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This source discusses how school dress codes unfairly target female students and students of color. Throughout this article, there are stories shared from different students about how their school dress code is unfair. The story that stood out to me was one that a 17-year-old student shared about how the majority of girls dress coded at her school are the black females. When this issue was brought up by the student to a male administrator, the response he gave was,  “because white girls don’t have as much to show.” This administrator did not even focus on the inequality/issue that this student was bringing attention to. Instead he gave her a response that further supports the fact that females bodies are focused on way to often when it comes to dress codes. It is also a response that highlights the way in which female students of color are targeted. Every female student has to follow the same rules, but it seems they are enforced more on the students of color when that should not be the case. The unfair aspect to dress code policies is the simple fact that clothing does not fit everyone the same way. Students should only be getting in trouble for the clothing they are wearing, not because of their bodies.

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While a dress code is supposed to make the school environment more conducive to learning, it frequently does the opposite. In the past year, schools all over the country made national news for the ways they enforce their dress code- asking a student to put duct tape over the holes in her jeans, suspending a student for a skirt that was too short, or sending a student to the office for not wearing a bra -all of which take the focus off learning and place it on girls' bodies.

At East Longmeadow High School, Massachusetts, six out of the nine dress code regulations targeted female students. The dress code had not been updated since the 1990s. "It was time for us to revisit some of the language," principal Gina Flanagan said.

Many school dress codes use gendered language, such as "girls must not wear spaghetti straps or show cleavage." The reasoning? These things are distracting to other students, particularly males. Girlhood expert Shauna Pomerantz of Brock University says that "dress coding" students for being distracting is a form of victim-blaming.

"It's saying the male response is your fault. Your body is causing negativity," explains Pomerantz. Sexist rules also set a precedent for men, she adds. "It is offensive to men. It suggests they don't have the ability to talk to a female student without going wild."

Marci Kutzer, a fourth-grade teacher at Bertha Ronzone Elementary in Las Vegas, Nevada, says that, while school boards couch dress codes as preparing students for the workplace and adult life, their real purpose is to prevent "distractions."

Kutzer says that sends a powerful message: "A boy's education can be compromised by your gender. Please do what you can to neutralize it." This clearly puts a burden on female students.

Another notorious dress code rule is the "finger-tip policy." Female students must wear skirts or shorts that go past their fingertips. While this seems straightforward, students and parents report that for some, it's impossible to find clothing that complies with the rule.

In Duval County, Florida, Nikki Belsham says that she's been struggling with this rule since she was in school, and now her daughter is facing the same dilemma.

Shopping for her daughter is difficult; while Belsham can find appropriate clothing at the mall, it doesn't pass the test. This is a common problem.

"Take a tall, skinny 12 year old girl-her shorts may not pass this finger length test and would be considered inappropriate for school, even though her butt is covered and the shorts are relatively long," she explains.

Belsham also says that administration won't enforce the rule with boys. "Not one person in administration would even look at or question the length of a boy's shorts."

'White Male Default'

Kutzer says that she will only "dress code" students if their clothing is clearly so tight it is uncomfortable. Her school follows "standard school attire," (SSA) so students wear uniforms. On laundry day, however, some students show up without. Other student's families can't afford to keep up with their growing children, so their uniforms are ill-fitting.

"We are told by our administrators to send non-compliance issues to the office, but I only refer kids who are clearly wearing too tight or uncomfortable clothing, and I send them to the nurse, who keeps a stash of extra clothing for this type of situation," explains Kutzer.

The high school attended by her daughter, however, uses a dress code policy rather than the SSA. Kutzer noticed that it essentially targets female and minority students-the focus being on on parts of the female anatomy, like backs, shoulders, and legs.

"Targeting styles of clothing that are mostly associated with a particular minority group is discriminatory. When styles such as 'sagging pants' are the issue, we are putting a burden predominantly on black males," says Kutzer.

She calls this the "white male default," a common trend for school dress codes. "Dressing as most white young men do seems to be what is encouraged.'

In 17-year-old Maddie Reeser's Baltimore City public school, it's the Black girls at her school who are the most frequently dress coded-a double discrimination. "My white friends rarely get sent to the office, but my Black friends do quite often," says Reeser.

Another student said she brought up this issue to a male administrator, who told her it was "because white girls don't have as much to show." The student says this comment made her feel uncomfortable, let along failing to address the inequality.

Despite the fact that Reeser's school has a uniform, she and her peers still faced the same issues that Belsham described at her Duval County school. "The rule should be based on the clothes, not how they fit, because it's different for each person," says Belsham.

Despite the rules being the same for every girl, teachers end up enforcing the rules more strictly with Black females, and in a way that is humiliating.

Many dress codes can cause black students to fall behind academically, according to a 2018 National Women's Law Center study. Looking at public schools in the District of Columbia, the report found that three in four D.C. public high school dress codes say students can be pulled out of class or school for dress code violations.

"It's outrageous that girls are losing critical class time simply for what they are wearing," said NWLC Education Fellow and report co-author, Kayla Patrick. "This sends a disturbing message to all students: What a girl looks like is more important than what she learns and thinks. No girl should ever have to forfeit her education because her shirt is the wrong color or she has a hole in her jeans."

Making All Students Feel Comfortable

East Longmeadow principal Flanagan said she's tried to target inequalities at her own school by creating a gender-neutral dress code, and by involving students in the dress code process. "Instead of saying no low cut shirts or cleavage, the dress code says all private parts must be covered at all times," she says.

Pomerantz recommends giving students lots of leeway to express themselves with fashion. If something truly crosses the line, there's a way to tell them, without enforcing victim-blaming.

"A question you can ask is 'What is it about dressing this way that's so important to you?'" Pomerantz recommends.

Many schools are looking into updating their dress code policies by making them more gender neutral, gathering student input and changing the wording-just taking the blame off females for "distracting" male students. Kutzer says the SSA at her school promotes equality fairly successfully-at least at the fourth-grade level. The districts hasn't yet introduced the SSA at the high school level.

"We want our kids to feel comfortable when they come to school," says Flanagan. "Who knows? Five or ten years from now we may have to update again to fit the changing times."

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When School Dress Codes Discriminate | NEA

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Student dress codes continue to unfairly target girls and students of color. Experts and educators weigh in on how to make them more equitable.

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This image offers a good visual representation of how it feels for any female student to be dress coded. I think it emphasizes the extreme focus there is on female students, and how they are put at fault because of their bodies; their bodies are such a distraction to others that they might as well wear a cardboard box around themselves so that no one can comment that they are showing too much skin or that the exposed parts of their bodies are distracting those around them.

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This article talks about social-emotional learning, its relation to dress coding, and the importance of it in schools. In short, social-emotional learning focuses on teaching students how to regulate their emotions and positive mind-sets. But, when schools don't create a safe environment for there students, the efforts to teach and enforce social-emotional learning are being wasted. It is important that schools take the time to look over and revisit policies like dress code policies for instances where a student is not allowed to wear something that is an expression of their culture. Another valid point that was discussed in this article is the idea of inclusivity. There are too many instances where schools have a dress code policy that forces students to leave their culture and their background outside of school, making the racially and culturally diverse students think that they do not belong in school. I think this idea of social-emotional learning and inclusivity linked to dress code policies is something that is not thought about enough. This article definitely shifted my perspective and thoughts about dress codes in which it did not only focus on the simple fact of a student being called out for the clothing they are wearing, but the way in which it can effect the mental and emotional well-being of a student.

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When Tvli Birdshead, a senior at an Oklahoma high school was denied the freedom to wear his Native American regalia to graduation this spring, he decided to fight back. After all, the clothing is considered a cultural rite of passage in his tribes and family.
**UPDATE: In May 2019, Tvli was unanimously approved by the Latta school board to wear his Sacred Regalia to graduation, and a new policy was amended and put in place to allow other Native American students to wear their religious and sacred regalia if presented one month in advance of graduation. Kudos to his mother and the ACLU for not letting this case be swept under the rug.
"It's against the dress code" is one of those answers we are often told to accept at face value. Students are often told their attire is "inappropriate," and that this is a matter of self-discipline and character, even being sent home on the basis that what they are wearing is disrespectful. But we rarely question what purpose these rules serve, who these rules exclude, and how these rules impact students' mental and emotional well-being. It's high time we start.

Dress codes like this are abundant and are too often used to promote race and sex discrimination, sending the message that students who come from diverse backgrounds do not belong in school, that their cultural backgrounds are to be left outside of their educational experiences, and that they must conform to dominant (mostly White) cultural expectations in order to succeed in school.

These policies directly undermine the work that many district and school leaders are doing to advance what's called social-emotional learning, which focuses on teaching students how to regulate their behavior and emotions (known as self-management) and positive mindsets (such as self-efficacy, the belief in one's ability to achieve goals and succeed at tasks). There is mounting evidence that social-emotional learning has positive effects on academics, well-being, and career outcomes. But when schools don't create the safe and supportive learning environments that students need (i.e., ones that don't discriminate based on race, culture, sexual orientation and/or gender), those efforts to teach social emotional skills and mindsets are likely to be wasted. It is therefore imperative that schools revisit a wide range of policies, such as dress codes, that often further marginalize students.

There are a number of scholars who insist that we must use a racial equity lens to ensure that social-emotional learning does not harm students of color, students from low-income families, and immigrant youth. There are also some ill-informed arguments that we must not "settle" for inclusivity and instead should focus on teaching character and self-discipline. This argument is misguided. Inclusivity is not settling; it is necessary to create schools that work for the racially and culturally diverse students in this country - with school systems that help all students to grow socially, emotionally, and academically. Not only does the research show the importance of ensuring students - especially students from historically marginalized backgrounds - feel that they belong in school, but that such students are often sent messages that they don't belong through exclusionary discipline policies and codes of conduct based in Eurocentric ideas of how to behave. Merely focusing on teaching students to "behave better" will not get at the systemic injustices that punish students for behavior that is culturally appropriate according to their experiences and backgrounds.

And in fact, without careful attention to knocking down systemic barriers to inclusivity in schools, efforts to promote social-emotional learning in individual students could do more harm than good. Discriminatory policies in schools have a direct impact on the social and emotional well-being of students. When school administrations unjustly discriminate against students, yet adopt behavioral interventions meant to teach students to manage their emotions and behaviors, they are sending harmful messages that students are responsible for systemic injustices. When school systems exclude students who don't conform to dominant cultural norms, they are failing to encourage students to believe in their abilities to achieve goals and succeed at tasks.

"Wearing these things is acknowledging that this is the step to a higher education," told the local news. "Wearing these things just have a whole different meaning to me." If the dress code policy is hindering this symbolic connection and recognition of achievement, it is doing a disservice to the students involved. Teaching students the social-emotional skills that are shown to have positive impacts, such as self-management and self-efficacy, will only work if schools are providing safe, equitable, culturally sustaining learning environments where all students are accepted, engaged, celebrated, and have the opportunity to thrive.

So no, inclusivity isn't something to settle for; it's what we must first address if social-emotional learning is to benefit all students. Inclusivity is the foundation upon which pedagogy, curriculum choices, discipline policies, community engagement, and other educational decisions must be made, and will in turn ensure we are not settling for teaching students to self-discipline and assimilate, but instead creating safe learning environments were all students are accepted, engaged, celebrated, and have the opportunity to thrive in schools.

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What Purpose Does Your Dress Code Serve? Why Inclusive School Policies Matter - The Education Trust

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When Tvli Birdshead, a senior at an Oklahoma high school was denied the freedom to wear his Native American regalia to graduation this spring, he decided to fight back. After all, the clothing is considered a cultural rite of passage in his tribes and family.

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"When a girl is getting pulled out of class, or a boy is getting pulled out of class so that they can go home, or fix their clothes, it disrupts their education."

Dress codes are important policies to have in schools. Obviously there are good reasons as to why certain dress code rules exist in schools. Teaching students what is appropriate and inappropriate in terms of being in a learning environment is an important lesson for administrators of schools to encourage and enforce. This video talks about those reasons, and a principal of a school talks about why dress codes are important and the reasons why schools enforce them. But, what really stood out to me in this particular source is what real students had to say about their school dress codes. While some students shared their own experiences about being dress coded, mostly all of the students presented in the video gave their own personal opinions regarding dress code. They discussed why it is an important policy to focus on, and the efforts they go through to push for more fair dress codes. Self expression and how that is being taken away because of dress code policies is something that was mentioned as well, and that relates to how dress code rules can take a toll on someone mentally and go against social emotional learning.

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"It’s not a surprise that many of the dress-code controversies that make the news involve girls and African American students, some researchers said. Their bodies are particularly under scrutiny by school officials—and the students know it."

This article, as it states in the title, discusses the ways in which schools enforce dress codes that are discriminatory towards specific groups of students. While females are a group that are targeted very often, this article focused more on the instances where students of color were targeted by their school dress codes.

There were a number of examples included in the article that gave me a better understanding of how exactly dress code policies can be discriminatory towards students who are racially or culturally diverse. A valid quote from the article that stood out to me was, "Teachers and students at the school said black males are more likely to be disciplined for dress-code violations than white males, even though their violation rates were similar..." Preferential treatment is a term that is mentioned in the article, and that is when one person or a group of people are given a preferred advantage over others. In this case, it seems a student is given preferential treatment based on their ethnicity or culture.

No student should ever be targeted by a dress code more than others in school just because of their ethnicity, gender, or culture.  Schools need to do a better job at making every student feel safe and accepted in a school environment and get rid of obvious discriminatory dress code policies.

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The length of De'Andre Arnold's dreadlocks didn't keep him from walking the red carpet as a guest at the Academy Awards.

But his shoulder-length hair, which he has grown since he was in middle school, will keep him from receiving a diploma from the Texas school district he has attended since kindergarten.

Earlier this year, a social-media swarm enveloped De'Andre and Barbers Hill Independent School District, a school system of some 5,400 students in Mont Belvieu, 30 miles from downtown Houston. The district's dress code bans male students from having long hair. It also states that they cannot wear their hair in a style meant to skirt the rule that hair can't grow below the eyebrows or earlobes or touch a T-shirt collar.

Cut your hair, De'Andre was told, or face the prospect of not participating in the May graduation ceremony.

That is where the situation remains, even as De'Andre was feted by celebrities and professional athletes for refusing to cut his hair.

The social-media glare has dimmed on this particular dust-up, but it's all but certain a similar controversy will flare soon in another school district, when dress codes clash with a growing number of students, parents, and researchers who see such rules and their enforcement as rife with racism and sexism.

"At Barbers Hill, they say we hold our students at a really high level," De'Andre said in an interview with Education Week. He has withdrawn from the district's high school and is now enrolled in another district. "If we're students of such a high caliber, I don't think hair would be such a distraction for us. It's kind of ridiculous."

Greg Poole, the Barbers Hill superintendent, did not respond to a request for comment from Education Week. In other interviews, he said the restriction was never about De'Andre's hairstyle, just its length, which applies to all male students regardless of race. In an opinion piece for a local newspaper, Poole said his district is being wrongly condemned by outsiders.

"This issue isn't an attempt to provide fair or 'equal' treatment to all students, which was a cornerstone of the civil rights movement in the last half century. This is an attempt to force unfair or 'unequal' treatment based on race or culture such that a child is given preferential treatment based on his ethnicity," Poole wrote in the Baytown Sun.

He concluded: "We will continue to strive to be correct, not politically correct."

Other Controversies

Almost monthly, a school dress-code issue pops into the public eye. Last September, a Texas grandmother was told by a public school principal that her 4-year-old grandson, who is African American, would have to cut his hair or wear a dress. In 2018, a 17-year-old Florida student was told by administrators at her public school that she needed to put bandages over her nipples. Her breasts, they said, were distracting other students.

In yet another Texas district, two African American students said that when they came to school with abstract designs shaved into the sides of their heads, administrators colored in the lines with a black Sharpie, rather than calling their parents. A federal lawsuit is pending against the Houston-area district, Pearland ISD, for those two incidents.

"The design was not something that was gang-related or offensive to another race or religion or women or anything like that. What difference does it make?" said Randall Kallinen, the lawyer representing the two students. "I don't see how they're disruptive, either. It's just, 'I've defined that as bad, so it's bad.' "

In a statement to the Houston Chronicle, Pearland spokeswoman Kim Hocott said that "while specific details cannot be discussed, we remain confident the outcome will be favorable for the district."

It's not a surprise that many of the dress-code controversies that make the news involve girls and African American students, some researchers said. Their bodies are particularly under scrutiny by school officials-and the students know it.

"When we look at what's happening to kids in school, it's a lot of policing of black and brown bodies," said Rachel Roegman, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She and co-author Alyssa Pavlakis, a graduate student at the university, interviewed students in a Midwestern high school and discussed their findings in an article that ran in Phi Delta Kappan.

"We don't always give kids credit. Kids are aware that different kids, because of their race and gender, get different consequences based on the same offense," Roegman said in an interview. Teachers and students at the school said black males are more likely to be disciplined for dress-code violations than white males, even though their violation rates were similar, according to the Kappan article.

But the act of "policing" is nuanced: Sometimes black or female administrators are the ones who are coming out in favor of such codes.

In April 2019, a Houston high school principal made national news when she banned parents from coming on campus wearing leggings, ripped jeans, minidresses, and hair bonnets, among other forbidden clothing items. The school is predominantly black and Hispanic, and the principal, Carlotta Outley Brown, is also black.

"There's respectability politics. I think we need to start addressing that," said Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, the director of educational equity and senior counsel for the National Women's Law Center.

"To start, black girls are not going to be able to dress their way to freedom. You have to wrestle with the fact that anti-black messages have been handed down from generation to generation. People start to internalize those things, and it's more harmful than it is helpful," she said. "We should allow black students to be confident in themselves in school."

The NWLC has produced two publications, Dress Coded and Let Her Learn, that explore the disparate impact of dress-code enforcement, sexual harassment, and other practices that they say impede girls' success in school.

Lisa Frack, a former president of the Oregon chapter of the National Organization for Women, said she was tired of seeing story after story about girls running afoul of student dress policies. What if the organization, instead of criticizing problems after the fact, created a model policy that schools could adopt or work from?

So, it did. The model policy, which was adopted by the Portland, Ore., district in 2016, says students must cover their private parts and wear shoes, and that's about it. There are no restrictions on hair length, width of tank-top straps, or whether underwear waistbands or bra straps must be covered. Students can wear hats or hoodies, as long as teachers can see their faces and if they are wearing earbuds.

"People were saying, 'Oh, they're going to wear bikinis and macrame jumpsuits'-nobody has," Frack said. What has happened, she said, is that teachers no longer feel like they have to enforce dress codes, and students are no longer subject to enforcement that varied depending on the whims of different teachers and administrators. People from around the country have reached out in support.

"What are you trying to create in your school?" Frack said she would ask of school leaders. "You want kids to feel motivated and excited about learning in an open-ended way. There is no one way of looking that reflects the things they can go and do. To tell them there's one way to be-that makes the grown-ups less credible."

Frack is aware that what may work in liberal Portland, however, might not pass as easily in other parts of the country. But, she said, "parents can still boss their kids around as much as they want to. Do you really want the government telling your kids what to wear?"

Dorinda Carter Andrews, a professor of race, culture, and equity at Michigan State University, also said that school administrators should look closely at their dress codes and what they want them to accomplish.

"Does the policy in any way serve to police or surveil student bodies? And if so, how do we redress the policy?" Carter Andrews said. "I think the second question people do have to ask is, 'Does our dress code further marginalize students who are already further marginalized by school culture?' These are basic questions that need to be on the table before policies even get created."

Traditionally, the dress-code policies are "cloaked in white-normed, Eurocentric framings of what is professional, what is good," she said. And it's troubling, she said, that lawmakers are now passing bills to prevent discrimination based on hairstyles associated with black culture.

"That ought to cause us all to step back," Carter Andrews said.

On March 4, Virginia became one of four states, along with California, New Jersey, and New York, to enact a law banning discrimination based on hairstyles traditionally associated with black people, such as braids, dreadlocks, and twists. Lawmakers in Texas and several other states are working on similar laws.

But changing mindsets may be challenging.

Safety and Compliance

Permian High School in Odessa, Texas, immortalized in the book, film, and television show "Friday Night Lights," is 500 miles from the Barbers Hill district. But it has a similar dress-code policy. Girls can't wear spaghetti straps or tube tops. "Extreme modes of hair design and color" are forbidden. Piercings can only be in the ear. (Barbers Hill forbids male students from wearing earrings at all.)

Danny Gex, the principal of the 3,600-student school, said dress codes are not the most important issue he faces on a day-to-day basis. Still, he understands and supports such policies.

First, Gex said, it's a safety issue. Though all Permian students are required to wear student IDs on a lanyard, a long-haired male student or a person with multiple piercings would quickly stand out as not belonging on campus, he said.

But also, he said, it's about learning how to comply with rules, just as students will be expected to do once they leave school.

"You can say we force them to go to school, we shouldn't force them to cut their hair. But what are you going to do when your job forces you to do something? My question is, we're just going to allow kids to make whatever choice they want, whenever they want, and just hope that whenever they graduate ... they're going to start complying then? I think that's a silly argument."

Gex said he gives students a chance to comply. "We try to use common sense," he said. But if they refuse, then it's not about the dress code, he said. "It's about insubordination."

Two students recently came to Gex with over 1,000 signatures opposing the district's prohibition on "extreme" hair colors. He told them he was proud of their work and showed them how to get on the school board's calendar to present their request to district officials.

"There's nothing wrong with that. You have to teach kids how to stand up for themselves," he said. "But you need to comply with the policy that's set forth first, and then go through the changes."

Back at Mont Belvieu, the whirlwind that surrounded De'Andre has died down. Earlier this year, he attended the Oscars, as a guest of a team that developed an award-winning animated short film called "Hair Love" that celebrated African American hairstyles. He also appeared on "The Ellen Show," where host Ellen DeGeneres implored the district to relax its policy, right before presenting Arnold a $20,000 scholarship check.

But De'Andre is now attending school at neighboring Goose Creek ISD, as is his cousin Kaden Bradford, a sophomore whose hairstyle also ran afoul of Barbers Hill's dress code. Goose Creek's dress code requires only that hair be "neat, clean, well-groomed, and out of the eyes."

Looking Forward

De'Andre is remarkably calm about leaving behind the district that educated not only him but many of his family members. His mother's late uncle, M.Q. Bradford, served on the district's school board from 1970 to 1984.

"We're just looking at the positive. As long as I'm getting my diploma, I don't just want to focus on the negative," he said.

But the events have prompted him to become more politically aware. "This has kind of opened my eyes. I see now I have to stand up even more for everybody's cause. I wouldn't want anybody to have to go through this alone. I'm focused on trying to be there for others."

But mostly, he's said, he's thinking about graduation and his dream of becoming a veterinarian. Recently, he had to say goodbye to two beloved dogs that died; one was older, the other relatively young. But the vet told him nothing could be done to cure the dogs' ailments.

De'Andre's goal, he said, is to be able to do something.

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Why Do Schools Hang On to Discriminatory Dress Codes?

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School dress codes are clashing with students, parents, and researchers who see the rules and their enforcement as rife with racism and sexism. Some school leaders say the codes are important for safety and teaching kids to comply.

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Before this curation assignment, I think the lenses that informed my opinion on this issue are the lenses in which I was taught to look through during my time in grade school and the influence of the adults around me. Personally, I have never had a super strong opinion towards dress code policies. I am someone who has never experienced being dress coded by an adult at school, and also have never witnessed a friend being dress coded. But, I was aware of the rules and had a general idea of what was acceptable and unacceptable in terms of appropriate wardrobe in school. There were a few teachers that I remember reminding girls in school about the "finger tip rule", or the rule that your shorts/skirts have to be past your fingertips. I also have memories of a conversation about how our shoulders shouldn't be exposed because it can be a distraction to others. I guess from then on I learned through my peers and for myself that dress codes generally targeted female students more than they did male students. I do think my perspective of this issue is limited because I have never experienced being dress coded as a female student. You can read a number of stories and articles about dress coding, but you can only understand them and relate to them to such an extent. But, I can confidently say that I have learned a lot more information regarding dress coding from this assignment. I was more close minded to the opinion that girls get dress coded for ridiculous reasons and never boys. But, I learned the deeper ways in which dress coding can affect students and the ways in which it discriminates and singles out students as well.