Streaming as the practice of exclusion, of extraction, confinement & racial segregation in schools:
Black children go to school in much the same way other babies do -with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. School (from what they can tell about it) is a place of learning 1/

and independence from home - it is a social space with friends & friendly teachers etc. But is also a place that’s away from home. For many non-Black Ss the wonder/promise of schooling continues to the end of their ed. career, for Black Ss, this promise is broken regularly 2/

The exclusion begins with a curriculum that rarely addresses their lives, identities, experiences, or concerns.
It continues with educators who see them in negative and essentializing ways - educators who misread their every actions and construct them as behavioural problems 3/

o be censured and removed from classes under any number of pretexts.
The removal can take the form of the small ways teachers fail to call on them to participate in the lesson, choose them to be leaders or even participants in community activities, benign neglect 4/

priority seating -the way in which teaches physically position their bodies & fail to focus on them (except to redirect behaviours. Removal also comes in the form of sending children from mainstream class for “extra support” with a plethora of “school support” staff 5/

Then there are the more punitive ways they are extracted & confined - to school hallways, to support rooms, admin offices & more formally - suspensions & expulsions. These are ways schools remove Black children & contribute to the education debt that Black people are owed 6

The systematic exclusion of Black children sends a message to other Black children about their precarity in the space. It contributes to racialization and to racial priming. It teaches Balck and non-Black children about the role/space of Black children in schools. 7/

This process continues throughout elementary and by the time children get to grade 8 & are ready to go to high school, overworked staff- pressured to clear their backlog of students referred to them, quickly and expeditiously refer a high % of Black Ss to the VOC program. 8/

Those entering mainstream high schools are disproportionately referred to applied level classes.
Even when Black children are seen as cognitively able - they are often (boys and girls) constructed as being problematic. 9/

Ability is a subjective term. Notions of ability, of knowledge, of what ought to be known and to what degree we know/should know are also subjective. Race and racism factor heavily into our subjectivities and lead to the racialized streaming of students. 10