You Can No Longer Ignore the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The School-to-Prison Pipeline is a national problem in which students in public schools are pushed into juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many public schools that are underfunded and have inadequate resources leave students with a poor education and disencouragement which leads to dropouts. Crowded classrooms, underqualified teachers, lack of resources and insufficient funding causes extreme disengagement from students. Another huge factor are school discipline policies, which are getting increasingly harsher, with many zero tolerance policies leaving students expelled, suspended, and ultimately pushed into the juvenile justice system. These “zero tolerance” policies are so problematic because they seem to be rooted in systemic racism, being another strategy to push young black children into criminal justice systems. Black students are six times more likely to be suspended than white students, even though misbehavior from black and white students is roughly the same. It is not even shown that suspensions help curb any misbehavior that might occur, a study even showed that students who were suspended early on in middle school continued to be suspended throughout, and that suspensions may reinforce bad behavior, rather than deter it . It’s also been widely shown that schools with higher suspension rates don’t necessarily report amazing behavior as a result, and tend to have much lower rates of academic achievement and much lower results on standardized tests, regardless of economic status. Knowing about underfunded, overpoliced schools is crucial, especially when attending a school like Science Leadership Academy, which is completely the opposite. Before I came to SLA, I went to a school called The Philadelphia School which is much like SLA in that students are offered unique assistance and care. They are both project based, which could be the future to less oppressive disciplinary schools that many students of color in the U.S. Teachers that are willing to talk out why or how a student is failing, and working out disruptions is often a much better approach and solution to helping students. This may seem normal to most students I know, but many, many public schools in the U.S. do not actually use this approach. It took some researching to find articles about schools that experiment with their school policies to become more empathetic towards students. People may say that new rules would be ridiculous, and that schools should stay just as they have always been- students that sit still, be quiet, and finish their work are the ones that graduate and do great things. But what is not widely understood is how many students never get these opportunities, and that schools in recent years have been doing even more to repress learning. “Despite other gains in race relations, the national rate of suspensions of black youth in high schools and middle schools has almost doubled since the 1970s (from 12 percent in 1973 to 23 percent in 2012), while the suspension rate for white students only increased from 6 percent to 7 percent over that period.” By this statistic, it might have been easier for a black student to finish school in the 1970s rather than today. Knowing that I am a rather privileged student, I have to take accountability and refuse to ignore what happens in many underfunded, underprivileged schools, and you do, too.