Who has constructed this climate that tells you the way you look is presenting as older than other girls? Where is your childhood? Can we explore and celebrate that, instead of moving so quickly to present you as a miniature adult? It's that kind of internalized age compression - that takes place in the minds of our girls, and adults - that renders Black girls uniquely vulnerable to contact with the criminal legal system.

Social justice scholar Monique Morris explores the ways implicit biases in our society - around class, sex and race - combine to push Black girls out of schools and towards the criminal legal system, and explains why educational institutions must re-examine their misunderstandings around the thoughts and actions of Black girls, and their reliance on an exclusionary discipline framework that amplifies the mistreatment of an already vulnerable group of children.

Monique is author of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools from The New Press.