The School-to-Prison Pipeline is the New Jim Crow
Most American schools are closed today in observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. But despite King's tireless efforts to eradicate Jim Crow, Ohio State University law professor and longtime civil rights activist Michelle Alexander says that systematic racial discrimination against black students is still far too common in our nation's schools. Instead of a cradle-to-college path, in her new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander calls out the prevalence of the "school-to-prison pipeline".
In an interview with Rethinking Schools, Alexander says that school discipline policies were directly copied from the get-tough rhetoric of the war on drugs. One of the earliest examples of "zero tolerance language in school discipline manuals was a cut-and-paste job from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration manual." Alexander says schools quickly "began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an