Urban education is a complex topic and can be defined differently depending upon who you are talking to. The most important thing I learned through this research and class overall is to be mindful of the non-academic side of this research. By that, I mean that I learned to keep in mind the important fact that what we read about is experienced by individuals with strong voices everyday.

Looking into the topic of the school-to-prison pipeline began when I wrote my research paper a few months ago on the topic. In doing so, my approach was inevitably academic. I read articles and abstracts including statistics and outtakes from a diverse set of researchers. It gave me hope that the topic was being widely discussed and funded in recent years.

Looking again into the topic through the lens of grassroots organizing, however, gave meaning to the subject matter. Learning about the ten groups I researched became learning about the individuals running those groups and the communities partaking in the groups’ work.

Over and over again in this class, I have thought to myself that the solution to most problems in education is focusing on the individual. This is not a implementable or realistic solution. The grassroots organizations and practitioner-oriented articles offered ideas to support students and families as well as to make changes in policy.

Thinking about the school-to-prison pipeline in a more accessible way makes the problems feel more tangible and important. Not only does the concept become defined in regards to the prison-industrial complex, a complicated system of power, but also it becomes defined in terms of how schools function individually. This relationship between large-scale and small-scale conversations about the idea is an important connection to draw between academia and practitioners of education and/or education policy.

8.

The school-to-prison pipeline draws upon many issues in our country including systemic racism, thoughtless policy, various systems of power, cycles of poverty, inequity in opportunity, and many more potent issues in the United States. Arguably, education is the most important field from which these issues can be approached because it is the process of development of future generations.

If our country continues to develop youth in a way that is biased and destructive to certain groups of people, future generations will continue to exhibit segregation in various ways but that segregation will become more concrete. This is especially important as we think about projected demographics of future generations given immigration patterns.

Of course, this topic has become inevitably tied to current events and conversations that President Donald Trump has begun. These conversations in many ways make me think that we are not progressing but regressing. Trump’s understanding of what it means to be American and what equity means are so vastly different than my own.

The issues of urban education as they relate to race and socioeconomic status are pressing issues that cannot be ignored. These issues should not be left to be discussed only by communities negatively impacted but instead should be a national conversation about policy and practice. Funding for education and education research needs to be restructured in a way that is thoughtful about long-term impacts — the relationship between academia and practice must be recognized and used as a way to think more conscientiously about these issues.

One of the most important lessons from the grassroots groups specifically was the importance of mobilizing communities, not just individuals, around this topic. Rhetoric around biases like this in education as they connect to things deemed issues only in the future, like mass incarceration, can be reformed such that it becomes a personal issue for various age groups and socioeconomic groups that live in certain communities. The segregation, racially and socioeconomically, of neighborhoods and schools provides a challenge here.

Looking to your direct community is important, but it is also important to be mindful that the communities you can be an ally to or activist in aren’t necessarily the direct communities you live in. Making choices about your own kids and own areas to live impact these conversations. Of course, this is a very complicated issue, but staying informed and supporting grassroots organizations like this in any way you are able to makes a real difference.

Learning about urban education and concluding with this project has prompted me to look into organizations like these in the community where I am from, and I am certain that I will continue to do this as I move to my own community next year. Issues of bias in education are the root of issues of bias at large in our society, and they must be addressed directly and aggressively.

Citations

1. ACLU. School-to-prison pipeline. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/issues/juvenile-justice/school-prison-pipeline
2.  Amurao, Carla. Fact Sheet: How Bad is the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/tsr/education-under-arrest/school-to-prison-pipeline-fact-sheet/
3. Bryan, Nathaniel. “White Teachers’ Role in Sustaining the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Recommendations for Teacher Education.” The Urban Review, 2017. doi:10.1007/s11256-017-0403-3.
4. Cramer, Elizabeth D. et al. (2015). From Classmates to Inmates: An Integrated Approach to Break the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
5. McGrew, Ken. (2016, June). The Dangers of Pipeline Thinking: How the School-to-Prison Pipeline Metaphor Squeezes out Complexity.
6. Nelson, Libby et al. (2015). The school to prison pipeline, explained.
7. Owens, Emily G. “Testing the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 36, no. 1 (2016): 11-37. doi:10.1002/pam.21954.
8. Postil, Debra. (2016, July). Let’s Rewrite the School-to-Prison Pipeline [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9tLSklCcgo
9. Schept, Judah et al. (2015). Building, Staffing, and Insulating: An architecture of Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
10. Stovall, David. Mayoral Control: Reform, Whiteness, and Critical Race Analysis of Neoliberal Educational Policy. New York, NY. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 2015.
11.  Wood, Douglas. (2014, June). Prison to school pipeline: education as transofrmation [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yptwyUDgb6w

Header image:

https :// www . aclu . org/feature/school-prison-pipeline

Background image: 

http :// www . courtneyluv . com/my-weekly-rant-fix-the-educational-systems/schools-not-jails/

*Note: Grassroots websites are directly linked from the “Grassroots Organizing” page.

A special thanks to and acknowledgement of Professor Doris Santoro’s Urban Education, Spring 2017 at Bowdoin College.