Admittedly I knew a great deal about the topic of the school-to-prison pipeline before completing this project. As the child of a formerly incarcerated parent, I always had a keen interest in the workings of the criminal justice system, particularly America’ s prison system. Through working as a youth activist with the New York Civil Liberties Union and a youth advocacy/juvenile justice intern with the Children’s Defense Fund, I was able to learn a great deal about the school-to-prison pipeline and other unfair practices that overly criminalized my age group. I saw the power in research and advocacy through these organizations. While these organizations may have started out as grassroots initiatives, they have transformed into advocacy and research powerhouses, which is definitely needed, but is no longer simply grassroots.

From this project, I learned that grassroots may not be like the NYCLU or CDF, but they are just as effective in their own way. It is the grassroots organizing that leads to the development of powerful organizations such as those. Grassroots organizing allows community members to evaluate their particular predicaments and come up with solutions. Who knows a community better than they know themselves? Who is going to have more passion and more at stake than the people directly impacted by the problems?

A popular theme that I noticed on the various websites of the grassroots organizations was their belief in the philosophical work of Paulo Freire. In his work, Freire offers a framework that explains that only the oppressed people (marginalized groups) can liberate themselves (solve their problems). He suggests this be done by the oppressed people engaging in critical thought that allows them to analyze their situation by sharing experiences and examining social and political structures. It’s amazing how many of the grassroots believe in and follow this philosophy.

Grassroots Organizing and Urban Education

The urban education system is very broken, but the grassroots provide hope for a better future. The urban education system is a web of problematic practices rooted in racism, discrimination, and segregation. The school-to-prison pipeline is just one of many. However, seeing the amount of organizing for this one issue illustrates that people are not giving up. I do not know where they are finding the energy, but each day they support each other in this exhausting struggle. At the same time they are not fighting for perfection; they are fighting for children of all backgrounds to have equal access to quality education. As marginalized people, they are able to see how great this world can be if all members of the nation were able to participate in state and country decision-making. Their communities have insightful intelligence and skills that are too valuable to give up this fight for a better urban education system.

Where do we go from here?

I recommend that grassroots organizations keep doing what they are doing. The work being done: the community engagement, youth advocacy, and campaigning, is exactly what needs to continue to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Change is slow and takes an extensive amount of labor which is the root of grassroots organizing. I noticed that no one organization has the perfect answer on exactly how to fix this issue nor do they seem to flaunt that their answer is the best answer. Instead they focus intently on how their solution works in tandem with other solutions to create an umbrella of techniques that can be used to address issues of the pipeline. This is seen in the coalition building efforts of many of the grassroots organizations I researched. Although I only listed 10 grassroots organizations, many of them worked in partner with other organizations or each other to produce power in numbers. Although the democratic processes of this country seem shaky at times, the government cannot ignore the cries of thousands and maybe one day millions.

 Also, let’s expand the issue of the school-to-prison pipeline from the lens of an urban education problem to rural communities as well. To clarify, the school-to-prison pipeline is widely explored in the context of urban education due to the high concentration of poverty and marginalized people in urban areas. Many school policies disproportionately affect these groups of people. However, it would be interesting to look at the intersection of the school-to-prison pipeline and poor rural communities. Do they have high rates of youth incarceration? Are many of their troubled youth being suspended and mislabeled instead of helped and rehabilitated? I predict a lot of room for coalition building by engaging non-urban communities affected by the school-to-prison pipeline.