Black girls are disciplined more harshly in school. Dress codes play a big role.

Black girls are often disciplined more harshly in school than their white peers, and dress codes seem to be part of the problem.

A new report from the National Women’s Law Center that looks at schools in Washington, DC, found dress codes to be unnecessarily strict and harmful to female students, and that black girls in particular are often reprimanded or punished for violating these rules.

DC public high schools frequently rely on gender-based stereotypes, framing girls’ dress code violations as being “unladylike,” “inappropriate,” or distracting to the boys around them, according to the report. Some schools also shame girls by forcing them to put on extra clothes that call attention to a violation, or punish them by pulling them out of class or sending them home, affecting their ability to learn in school.

Grace, a 17-year-old black senior at DC’s Duke Ellington School for the Arts, told me that the dress code at her school gives teachers and administrators a lot of discretion in determining when a student is wearing something inappropriate.

“I’ve been told about my bra, whether I’m wearing one, the type that I’m wearing,” she said. “It makes me uncomfortable.”

The new report is part of a growing body of research that shows that black girls are punished more severely in school than girls of other races. It also raises new questions about the role race plays in a growing debate over whether dress codes unfairly police girls’ bodies.

“Dress codes have been around for so long, we don’t really think about the message it sends to girls,” Kayla Patrick, an education fellow at the National Women’s Law Center, told me. “We’re sending the message that what girls wear is more important than what they think.”

Research shows that black students are suspended and expelled from school at a rate more than three times greater than white students, and the latest numbers from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection finds that this disparity is actually increasing, with black students taking up a larger percentage of students referred to law enforcement.

The new DC schools report comes amid an ongoing national conversation about racial disparities in school discipline, and as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos weighs rescinding Obama-era guidelines aimed at reducing the number of nonwhite students suspended for relatively minor issues.

But conversations about these issues often focus on black students as a unit, or highlight the disparities between black and white boys. Black girls are often overlooked in discussions of school discipline, despite the unique challenges they face.

A 2012 report from the African American Policy Forum, for example, notes that black girls are often punished more severely because they are seen as more aggressive and less feminine than their white peers.

And a 2017 report from researchers at the University of Kentucky found that dress code violations and other minor infractions that are disproportionately applied to black girls in schools are “subjective and influenced by gendered interpretations.” That same year, a Georgetown Law study found that by the age of 5, black girls are already seen as needing less protection and support than their white counterparts.

These biases can have severe effects. Black girls make up 16 percent of girls in US public schools but account for 42 percent of girls’ expulsions and more than a third of girls’ school-based arrests. Black girls accounted for 50.7 percent of the girls with multiple out-of-school suspensions in 2013, according to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. In every state in the country, black girls are more likely to be suspended than their white peers.

While some education experts have argued that school uniforms help even the playing field for students from low-income backgrounds, the students surveyed in the new report say that in some DC-area schools, uniform requirements are often taken to extremes.

“I was sent home because I had a bit of splattered paint on my shoe,” says Ceon, a 16-year-old black student who attends DC’s Phelps A.C.E. High School. On another occasion, she couldn’t go to class for a full day because her pants weren’t navy blue, a violation of her school uniform. “It didn’t make sense,” she says.

Patrick of the National Women’s Law Center explains that dress codes are not only punitive for students but can also be expensive for their families. The report notes that 81 percent of schools in DC require a uniform, often requiring parents to purchase multiple items for their child. One girl told researchers that her school uniform cost some $300.

Dress codes have also been used against black girls in ways that reveal racial bias.

Almost 70 percent of school dress codes in DC, for example, prevent students from wearing cultural items like headwraps and scarves unless they are for religious purposes. In other parts of the country, dress codes ban black students from wearing hair extensions, certain hairstyles like locs and braids, or even their naturally textured hair.

The report also points out that dress codes often contain highly subjective language saying that students should avoid clothing that is too “tight” or “revealing.” This may make it easier for girls with curvier bodies to be arbitrarily punished for wearing the same thing as a smaller classmate.

“Many dress codes provide the opportunity for adults to police the bodies of Black girls,” Monique Morris, author of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, told me in an email. This is often based on stereotypes that black girls are more sexual and less feminine than girls of other races, she adds.

Grace, one of the students I spoke to who participated in the new report, agrees that girls are punished unfairly in school for dress code violations and says that she ultimately hopes schools get rid of them, a desire echoed by the National Women’s Law Center researchers. “If schools are places where we are supposed to be training to think ... we need to be treated as such,” Grace said. “There are far more pressing issues inside of schools than what a student wears.”