The Pushout of Black and Latinx Students Into Continuation Schools Across Racialized, Gendered, and Linguistic Lines

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Responding to the Shifting Features of Racism: Intersectional Extensions of Critical Race Theory

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose:
Alternative schools in the K-12 schooling system were developed as a direct response to the national dropout/pushout crisis (Kim, 2011; Kelly, 1993). In the alternative education system, Black and Latinx students account for an overrepresentation of nearly two-thirds of the total student population in continuation schools (CDE, 2019). Using the school-to-prison pipeline to understand how Black and Latinx students navigate the educational system, continuation high schools often represent the last stage of schooling. This pipeline not only refers to the prioritization of incarceration over education (Annamma, 2015), but relies on strict zero-tolerance policies that exist in traditional schools to target the suspension, expulsion, and pushout of Black and Latinx students. This paper examines the racialized processes traditional comprehensive high schools participate in to remove Black and Latinx students into alternative schools, and how that is exacerbated across gender and linguistic lines.

Theoretical Frameworks:
Guided by the tenets of intersectionality, experiential knowledge, and commitment to social justice (Solorzano, 1998), this paper uses Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine the racialized pushout of Black and Latinx students. This paper specifically draws on whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), and race-evasive racism (formerly read as colorblind racism) (Bonilla-Silva, 2013) to understand how Black and Latinx students are removed from traditional schooling, resulting in their racialized pushout. Using a CRT framework, this paper also uses student resistance (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001) to acknowledge their resistance and agency as a response to racial oppression and educational inequity.

Methods & Data Sources:
Using a qualitative approach, this study investigates how six Black and Latinx students were pushed out of their traditional comprehensive high schools and sent to a continuation high school in the greater Los Angeles area. Through observations, document analysis, and in-depth interviews with these students, I build upon CRT to presented their stories as counternarratives (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004).

Findings:
The findings in this study indicate that Black and Latinx students carry an awareness and critique of racial, gender, cultural, and linguistic oppression that is at the root of their pushout from traditional schooling. Applying a CRT lens to their analysis of their own pushout reveals that school systems provide racially coded, deficit-framed justifications to their removal from traditional high schools that explain how school systems may have a hidden function of preserving whiteness in traditional schools (Dunning-Lozano, 2016).It is through student resistance that Black and Latinx youth resist this racialized pushout in various ways.

Scholarly Significance:
With limited literature in the field of alternative education, research has yet to focus on the racialized pushout of the two most overrepresented groups in the alternative education system, Black and Latinx students. Through a CRT framework, this research examines the processes that traditional schools engage in to push-out Black and Latinx students, paying attention to intersectional forms of racialization.

Author

• Nallely Arteaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills