US Rep. Ayanna Pressley said on Monday that a newly published report prepared by the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) should prompt her colleagues in government to take action on legislation she has crafted that is aimed at challenging the disparate disciplinary policies impacting Black and brown girls in K-12 public schools.

Pressley, who was joined by US House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi at a press conference on the topic last week in Washington, said the report confirms what she and other advocates have long argued is a persistent problem in schools across the nation.

“The GAO’s report was devastating but unsurprising,” the congresswoman said. “To put it simply: This damming new report affirms what we’ve known all along. Black girls continue to face a crisis of criminalization in our schools, and it provides powerful new data to push back on the harmful narrative that Black girls are disciplined more because they misbehave more.”

She added, “Despite making up only 15 percent of all girls in public schools, Black girls received nearly half of all suspensions and expulsions in the 2017-2018 school year. Nationally, Black girls were disciplined more than three times the rate of white girls and in my home state of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Black girls were suspended at 4.2 times the rate of their white peers.”

The report was commissioned in 2022 after Pressley and Pelosi called on the GAO to take up the issue and report back to Congress. The agency analyzed ’17-’18 data on rates of suspension and expulsion. Asked how those numbers stacked up against the 2023-2024 school year nationally, Pressley offered her opinion that “it may be even worse.”

On Monday, Pressley said her interest in the problem dates back to her time on the Boston City Council when two Black sisters at Mystic Valley Charter School in Malden were punished for wearing hair extensions. 

“This was pre-my alopecia, and I was wearing my hair in a protective hairstyle as well,” Pressley said. “I thought this was likely a systemic issue and they were not an anomaly and then I conducted evidence-based focus groups with 100 girls working closely with Dr. Monique Couvson, president of The National Black Women’s Justice Institute at the time. It was that research that became the foundation of [the legislation] that I introduced once I was in Congress.”

Pressley’s bill – H.R.5325, dubbed the PUSHOUT Act – stands for ending Punitive, Unfair, School-based Harm that is Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma. Pressley says it is meant to disrupt the cycle of Black girls being pushed out of school by investing in safe and nurturing school environments for all students, especially girls of color. 

Race is not the sole indicator of how students across the country are treated unfairly, she said. The GAO report illustrated that while Black girls receive more and harsher discipline than their white peers, Black girls with disabilities or in the LGBTQIA+ community experience disproportionately severe discipline than their cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied classmates. 

That resonates with Dr. Monique Couvson, author of “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in School,” a book on the subject.

“As a former educator and principal investigator of evaluations for school-based programs,” Couvson said, “ I know that the safest schools for Black, Latina/e, and Indigenous girls and gender-expansive youth are those that operate with the belief that no child is disposable.

“That demonstrates this by building an infrastructure, which includes counselors and restorative approaches, to respond to children appropriately when they experience dysregulation.” 

She added, “The Ending PUSHOUT Act is an important effort to grow our schools’ capacity to be locations for healing, so they can fully realize their potential as locations for learning.”

In Pressley’s view, the unfair treatment of Black and brown girls in schools correlates to the treatment minorities face far beyond the hallways and classrooms. 

“All the recent youth risk behavior surveys have pointed to the ways,” she said, “in which students of color, LGBTQ students, disabled students, and immigrant students have felt more vulnerable and more targeted and that has everything to do with an emboldened white nationalism and emboldened racism and bigotry that is fanned by the rhetoric of Donald Trump and JD Vance and their allies.”

Pelosi, in her remarks last week, urged Congress to act on what she called a “groundbreaking GAO report that highlights the unaccepted discrimination that Black and brown girls face in K-12. We’re talking little girls, every day. When people ask me what the most important issues is facing our Congress, I always say the same thing. Our children, that’s all of our children.”

While Pressley’s legislation is unlikely to move in this current session, she thinks Massachusetts can be a leader through state law.

“I hope once we are not in the legislative session and I am back in the district and we’re doing events in the community to sound the alarm and raise awareness about this report, that Massachusetts will want to be a leader,” she told The Reporter. That we’re not waiting until I moved federal legislation to begin to root these things out.

“While we have been under this Republican majority, they have not been leading on these issues that are a true consequence to everyone that calls this country home. They have not been centering the people and this is a systemic crisis, the pushout crisis, and we have to end it,” said Pressley. “I need Hakeem Jeffries to get that gavel and be our speaker and for the Democrats to be back in the majority so that we can advance this.”