Just as scholars contribute to discourse surrounding the School-to-Prison Pipeline, so do educational practitioners. Again, while there is an abundance of articles written from the perspective of practitioners, here I will be focusing on just two: Hands Up, Don’t Test: Police Brutality and the Repurposing of Education ³⁴ and This is a test: Educating to End the School-to-Grave Pipeline in Ferguson and Beyond.³⁵

In “Hands Up, Don’t Test,” Jesse Hagopian details the negative impact that policies like zero tolerance and high stakes testing have had on students of color. The results of these implementation renders kids disempowered and prevents them from attaining the tools needed in order to tackle the huge problems of society – mass incarceration being one of them. These racist policies are instead funneling students of color into prison cells, further upholding white supremacy. This directly relates to the other article written by a practitioner named Jackie Gerstein: “If education is not dedicated to empowering our youth to solve the problems they face in their communities, in our nation, and in our world, then it isn’t really an education at all—it is an indoctrination designed to reproduce oppression. As Richard Shaull explains in the forward to Paulo Freire’s masterwork, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ‘Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.'”³⁵ Gerstein ties the effects of the School-to-Prison Pipeline with murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. This points to the most fatal outcomes of criminalizing our youth of color – death. Overwhelmingly, both articles voice the fact that in order for students of color to make any sort of progress or change in their society, they must be given the education and books to do so, instead of being met with shackles. They emphasize the role that education should be playing in our current day: “‘Career and college ready’ are the new buzzwords in the education reform world and every teacher certainly hopes their students achieve these personal successes. Yet to limit education to only these puny goals is to extinguish the true power of education. Education must also be in service of transforming our very troubled society.” ³⁵  Educators are aware of the problems that exist in over-disciplining youth of color and strive to make changes both within their classrooms and within the educators’ community.