Abstract

Excerpted From: Thalia González and Rebecca Epstein, Racial Reckoning and the Police-free Schools Movement, 72 UCLA Law Review Discourse 38 (2024) (102 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Legal scholarship has long centered on interrogations of structures of segregation, control, and punishment in American public education. Most fundamentally, this work has established a record of the infusion and diffusion of carcerality across political, social, and jurisprudential spaces to maintain “expectations of power and control that enshrine the status quo as a neutral baseline ... masking the maintenance of white privilege and domination.” Punishment and control in U.S. public education have continually adopted new forms since their initial formulations, such as the denial of education to enslaved people of color, forced attendance by Indigenous children at residential schools, the infusion of eugenics into education policy, and decades of Jim Crow laws. As is argued in other work, the present-day regimes of school policing and discipline evolved under the banner of public safety and necessity during and after the civil rights movement.

Oppositional challenges to the interlocking regimes of policing and discipline have long existed. In the 2000s, a novel educational justice movement challenged the school-to-prison pipeline by linking litigation, reformist and abolitionist agendas, and youth justice coalitions with empirical research. Attention and responsiveness to disparities in school climate, policing, and discipline acutely focused on the harsh realities faced by Black boys. But the multiplicity of harms rooted in the interplay of carceral norms and intersectional bias experienced by Black girls in schools, especially in the context of policing and discipline, remain largely overlooked.

These harms are documented in both data and media accounts. National school discipline data and analysis in 2020 show Black girls were 3.66 times more likely than their white peers to be arrested, 5.34 times more likely to be transferred from their school, 3.66 times more likely to be expelled, and 2.17 times more likely to be physically restrained. The U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection dataset collected before COVID-19 school closures showed that Black girls were overrepresented in school suspensions. Media accounts of Black girls' experiences in public schools bring intersectional reality into full relief: four middle school Black girls were strip-searched, for example, because they were perceived as ““hyper and giddy,” and a six-year-old Black girl was arrested for taking candy from a teacher's desk. Simply put, the ongoing dynamics of racialized and gendered power, expressed through threats of police violence and arrest, have divested students of color of their educational futures-- uniquely so for Black girls--by subjecting them to disproportionate and unjust surveillance and punishment. Yet despite the “enduring nature of anti-Black racism, sexism, classism, and heteropatriarchy,” Black girls are too often invisible in research, advocacy, and discourse.

This Essay, and the larger project of the Center on Gender Justice & Opportunity at Georgetown Law in which it is positioned, reflects our unwavering commitment to elevating intersectionality as central to education equity and justice. This piece, however, does not attempt to present a normative, descriptive, or prescriptive interrogation of the full scope of the school-to-prison pipeline or the deleterious impact of school police or school resource officers (SROs) on Black girls and students of color more broadly. Instead, it aims to intervene in the interstice between scholarship and advocacy that champion “freedom dreams” for public education.

The transformative potential of freedom dreams and the political opportunity structures that can make them a reality were brought into sharp relief in the wake of the “racial reckoning” of 2020, when education justice activists exerted increased pressure at local and national levels to end entrenched carceral conditions and policing practices in public schools. School districts across the country began to pass police-free school policies for the first time in June 2020. Despite the significance of the enactment of these policies for civil rights, education justice, and police abolition, no scholarship has presented national data on police-free school policies passed between 2020 and 2023. To address this gap in legal scholarship, this Essay proceeds in two parts. Part I sets forth a brief background of the institutional and ideological genesis of police in public schools and the rise of individual and collective resistances to punitive control and racialized violence against students. Part II presents an analysis of data collected from the sixty-nine school districts that passed police-free school policies between June 2020 and June 2023. We conclude with a reflection on current implementation challenges and the future of these policies.

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This Essay joins the existing legal literature on educational carcerality--in particular, systems and structures of policing that divest children of their right to education. In addressing the unattended but critical passage of police-free policies resulting from the political opportunity structures of the 2020 racial reckoning, this Essay aims to intervene in three specific ways. First, it introduces a descriptive, national accounting of police-free school policies passed and rescinded over a three-year period. Second, it maps the landscape for advocates and activists seeking to ensure educational equity and access for students of color during a time of increasing precarity in education law and policy. Third, it aims to sharpen consciousness about the critical need for intersectional analyses of state control, including the reproduction of racial and gender discrimination inherent in policing. This point is consistent with the literature that shows that school discipline disparities, including arrest by school police, are based in harmful stereotypes about girls of color--especially Black girls. It is no accident that Black girls are fifteen percent of girls enrolled in public schools, but account for thirty-seven percent of girls arrested and twenty-eight percent of those referred to law enforcement.

As highlighted in Part II, the future of successful police-free policies is unclear. First, we note that the vast majority of school districts have not passed these policies. And in those jurisdictions where policies formally remain in place, their influence is limited--threatening to upend the promise made to students, parents, caregivers, and communities for the opportunity to learn free from threats to physical and mental wellbeing. As the Supreme Court has acknowledged, education is critical “in maintaining our basic institutions” and functions as a “principal instrument” in a child's life. Written seventy years ago, the Court's words in Brown v. Board of Education still ring true today: “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if [they are] denied the opportunity of an education.”

Professor of Law and Harry & Lillian Hastings Research Chair; Co-Director of the Center for Racial and Economic Justice at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco; Senior Scholar, Center for Gender Justice & Opportunity, Georgetown University Law Center.

Executive Director, Center for Gender Justice & Opportunity, Georgetown University Law Center.