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“School-to-Prison Pipeline”: A
Societal Issue Played Out In Schools
By Lynne Hamer and Willie McKether
The Truth Contributors
In 2014, it
felt as if we finally began an intense national discussion
of the color of punishment and systemic racism. These are
issues that Dr. Michelle Alexander discusses in her
award-winning book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)—a source that has
profoundly influenced and enabled the discussions we are
having as a nation.
Alexander
provides the data to show that we are not colorblind when it
comes to whom we incarcerate. A look at data on school
disciplinary actions and expulsions shows an absence of
colorblindness in those institutions as well.
On November
24 at the exact same time of the announcement of the grand
jury’s non-indictment of the policeman who shot Michael
Brown in Ferguson, here in Toledo our Community
Conversations group was focusing on factors related to the
school-to-prison pipeline.
From an anthropological perspective, we see all systems as being
interrelated. By interrelated, we mean that one system
affects all other systems. Our cultural systems of values
and beliefs affect our social systems of rewards and
punishments, and vice versa. Our legal, judicial, economic,
political and educational systems all affect and reflect
one another. If we are seeing problems in the legal and
judicial systems—as Alexander documents and Ferguson
embodies—then we can no doubt see similar problems
reflected in in our educational systems.
The
“school-to-prison pipeline” is a catchy phrase that,
generally speaking, describes an unjust system that
disproportionally sets scores of predominantly
African-American and Latino students on a route to the penal
system. Typically, cultural misunderstandings lead to
disciplinary actions; disciplinary actions lead to
suspensions; suspensions to truancy; truancy to expulsion;
expulsion to the juvenile system or dropping out; the
juvenile system or dropping out to jail; jail to prison.1
This
pipeline is a national phenomenon rooted in centuries of
systemic racism and intensified by zero-tolerance policies
beginning in the early 1990s. Although intended to prevent
drug abuse and violence in schools, the policies of the ‘90s
have been used to impose severe punishments, including
out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, on children for
minor, often non-violent infractions.
The
Children’s Defense Fund reported that Ohio statistics in
2010-11 mirrored national statistics: in Ohio, only six
percent of out-of-school suspensions involved drugs or
weapons. Sixty-four percent were for “disobedient or
disruptive behavior,” truancy, or “intimidation.”2
No doubt the
authors of this report put quotation marks on “disobedient
or disruptive behavior” and “intimidation” to emphasize the
room for interpretation: what is one person’s disruptive
behavior or intimidation can be another’s way of
communicating, so the problem of cultural differences and
miscommunications enters in. Moreover, and less discussed in
the education literature or in public conversation, the
larger cultural understanding of “what black people are
like,” and “what Latino people are like,” and “what white
people are like” is a huge force.
Thus while
cultural differences between teachers and students appear to
be key in setting students’ course on the prison pipeline3,
it is a broader lack of cultural competence and cultural
understanding, shared by all of us, which is the real
problem—just as cultural differences between police officers
and young people have been perceived as key in sending those
youth to early deaths, but the altercations occur within
systems of belief and discrimination which are the real
culprits.
It is too easy to scapegoat teachers and police officers as
lacking competence: we have to look at ourselves as a whole,
and our individual roles in maintaining or challenging
cultural systems of belief and action. The pipeline is
systemic: no one individual, set of individuals or even
institution is entirely to blame for it, but all of us must
take responsibility for understanding it and changing it.
We are all
part, product and producers of the systems involved. Over
the past decades, most of us have attended schools where the
only history learned has supported systemic racism by
failing to include non-white history, where we have not
learned to think critically about systems of oppression and
how our individual actions contribute to them, and where we
have not learned to seek out and respect knowledge and
experience of those different from ourselves.
Those of us
who work as teachers, police officers, administrators,
judges, and jury members are products of those school
systems, and because we have not all learned to recognize
and challenge systemic racism, we tend unintentionally to
reproduce it.
It is not
our fault that this is what we have learned and what still
surrounds us in the dominant culture. It is our fault,
however, if understanding that, we fail to learn, to
challenge, and to change. Clearly, it is the responsibility
of all of us, but it is arguably incumbent upon those of us
in the education profession to lead the way. After all, the
teaching profession exists to teach us, as children or
adults, to be successful, contributing members of our
society.
We must all
hold ourselves responsible to contribute to understanding
and change in our own arenas, but teachers do play crucial
roles and must be supported: Consider not only teachers’
roles in helping students overcome cultural biases against
them, but also teachers’ roles in educating those future
police chiefs, grand jury members, new teachers, and others
to understand and act against systemic racism and the
cultural biases underpinning it.
This is what
we are trying to do in “Community Conversations for School
Success” as we come together—as teachers, administrators,
faculty, students, union members, police officers, retired
teachers, parents and grandparents, politicians, activists,
and generally concerned citizens. We are holding ourselves
responsible, and perhaps helping others, to understand the
systemic racism that we live within and how it creeps into
our educational systems.
The
school-to-prison pipeline seems like a daunting system to
dismantle. But we humans made it, and we can unmake it. All
we need is a true will to join forces to share and create
the knowledge to do so.
We in Toledo
have a great opportunity to act locally on an issue of
national importance. We are big enough to have all the same
problems of a New York City or a Chicago, but small enough
to work together, listening to everyone’s voice and
validating everyone’s experience not only as legitimate,
but also as an indispensable source of insight. It is
through taking responsibility to listen to everyone’s voice
and to seek out ideas that challenge our beliefs that we
begin to get outside our own cultural and social systems and
work together for change. Please join in the conversation!
“Community
Conversations for School Success” began in fall 2014 with
the vision that “by tapping our own local knowledge we will
develop our community’s capacity for positive change.” The
group’s first goal is “to establish shared space for
dialogue as community members concerned about education,”
and its second goal is “to work as a group to establish and
work toward specific goals and objectives.” We are currently
pursuing both.
The authors
of this column are faculty at the University of Toledo and
facilitate “Community Conversations.” Lynne Hamer,Ph.D, is
professor of Educational Foundations and Leadership and
directs UT@TPS, and Willie McKether, Ph.D, is associate dean
in the College of Language, Literature and Social Science
and associate professor of Sociology/Anthropology.
Everyone is
welcome to join in the Community Conversations, which take
place alternate Mondays, 6:30-8:00 pm, at the Kent Branch.
The next conversation is January 26. Call 419-283-8288 for
more information, or email lynne.hamer@utoledo.edu to get on
the emailing list.
1
The American Civil Liberties Union defines the
school-to-prison pipeline as “the policies and practices
that push our nation’s school children, especially our most
at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile
and criminal justice systems. This pipeline reflects the
prioritization of incarceration over education.” See
“Locating the School-to-Prison Pipeline” available at
https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file966_35553.pdf
2
The Children’s Defense Fund of Ohio’s issue brief, “Zero
Tolerance and Exclusionary School Discipline Policies Harm
Students and Contribute to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline”
(November 2012) provides data specific to Ohio and Toledo,
and explains the disproportional impact of zero tolerance
on children of color and children with disabilities. It is
available at http://www.cdfohio.org/assets/pdf-files/issue-brief-zero-tolerance.pdf
3
At the beginning of the pipeline is often a
misunderstanding—between student and student or student and
teacher—that escalates. Usually the initial act does not
involve violence or danger, but rather perceived disrespect,
horsing around, or even incessant annoyance, as from
drumming a pencil on a table. Emily Chiariello’s “A
Teacher’s Guide to Rerouting the Pipeline” is a great
resource available at
http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-43-spring-2013/feature/teachers-guide-rerouting-pipeline
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