “differences in punishment may be due to racial bias.” Just 9 percent of the disparities could be explained by differences in behaviors between Black and white children, researchers found. 

Ted Dwyer, the Pittsburgh district’s chief accountability officer, said in a statement the arrest data it reported to the Education Department was inaccurate “due to an employee illness” that hindered fact-checking but didn’t learn about the problem until it was too late to submit a correction. He said the district has worked to improve data reporting processes, including those related to student arrests.

Dwyer said school police “have demonstrated their commitment to working with the school staff to curtail arresting students,” and noted that arrest rates have dropped in the last several years. However, he said arrest rates have decreased more quickly for white students than their Black classmates, therefore making the disparities even larger.

“The district has convened a task force to conduct deep listening sessions, review of the School Safety Manual and evaluate the effectiveness of current school safety and well-being,” he said in the statement. “The group continues its work.” 

Questionable zeros reported nationally 

By matching education data to juvenile court records, Jordan and his co-author Ghadah Makoshi, a community advocate at the civil rights group, took an unconventional and labor-intensive approach to expose the extent of school-based arrests across Allegheny County. School districts don’t generally compare their data against the figures collected by juvenile courts, Jordan said. 

On a few occasions, journalists have done similar investigations. In , The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, found that the local school district failed to report hundreds of arrests to the state. In 2020, Illinois Public Media reporters found that had underreported student arrests to the U.S. Department of Education for years. 

The issue plagues districts across the country. reported zero school-related arrests during the 2015-16 year, according to a report released in 2020 by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, a figure that suggested “a widespread failure by districts to report data on school policing despite the requirements of federal law.”

Three of the country’s 10 largest school districts — including those in New York City and Chicago, , according to a recent analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news outlet. Yet in New York City, for example, police department records that year.

For years, the federal Civil Rights Data Collection has faced scrutiny for offering incomplete data on highly sensitive topics other than school-based police, including on instances of sexual misconduct and educators’ use of physical restraints. In , the Government Accountability Office found that 70 percent of school districts reported zero seclusion and restraint incidents during the 2015-16 school year but the U.S. Department of Education lacked tools to fact-check the data’s accuracy. The department’s quality control processes, the government watchdog found, were “largely ineffective or do not exist.”

Advocates combating sex-based discrimiation have long accused districts of underreporting campus misconduct. In an analysis of federal civil rights data from the 2015-16 school year, the nonprofit American Association of University Women found that serving students in grades 7 to 12 reported zero incidents of sex-based harassment or bullying. 

Given the data’s role in enforcing civil rights laws, Jordan said the U.S. Department of Education should be more aggressive in ensuring the numbers are reliable. With better data, he said, researchers can better understand the impact of police in schools. 

“The data doesn’t answer the whole question,” he said, “but it gives you the opportunity to drill down, to see what can be changed to improve the overall school environment without involving police and the criminal justice system.”