The School-to-Prison Pipeline Can Be Stopped
Harsh school policies and practices and an increased role of law enforcement in schools have combined to create a “schoolhouse-to-prison pipeline,” particularly our Black young. Huge numbers of children and youth, are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. | Screen Shot The School to Prison Pipeline by Advancement Project
By Dana Goldstein | Originally Published at AlterNet. April 7, 2014
Destiny was in eighth grade when, in the middle of an altercation with another student, she grabbed a teacher’s jacket and threw it out of a classroom window.
She was enrolled at the Lyons Community School in Brooklyn, N.Y., where almost every kid is black or Latino and living in poverty. Only five percent are meeting standards in math and reading.
New federal data shows that across the United States, schools with demographics like these tend to respond to bad behavior with aggressive force. Principals put students as young as four years old into isolation rooms or suspension, kicking them off campus for days or even weeks at a time. School-based police officers — in New York City there are more of them than there are school psychologists or social workers — sometimes respond to offenses as trivial as talking back to a teacher with physical restraints or even arrest.
But Destiny was not isolated, suspended or arrested. She wasn’t even sent to detention. Instead, wearing gold hoop earrings and a t-shirt with a big pink heart, she appeared, a little jittery, before a “justice panel” of four teenage peers. They listened to Destiny’s side of the story (she didn’t know the jacket belonged to the teacher, she said) and determined her punishment: a face-to-face apology to the teacher, two days of empathyeducates – The School-to-Prison Pipeline Can Be Stopped:
