Tell Congress: Pass the Ending PUSHOUT Act! TAKE ACTION

Dear Friend,

Learning is a tender thing, worthy of protecting, and every child deserves a seat in the classroom. Schools can be a safe place for students to learn, heal, make mistakes, and grow and a place where students can build healthy relationships with themselves, with their peers, with adults, and with their communities beyond the classroom.

Yet for girls of color, and other traditionally marginalized students, discrimination has led schools to disproportionately exclude them from the classroom, through harsh discipline practices, such as suspension, expulsion, and even arrest.

Black and Brown girls in schools are facing educational, judicial, and societal disparities. 

• Black girls are 7x more likely to be suspended and 4x more likely to be arrested at school compared to white girls¹.
• Latina girls are 1.6x more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions². 
• Native American youth make up only 1% of students, yet Native American girls are 3x more likely to be suspended than white girls³. 
• LGBTQIA+ students of color are 2x more lily to be suspended than their white peers⁴. 
• Corporal punishment (e.g. spanking and paddling) is still permitted in 19 states and disproportionately administered on Black students and students with disabilities⁵. 

This is the unfortunate reality faced by too many Black and Brown students and even more Black and Brown girls who have been pushed out of school, making them more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system due to systemic racism.⁶

This Pattern Must Stop! Tell Congress to Pass the Ending PUSHOUT Act Now!

Pushout refers to the punitive discipline practices used in schools that exclude students from class and too often harm students and communities by pushing them out of school altogether. 

At alarming rates, Black girls, and other girls of color, experience discriminatory, disparate, punitive, and unfair treatment in schools. Black girls are suspended, expelled, referred to law enforcement, and arrested in school at rates that far exceed the public school population as a whole, and far exceed their white female peers.

Congress must act! Pass the End PUSHOUT Act!

Lawmakers can prevent unfair school pushout now by passing the Ending PUSHOUT Act (H.R. 2690).⁷ The bill aims to stop discriminatory punishment practices that criminalize Black and Brown students and push them out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice system effectively fueling the school-to-prison pipeline.

A core part of the bill incentivizes states and schools to ban most out-of-school suspensions and expulsions for minor infractions. This major step can ensure there are equitable educational opportunities for girls of color to achieve academic success by ending punitive and discriminatory discipline practices that put Black and Brown girls at risk.⁸

The Ending PUSHOUT Act includes:

• Establishing $2.5 billion in new federal grants to support states and schools that commit to ban unfair discriminatory school discipline practices and improve school climates.

• Protecting the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and strengthening the Department of Education’s (ED) Office of Civil Rights (OCR).

• Establishing a Federal Interagency Taskforce to End School Punishment and examine its disproportionate impact on girls of color.

Together we can end the culture of criminalization in our schools and build school cultures and environments where all kids, particularly those who have been harmed by policies and practices that push them out of the classroom and into the juvenile and criminal justice system, can thrive. 

Join us in ending pushout, and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline for good!

Thanks for all you do,
--Beatriz, Kelsey, Monifa, Kiersten, and the whole MomsRising.org & MamásConPoder Team

P.S.–It’s time for Congress to address systemic problematic policing tactics. Tell Congress to pass the People’s Response Act.

References:
[1] National Black Women’s Justice Institute, “End School Pushout for Black Girls and Other Girls of Color,” (Sept. 2019) 
[2] National Women’s Law Center, “Let Her Learn: A Toolkit to Stop School Pushout for Girls of Color,” (Nov. 2016)
[3] The Ending Punitive, Unfair, School-Based Harm that is Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma (PUSHOUT) Act
[4] THE STRIKING OUTLIER
[5] Educational Exclusion: Drop Out, Push Out, & School-to-Prison Pipeline | GLSEN 
[6] Resources | PUSHOUT
[7] The Ending Punitive, Unfair, School-Based Harm that is Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma (PUSHOUT) Act 
[8] Bill Aims to End the "School to Confinement Pathway

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