The social and economic implications of the quality education that children in the United States of America receive while not absolute are critical in determining their future trajectories. The institution that children come into contact with the most in their prepubescent, formative years outside of their communities are schools. From both an operational and architectural standpoint, public schools function as an important organization in socializing and routinizing the behaviors of the youngest segments of the population. Pioneering educators such as Stanley Hall called for the creation of pedocentric schools where the institution’s paramount mission was to serve the social and psychological needs of children. In fact, Hall notably characterized pre-adolescent children as “savages” and therefore rationalized that reasoning with them was a futile effort. Rather, he proposed that the panacea for society’s degenerates- poor and urban communities -was a good dose of authoritarian discipline. Social and education reformers of his ilk in the early 20th century believed that public schools were in many cases, the last and only life line to save children from their predestined fate of failure.

As Pedro Antonio Noguera explains in his book Preventing Violence in Schools Through The Production of Docile Bodies, “It was to the school that progressives turned as the institution that would at least complement familial education and in many instances correct it and compensate for its shortcomings. The school would rear the children of ordinary families, it would provide refuge for the children of exploitative families, and it would acculturate the children of immigrant families…the school would deliver whatever services children needed to develop into health, happy and well-instructed citizens – it would provide meals for the poorly fed, medical treatment for the unhealthy, and guidance for the emotionally disturbed…Though progressives asserted the primacy of familial education, they advanced the pre-eminence of schooling”. Ultimately, the school operated as a repressive space that used mechanisms to create and embed a racialized social order in the psyche of America’s children. The repressive technologies used in these spaces provoked behaviors that in turn were criminalized at the outset of the school yard-to-prison yard pipeline.

Read the rest HERE.

From the Washington Post:

Nearly two decades after a zero-tolerance culture took hold in American schools, a growing number of educators and elected leaders are scaling back discipline policies that led to lengthy suspensions and ousters for such mistakes as carrying toy guns or Advil.

This rethinking has come in North Carolina and Denver, in Baltimore and Los Angeles — part of a phenomenon driven by high suspension rates, community pressure, legal action and research findings. In the Washington region, Fairfax County is considering policy changes after a wave of community concern; school leaders in the District and Prince George’s, Arlington and Montgomery counties have pursued new ideas, too.

The shift is a quiet counterpoint to a long string of high-profile cases about severe punishments for childhood misjudgments. In recent months, a high school lacrosse player was suspended in Easton, Md., and led away in handcuffs for having a pocketknife in his gear bag that he said was for fixing lacrosse sticks. Earlier, a teenager in the Virginia community of Spotsylvania was expelled for blowing plastic pellets through a tube at classmates.

Now, in many areas, efforts are underway to find a more calibrated approach to school discipline. Educators are increasingly focused on the fallout of suspensions, which are linked to lower academic achievement and students dropping out.

Read the entire article here

The following article from Youth Today is stunning:

More Texas students have been suspended or expelled than have not, according to a forthcoming study of state trends on school discipline. And the margin isn’t that close.

Details of the study will not be public until July 19, but Council of State Governments Justice Center Director Michael Thompson said at a federal juvenile justice meeting yesterday that nearly six out of 10 Texas students had received an in-school or out-of-school suspension, were expelled, or were incarcerated at some point by their 12th grade year.

It is the first look at an entire state’s practices in disciplining students. It tracks 928,940 students who entered seventh grade between 2000 and 2003, using records from Texas school districts and the agencies that oversee juvenile probation and confinement.

Thompson discussed the findings at the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention meeting, which was attended by Attorney General Eric Holder. The study found that:

* 58 percent of the students had received a suspension or worse by 12th grade.

* The vast majority (about 90 percent) of those actions were taken at the discretion of school administrators. The notion that state law or federal law drives suspensions and expulsions “is simply not the case,” Thompson said.

* Violent offenses accounted for about 10 percent of the disciplinary actions.

Read the rest of the article here.

This new zine about the school-to-prison pipeline was illustrated and written by teaching artist Rachel Marie-Crane Williams. This is part of a larger collaborative initiative called the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Comic Arts Zine Project. This initiative brought together the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Project NIA, and the Chicago Freedom School to develop a series of four zines, created by the teaching artists, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams and Elgin-Bokari T. Smith; and youth at the Chicago Freedom School and the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC).

The zines feature the voices of youth affected by the juvenile justice system: the History of the Juvenile Court in IL, Girls in the System, Youth Stories (of the Incarcerated), and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. This zine series was developed in connection with “Unfinished Business–Juvenile Justice,” the community-curated exhibit at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, on view through August 2011.

You can download the School-to-Prison Pipeline Comic Zine here as a PDF document.

This publication is tailored for middle-school aged students but can be read by high school and college-aged youth as well.

All other zines in the series can be downloaded from the Juvenile Injustice site.

From New America Media:

Former NAM managing editor Annette Fuentes is the author of a new book, Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes the Jail House, published by Verso. The book explores the reasons zero-tolerance policies have grown and investigates the impact those policies are having on students. She was interviewed by NAM associate editor Jacob Simas.

JS: We’ve witnessed a trend over the last 20 years or so, of schools embracing security and punishment as a means to control student behavior. Would it be safe to assume, then, that our schools are not as safe as they used to be?

AF: It would be very inaccurate [to say that]. Schools today are among the safest places for children to be, and that includes their homes and their neighborhoods. We know, the experts know, that the level of violence in our public schools is among the lowest level it’s been in in about 20 years. School violence peaked in the early ‘90s. Data from the National Center on School Violence… show clearly that incidents of violence in schools have been going down. And this parallels crime in general, in the wider society. So schools are in almost all cases the safest places for kids to be. That doesn’t mean that there are not incidents of school violence, but they have been so blown out of proportion that most people walk around thinking that another Columbine is just around the corner.

JS: So why the hysteria around violence? Now, you mentioned Columbine, but certainly the hysteria is due to more than just one isolated incident.

AF: Columbine happened in 1999, but in fact there had been a handful — maybe four or five – of very high-profile school shootings in the years preceding Columbine. There was one in Paducah, Kentucky; a student who shot classmates at a prayer group up in Springfield, Orgeon; a young man who shot and killed his parents and then went to school with his gun and shot at folks. There were several that were very high profile. So people already were kind of primed for school violence.

Now, remember, these shootings were very high profile; they claimed multiple victims. But compared to how many kids are killed every day in acts of violence in their own homes, in their own neighborhoods, it just doesn’t even compare. But these were crimes that had shocked people, and that made it appear that schools were violent. And it fit with the narrative of violent children, violent schools that had been building since the 1980s.

You know, we’ve been a society afraid of crime since, really, the Reagan administration and perhaps before. But the war on drugs led to the war on kids, and the increasing prison-like conditions for juveniles in general. So we started cracking down on kids in schools and it’s just led to a whole raft of policies and practices that have made schools more and more like prisons.

My book talks about everything, from the increased presence of police, the increased use of drug-sniffing dogs, of drug testing in schools — and I’m not even talking urban schools, I’m talking about schools in suburban New Jersey or suburban Oregon — where parents are afraid that their kids are doing drugs and are out of control. We are clamping down on kids with other high tech security and surveillance equipment at a time of scarce school resources. School districts are spending money on the surveillance hardware of the prison state.

JS: Many have criticized zero tolerance policies for creating a “school-to-prison pipeline.” Does that argument have any teeth, and if so, could you paint us a picture of how such a scenario might play out?

AF: It’s really a very, very ugly scenario. But we know, and the education and legal researchers who have been looking at this issue for two, maybe three decades have found, that zero tolerance policies that put kids at risk of suspension, and then lead to kids dropping out, those (in turn) put them at risk of falling into the prison pipeline.

So we know that high percentages of black and Latino kids have high rates of drop out from schools, and we know that a high percentage of the prison population is comprised of black and Latino men in particular, although young women are increasingly in that scenario. But researchers like Russell Skiba — who was one of the first to do research on suspensions and look at the racial component of it — they’ve shown how increasing the number of suspensions increases the risks of the most vulnerable students to being pushed out of school.

Now, the other part of this equation is that schools and teachers are under incredible pressure, especially with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) — which was former President George W. Bush’s signature education bill. What NCLB did was to put incredible pressure to achieve unrealistic levels of achievement in English and math from students who were starting at a very low level, and were expected each year to increase their English and math skills really unrealistically.

Teachers and schools were not given the resources to make these changes to increase the achievement levels, and so for a lot of teachers — and I heard this time and again during the course of my two years of reporting — teachers were under pressure to get the lowest-achieving students out of their classrooms. You get rid of the lower achievers, and you automatically have a class whose collective achievement level is raised. So those kids who are the most challenged, the lowest achievers, are those who need the most resources. But in resource-starved classrooms, they’re not getting it. In some cases, sadly, it’s easier to just suspend them because they’re trouble and because the teacher doesn’t have the wherewithal to deal with that student one-on-one. And unfortunately, in a time of budget cuts all over the country, the fear is that this is just being worsened because suspension becomes a quick fix for kids who are the most challenging to deal with.

Read the rest here.