Losing Black Teachers and Female Juvenile Detainees

I. Losing Black Teachers
"In Philadelphia and across the country, scores of schools have been closed, radically restructured, or replaced by charter schools. And in the process, the face of the teaching workforce has changed. In one of the most far-reaching consequences of the past decade's wave of education reform, the nation has lost tens of thousands of experienced black teachers and principals. In Philadelphia, the number of black teachers declined by 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2012. In Chicago, the black teacher population dropped by nearly 40 percent. And in New Orleans, there was a 62 percent drop in the number of black teachers." "Nationwide, according to the federal Department of Education, African Americans made up 6.8 percent of the teaching workforce in the 2011-12 school year, down from 8.3 percent in 1990." [1]

"White teachers are much more likely than black teachers to find behavior problems with black students." Adam Wright, an education researcher, estimated that if schools "doubled the number of black teachers, the black-white suspension disparity would be cut in half. Yet, though sixteen percent of America's students are black, only seven percent of teachers are." [2]

"In the South, in particular, the consolidation of black and white schools typically meant that white school boards and superintendents had more control than black principals over individual school's staffing." In the 1950s, about half of all college-educated African Americans went into teaching -- one of the few fields open to black professionals.

Philadelphia closed twenty-four schools in 2013. By the 2013-14 school year, the Philadelphia district had 3,885 fewer staff members -- teachers, nurses, counselors, secretaries and aides -- than it had at the end of 2011, a decrease of sixteen percent. Thirty percent of all charter school students now come from outside the Philadelphia district and white per-student public money follows them. Moreover, Philadelphia has extra costs (such as transportation) that aren't offset. Traditional schools in Philadelphia and elsewhere educate ten percent more students living in poverty, four percent more English learners and two percent more students with special needs. [3]

II. Female Juvenile Detainees
Nearly 50,000 adolescent girls enter the courts every year because of a system of criminalizing low-level offenses that has long been biased against girls. "Once a kid is roped into the system, she can be drawn in again and again for minor violations of her probation. As a result, the portion of juvenile detainees who are locked up for status offenses and technical violations has hovered around twenty-five percent. [4]

Between 1995 and 2009, cases of breaking curfew rose by twenty-three percent for girls -- and just one percent for boys. By 2113, girls were almost twice as likely as boys to be in detention for simple assault and certain other nonviolent offenses. "Parental bias morphs into police bias, which morphs into court bias." [5]

There is a 2013 study finding that the likelihood of black girls being found guilty for a status offense is almost three times greater than the likelihood for white girls, and a 2015 study showed that forty-one percent of LGBTQ girls in detention were there for status offenses, compared with about thirty-five percent of straight girls.



Footnotes
[1] Kristina Rigga, "Black Teachers Matter," Mother Jones, September/October 2016.

[2] Ibid.; [3] Ibid.

[4] Hannah Levintova, "Minor Threats," Mother Jones, September/October 2016.

[5] Ibid.