by Barbara Cervone
CHICAGO, IL—“He who opens a school door closes a prison,” Victor Hugo wrote in his 19th-century masterpiece, Les Miserables. Yet in today’s United States, students as young as six years old are being suspended, expelled, and even arrested at school for matters that once were handled by a phone call home.
And increasingly, activist youth and adults are questioning why the school doors are closing on these 21st-century “miserables” just when they most need to learn.
The “school-to-prison pipeline,” a term coined by youth advocates almost a decade ago, is still going strong, due in large part to “zero tolerance” policies. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), over 3 million students are suspended at least once each year and over 100,000 are expelled. In Chicago, out-of-school suspensions quadrupled to 93,212 between 2001 and 2007. In Pennsylvania, school-based arrests almost tripled between 1999 and 2006, to 12,918.
Now a remarkable website started by a group of young Chicago activists—all women between the ages of 12 and 22—is collecting the personal stories of such students in print, video, and audio and combining them with survey research, popular education, art, and more.
Read more here.
