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Putting names to the issue

So I have talked a lot about the hypotheticals of the school to prison pipeline but I have not give a lot of concrete examples so I decided to put some names to this tragic issue.  A high school student in Mississippi named Dontadrian Bruce was suspended for five months because a school administrator accused him of being a gang banger (Chile, 2014). The only proof the school had was the fact he flashed “gang signs” in a picture which was actually him flashing his football number. This is just another example of the school to prison pipeline. A student was suspended for five months just because of an accusation that had very little proof to back it up. This makes me wonder how the school thought they were helping? They were depriving a child of school all because of something that was not even proven. Punishments are not given until someone is proven guilty in the real world so why should you not give a student the same courtesy in a school. Schools are supposed to prepare child...
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School or prison?

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            In an effort to make schools safer, schools have added police officers and metal detectors which end up making students feel like criminals instead of students. Schools also conduct frequent locker and bag checks to check for drugs, weapons, and other banned and harmful items. Feinstein (2015) believes that “[w]hat was sacrificed along the way was an institutional commitment to fairness, due process in administering discipline, getting to the root of conflicts, and coming up with solutions that would likely prevent future conflicts”. These attempts at safety add to the school-to-prison pipeline and subject students to very unproductive learning environments. Dukes (2017) makes the point that schools “expect poor Black and Brown kids to sit, be quiet, and obey the rules   just like correctional officers expect from the disproportionate number of Black and Brown men and women housed as inmates in prisons”. She g...
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The Victims of the School-To-Prison Pipeline

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                         The school-to-prison pipeline has been becoming an even bigger issue as of late which has caused people to take a closer look at what is really going on. The big discussion topics concerning the school-to-prison pipeline are usually the most obvious issues with the school system. One thing that is being discussed more often now is the fact that most of the students that are facing these harsh problems are black. Even more shocking is the age that this issue can start. Some students are on track to the school-to-prison pipeline as early as kindergarten. Both of these are huge issues that are not always discussed and I feel passionate about. Hackett (2018) tells of a study that finds that black students “accounted for 15.5 percent of all public school students, but represented about 39 percent of students suspended from school”. Which is a huge issue when you stop to ...
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The Basics

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If you’re like me, you may have heard of the school-to-prison pipeline but no one ever really explained what exactly it really means. The ACLU (2018) describes it as, “a disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems”.   This is the basic explanation but there is so much more to it than that. Some of the biggest contributors in the school-to-prison pipeline are unproductive learning environments and lack of school resources, the implementation of the zero tolerance policy, and the use of police in the classroom. The school-to-prison pipeline usually begins with issues in school resources. These issues usually consist of “[o]vercrowded classrooms, a lack of qualified teachers, and insufficient funding for "extras" such as counselors, special edu­cation services, and even textbooks, lock students into second-rate educational environments” (ACLU, 2018). When students are subjected to problemat...
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