Education Commons^™

Feeding The School-To-Prison Pipeline: The Convergence Of Neoliberalism, Conservativism, And Penal Populism, Richard Mora, Mary Christianakis

Journal of Educational Controversy

The increase in prisons and the policing of schools are both rooted in the convergence of neoliberalism, conservatism, and penal populism. This convergence criminalizes minority youth and reinforces the school-to-prison pipeline. Politicians and public servants criminalize minority youth by espousing tough-on-crime rhetoric for political gain. Law enforcement and school officials compound the matter by implementing zero-tolerance policies in the name of public safety. The result is that minority youth who have been suspended, expelled, or adjudicated in the juvenile justice system will likely be fed into the school-to-prison-pipeline and be further excluded from our neoliberal society.

Schools, Prisons And Aboriginal Youth: Making Connections, Amanda Gebhard

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article examines the school-to-prison nexus for Aboriginal youth in Canada. The author calls on educators to examine their complicity in the overrepresentation of Aboriginals in Canada’s penal system, and suggests four overlapping areas that point to this need: the racist and colonial histories of law and education for Aboriginals; the disciplinary culture of schools; the lack of diversity in the Canadian teaching force, understood as a larger problem of systemic Whiteness; and the overuse of paradigms of cultural differences to explain Aboriginal under-education.

The Play Of Punishment In The “Culture Of Cruelty”, Christopher G. Robbins

Journal of Educational Controversy

A marquis product in a high-end, U.S.-based electronics store’s holiday catalog has as its description:

Anyone can give a video game. Yours can fly. Give them the power of military-grade flight technology that creates an augmented reality gaming environment complete with virtual air-to-air missiles, interactive targeting systems and fiery explosions. Now, how cool is that? (Brookstone, 2011a, p. 3)

The advertisement shows the Parrot Ar.Drone, what looks very much like a concept model of a drone bomber and a clean-cut young white man controlling it via his iPad while two young women adoringly rest their heads on his shoulders and …

Pressure Points At The Intersection Of The Education And Justice Systems: Strategies To Improve Student Success And Reduce Juvenile Court Contacts, Hillary A. Behrman, Anne A. Lee, Jean M. Nist

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article explores an under examined facet of the school to prison pipeline by focusing a magnifying glass on the real life stories of youth in Washington State who have become stuck in a cycle of school failure and escalating involvement in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. These concrete case studies allow us to explore the ways that the public education and juvenile justice systems have become entangled and how this entanglement creates significant barriers for youth in their attempts to successfully pursue meaningful educational goals, including high school graduation. The article also explores how this entanglement makes it …

A Dream Deported: What Undocumented American Youth Need Their Schools To Understand, Maria Timmons Flores

Journal of Educational Controversy

The current heated debate over immigration reform in the United States frequently overlooks the plight of the children of undocumented immigrants. According to many estimates, there are nearly 12,000,000 unauthorized immigrants in the United States (Gonzales, 2009), and of these, 1.8 million are children (Gonzales, 2007). As dramatic as these numbers are, they account for only a fraction of those affected by the negative climate surrounding immigration and increased deportations. Indeed, half of the 10.2 million undocumented adult immigrants living in the US have children, and 73% of children born to undocumented immigrants are US citizens by birth. An estimated …

The School-To-Prison Pipeline: A Civil Rights And A Civil Liberty Issue, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

The School-to-Prison Pipeline stands as a direct contradiction to the vision of the public school as an institution for promoting and sustaining a democratic republic. Each year thousands of students are funneled through the public schools into the juvenile justice system as a result of school policies and practices that increasingly criminalize students rather than educate them. Most are students of color, students with disabilities, and students from impoverished neighborhoods. How and why this is happening is the focus of this issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.

Justice, Education And Democracy—How They Fit Together, And Are Necessary To Each Other, Daniel Larner

Journal of Educational Controversy

The school-prison-pipeline is a most ironic development. Right where it is most important to help children move toward productive citizenship, toward cooperation and support of others, toward a thirst for knowledge of the issues and questions before us every day, some students find themselves completely alienated from the institution that is charged with educating them, singled out for surveillance and discipline, confronted with police officers for in-school infractions, and caught in the juvenile justice system, which, as a different kind of school, prepares them for a life of crime and for the adult criminal system.

Mass Incarceration, The School-To-Prison Pipeline, And The Struggle Over “Secure Communities” In Illinois, Robert Scott, Miguel Saucedo

Journal of Educational Controversy

This paper describes educational policies and disciplinary practices that constitute a school-to-prison pipeline, specifically in Illinois and Chicago Public Schools. During the 1980s, the so-called war on drugs and harsh sentencing laws ushered the United States into an era of mass incarceration. In the 1990s, zero-tolerance policies were implemented and schools began to be treated as secure facilities, while simultaneously Illinois constructed a dozen new prisons. Since the early 2000s, policy trends began to shift. Some criminal statutes were overturned, several juvenile prisons were closed, and youthful offenders were increasingly re-directed toward rehabilitation services for non-violent offenses. Simultaneously, new pathways …

Reframing The Problem: New Institutionalism And Exclusionary Discipline In Schools, Rebecca W. Cohen

Journal of Educational Controversy

Exclusionary discipline refers to any disciplinary action that removes a student from the typical classroom setting (i.e., in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, expulsion). Such practices have long been embedded within the culture of public school discipline in the United States as a means to maintain safety and order in schools. While decades of research highlight an association between exclusionary practices and negative student outcomes, there is little evidence to suggest that exclusionary discipline either meaningfully addresses student misbehavior or improves school safety. In this paper, I use new-institutionalism’s concepts of rationalized myths (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) and institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & …

The Knowledge Of Good And Evil: Black Students’ Church-Based Funds Of Knowledge Concerning School Discipline, Ashley Woodson

Journal of Educational Controversy

Studies of school discipline in the United States almost universally report that children of color are disproportionately subject to disciplinary action, specifically disciplinary action that removes or excludes students from the learning environment. Considerable focus has been afforded to the effect of this phenomenon on the educational outcomes of Black children, who routinely experience discipline in rates higher than their representation in the school population. The disproportionate discipline of Black students has been called the discipline gap (Gregory & Mosley, 2004; Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Monroe, 2005).

The Intergroup Dynamics Of A Metaphor: The School-To-Prison Pipeline, John G. Richardson, Douglas Judge

Journal of Educational Controversy

Among the several terms and phrases that populate the educational literature, both lay and professional, the phrase school-to-prison pipeline is without doubt the dominant, with few challengers in sight. Much like at-risk, or eight hour retarded child, linking specific school policies to subsequent incarceration captures the disturbing and seemingly entrenched statistics on racial inequity in schooling, doing so in a crisp imagery of a pipeline. With such a physical imagery, the phrase implies, or advances a causal connection between school practices and racial disparity of the harshest kind. It is no longer enough that minority and low-income …

Paving A Path To Best Practices In Washington State: How Changing School Discipline Policies Can Curb Disproportionality And Close The Achievement Gap, Heather Cope, Chris Korsmo, Maggie Wilkens

Journal of Educational Controversy

Washington State is one of a handful of states in the nation with a growing achievement gap between students of color and White students. These gaps are apparent when measured by differences in graduation rates and assessment proficiency rates. In 2011, White students in Washington graduated from high school at a rate of roughly 15 percentage points higher than that of African-American, Latino, and Pacific Islander students, and nearly 25 percentage points higher than that of Native American students (Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction [OSPI], 2012). That same year, low-income third graders in Washington passed the state reading …

Suspensions And Expulsions Contribute To School Dropouts, Adie Simmons

Journal of Educational Controversy

The Office of the Education Ombudsman (OEO), a state agency charged with resolving complaints from parents and students about public schools, frequently intervenes in discipline-related cases, and student suspension and expulsions make for the second most frequent types of complaints OEO handles. The number of suspensions and expulsion cases brought to OEO’s attention grew by 13% in the 2011-2012 school year, as compared to the previous school year. For the most part, OEO’s interventions worked to reduce the length of the suspension for students or helped expelled students re-enter the system by enrolling in another school district or alternative program. …

Police In The Hallways: Discipline In An Urban High School By Kathleen Nolan, P. L. Thomas

Journal of Educational Controversy

Michel Foucault's (1975) examination of the power of surveillance includes a disturbing question:

The practice of placing individuals under “observation” is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penalty? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Over the four decades since this observation, U.S. public education has experienced …

Girl Time: A Space To Embody A Different Narrative A Review Of Maisha T. Winn’S Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, And The School-To-Prison Pipeline, Allison Daniel Anders

Journal of Educational Controversy

With a passionate commitment to her participants’ stories, Maisha T. Winn provides an opportunity for her readers to engage with the everyday experiences of student artists and their teachers whom she came to know in Girl Time, a theater program designed for girls incarcerated in juvenile detention centers and girls who had been formerly incarcerated. Based on interviews with the teaching artists, student artists, and participant observation, this three-year, multi-sited ethnographic work offers representational breadth and a chance to engage with the discourses of a small group of women committed to social justice and the girls they serve. Winn takes …

Connecting The Hidden Dots: An Essay Book Review Of Erica Meiners’ Right To Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, And The Making Of Public Enemies, Amanda Gebhard

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article is an essay book review of Meiner’s Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons and the Making of Public Enemies (2007). While educators are usually not brought to reflect upon penal institutions, Meiners builds a compelling case for why this should be otherwise. Meiners’ objective is to push educators to think about the ways in which the practices, ideologies, and processes in schools play a role in supporting the Prison Industrial Complex. Meiners accomplishes this by outlining historical and current realities of schools, which have functioned to normalize an expectation of incarceration for select youth. Meiners’ ability to explore …

No Single Source, No Simple Solution: Why We Should Broaden Our Perspective Of The School-To-Prison-Pipeline And Look To The Court In Redirecting Youth From It, Bobbe J. Bridge, Leila E. Curtis, Nicholas Oakley

Journal of Educational Controversy

Common descriptions of the School-to-Prison Pipeline (STPP), a system of policies that push students out of school and into the criminal justice system, identify harsh and unequally applied school discipline practices as the source of the pipeline. In this framework, the court is viewed as the institution solely responsible for the end of the STPP--prison, rather than as a positive influence for youth at-risk of entering the STPP. This viewpoint also fails to take into account additional contributing factors to a youth’s entrance or progression through the STPP. One such contributing factor to the STPP is excessive school absenteeism or …

About The Authors

Journal of Educational Controversy

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