Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

Pushout places a problem obscured by male-centered accounts at the junction of education and criminal justice: Black girls do not simply leave school after one instance of “bad behavior”; discipline, policing, unaddressed trauma, and resource deprivation progressively expel them from learning. Monique W. Morris therefore widens the familiar school-to-prison pipeline into “school-to-confinement pathways.” The destinations include suspension, expulsion, detention, house arrest, court schools, and continuing surveillance as well as prison. The pathway is built through ordinary administrative decisions long before a cell appears.

This concept repairs an intersectional blind spot between two public debates. Movements against school criminalization often take Black boys as their implicit subject, while conversations about gender discrimination in education often center white girls. Black girls disappear from both. Morris combines statistics, history, policy analysis, and interviews with girls so race and gender cannot be treated as variables simply added together. She asks what institutions do when the expectation that girls be docile meets the stereotype that Black people are threatening, recoding voice, embodiment, and self-defense as danger.

“Attitude” is a key term in that interpretive politics. Speaking directly, arguing, refusing compliance, dressing in particular ways, or responding to harassment can all be classified as defiance. Black girls are also frequently perceived as older and more knowing than white peers and therefore denied the protection and room to err afforded to children, a mechanism later research often calls adultification bias. Discipline does not merely answer conduct; teachers, administrators, and police first decide who remains a child in need of help and who has already become a body to control.

Trauma is especially likely to be translated into misconduct. Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped attending school after she was punished for lashing out amid sex trafficking and harassment that staff had failed to recognize. Such accounts show how absence, anger, silence, or leaving a classroom may be survival responses to sexual violence, family instability, poverty, homophobia, or transphobia. When a school records only the infraction and never asks what happened, zero tolerance punishes trauma’s visible effects while leaving the conditions that produced it untouched.

Morris then maps the infrastructure of criminalization. School police and security absorb routine discipline; minor conflict becomes arrest and a court record; suspension breaks academic continuity; court schools compound the damage through weak teaching, punitive climates, and credits that may not transfer back. Each part can describe itself as neutral or safety-oriented, yet together they turn a student into a risk file. Changing a dress code is therefore insufficient. Budgets, mental-health support, disability accommodation, meaningful appeals, and police authority inside schools all require scrutiny.

The book does not render Black girls as statistics awaiting rescue. Interviews preserve their assessments of teachers, schools, families, and futures, as well as their desires to learn, create, and sustain relationships. Treating girls’ voices as knowledge allows Morris to distinguish resistance to oppression from harm to others without renaming all agency as inspirational “resilience.” Her alternatives include reducing exclusionary discipline, building trauma-informed and healing-centered learning, listening seriously, and involving girls in defining safety. Education should create conditions for growth, not train greater compliance.

The boundaries follow from time and place. Evidence from the United States in 2016 cannot stand in for other histories of education, racialization, or juvenile justice, and Black girls differ by class, disability, migration status, color, and gender identity; the original edition could more fully address trans and nonbinary students. Restorative practice without power analysis may coerce a harmed student into reconciliation, while “trauma-informed” can become a training label if resources and disciplinary authority remain unchanged. Reform should be judged by outcomes rather than new vocabulary.

A useful reading exercise is to trace one girl’s experience across every turn: Who first noticed distress? Who translated a request for help into attitude? Which rule triggered suspension? How did coursework, housing, or care then unravel? Next, examine current local discipline data disaggregated by race, gender, disability, and sanction, and read it beside Black girl-led organizing and first-person work. Pushout leaves feminism with a durable warning: protection is not more control. School ceases to be an antechamber to confinement only when Black girls are treated as complex children entitled to resources and able to co-define safety.