The Victims of the School-To-Prison Pipeline


            
            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 think about it. On top of this, “18 percent of the nation's public school students are black but an estimated 40 percent of all students that are expelled from U.S. schools are black” (Lynch, 2016). After looking at these numbers, it is very clear that something is wrong with the way things are currently being done. Decaille (2017) writes of different incidents in which young black girls had to leave their school due to their hair styles not following the school dress code. I could be wrong, but I do not really see how a hair style affects a student’s learning or says anything about their behavior in anyway. Some say that this could be the result of a cultural disconnect and others feel that it is “racially motivated” (Decaille, 2017).
            In addition to this, Decaille (2017) also tells of a sixteen year old student from South Carolina who was ripped out of her desk by a police officer for not listening to her teacher. Her friend caught this on tape and it has become viral on the internet (Decaille, 2017). Many parents became outrage after this event asking if the police officer “would have treated a white female student the same way” (Decaillle, 2017). The issue with all of these cases is, no matter what the girl did, even if it was as insignificant as wearing her hair in braids, the result was a young black girl being criminalized. Her teachers and anyone else that she might have interacted with would just assume she is a bad child because she was expelled from school or what have you. These labels are extremely hard to get rid of once they are placed on a child and can often cause the child to head down the troubled path that is expected of them.
Even more shocking than the race issue is the age that this issue can start. Some students are track to the school-to-prison pipeline as early as kindergarten. It is usually thought that all students start on an even playing field in kindergarten but this not true. Lynch (2016) states that these students are “already products of their limited life experiences but their public school classrooms are intended to be equalizers”. Some children have already attended preschool or daycare before kindergarten and some have parents who have been singing the alphabet and reading to them for two years. Other children have parents who spend most of their time working and do not have as much time to devote to preparing or over preparing their kids for school. Lynch (2016) also discusses how “the behavior of children is impacted by their life experiences and that behavior does impact the way a classroom functions”. Kindergarten is just the first time that students are placed in a school setting in which they are judged for behaviors they did not know were “appropriate”. This eventually just becomes a spiral where the children who have “bad” reputations are literally preceded by their reputations and have little to know chance to change them. This basically means that the way that you acted in kindergarten can shape the way you are treated in high school and you eventually display the behaviors that are expected of you.
To conclude, black students are usually victims of the school-to-prison pipeline more often than anyone else. These can be due to many different issues such as cultural differences or just blatant racism. The school-to-prison pipeline can also start as early as kindergarten and the children are given almost no chance to disprove their reputations throughout their entire schooling. Most of these children have little to no control over how they will be treated because it based all on their race or something they did when they were five that they do not even remember.
References
Decaille, N. (2017). Biased discipline policies put black girls on the school-to-prison pipeline. Vice Impact. Retrieved from https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/j55p58/biased-discipline-policies-put-black-girls-on-the-school-to-prison-pipeline

Hackett, A. (2018). Black students are disproportionately disciplined in public schools. Pacific Standard. Retrieved from https://psmag.com/education/black-students-are-disproportionately-disciplined-in-public-schools
Lynch, M. (2016). Black boys in crisis: the school-to-prison pipeline. Education Week. Retrieved from https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/education_futures/2016/08/black_boys_in_crisis_the_school-to-prison_pipeline.html


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

School or prison?

Image
            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...
Read more

The Basics

Image
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...
Read more