The school to prison pipeline, explained - Vox

The school to prison pipeline, explained - Vox:



The school to prison pipeline, explained

Updated by Libby Nelson and Dara Lind on February 24, 2015, 12:40 p.m. ET

A police officer handcuffs a small child during a demonstration. Lyn Alweis/Denver Post via Getty

 Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the number of Americans in juvenile detention has dropped. One report shows the juvenile incarceration rate dropped 41 percent between 1995 and 2010.

But school discipline policies are moving in the opposite direction: out-of-school suspensions have increased about 10 percent since 2000. They have more than doubled since the 1970s. Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students,according to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, and research in Texas found students who have been suspended are more likely to be held back a grade and drop out of school entirely. Those facts has led to concern among some people, including the Obama administration, that schools are suspending students too much and need to find other ways to discipline them.

The reason the difference between juvenile detention and school discipline is so surprising — and the reason school discipline is seen as a growing concern — is that the two are connected, leading civil-rights advocates to talk about a "school-to-prison pipeline." Especially for older students, trouble at school can lead to their first contact with the criminal justice system. And in many cases, schools themselves are the ones pushing students into the juvenile justice system — often by having students arrested at school.

Here's how the current state of school discipline developed and why some districts and federal officials are working to change the status quo.

1) Concerns about crime led schools to adopt 'zero tolerance' policies

A Chicago police officer escorts a child to school. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)

In the 1970s, keeping students out of school as a punishment was relatively rare: fewer than 4 percent of students were suspended in 1973, according to an analysis of Education Department data by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But growing concern about crime and violence in schools led states and districts to adopt policies that required students to be suspended.

The Gun-Free Schools Act, passed in 1994, mandated a yearlong out-of-school suspension for any student caught bringing a weapon to school. And as states began adopting these zero-tolerance policies, the number of suspensions and expulsions increased. The suspension rate for all students has nearly doubled since the 1970s, and has increased even more for black and Hispanic students.

Zero-tolerance policies have been widely criticized when schools have interpreted "weapon" very broadly, expelling students for making guns with their fingers or chewing a Pop-Tart into a gun shape or bringing a camping fork for Cub Scouts to class.

But they're not the only reason schools suspended students more frequently. At the same time as zero-tolerance policies for violence were growing, school districts adopted their own version The school to prison pipeline, explained - Vox: