Conducting this project has opened my eyes to the issue of the school-to-prison pipeline. While I had always been aware of the phenomenon, I didn’t know how disproportionately it affected disabled students, LGBTQI students, low-income students, and most disproportionately of all, students of color. The patterns I saw and trends I learned about while conducting this project paint a clear picture that our public education system is still a system of institutionalized racism. While the information synthesized en route to completing this project, something that went unmentioned was the problem of residential segregation and how it might be contributing to the school to prison pipeline. This line of inquiry motivated me to conduct an analytic study of residential segregation earlier this year.

Residential segregation in the United States has prevented civil rights legislation from positively impacting public education, thus enabling the immersion of policies—such as zero tolerance policies—that disproportionately affect students based on their racial background. In the 1950s and 1960s, a wave of civil rights legislation and litigation promised equal access and opportunity to all students within the American public schools system, regardless of a student’s color. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the separate but equal doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, was unconstitutional. The 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka held that “separate but equal” facilities were inherently unequal. Furthermore, maintaining separate facilities had a detrimental effect on the education and personal growth of African American children.[1] The case added integration to the demands of the Civil Rights Movement. However, more than sixty years later, integration in urban public schools is still not commonplace. The Civil Rights Movement was unable to overcome powerful factions who wished to perpetuate a culture of segregation within the United States. These factions used their power and influence to thwart the decisions and demands put forth by civil rights legislation. Dominated by affluent whites, these factions resisted the migration of blacks into urban areas using violence, intimidation, and legal tactics. The Supreme Court’s decisions in 1990 indicates that the Supreme Court “has moved from desegregation champion to foe” thus bringing the focus of educational reform from equity to excellence.[2] Furthermore, “in a society with deep residential segregation, a lack of explicit attention on school desegregation has unsurprisingly coincided with a rise in segregation.”[3] This rise in segregation has enabled a reincarnation of separate but equal policies as a negative feedback loop between inadequate education and poverty has become clear, “residential segregation between blacks and white builds concentrated poverty into the residential structure of the black community and guarantees that poor blacks experience a markedly less advantaged social environment than do poor whites,”[4] a critical component of this less advantaged social environment being inadequate public schools. Residential segregation, and the poverty that comes with it,[5] enables government officials to ignore the social ills and problems that plague American ghettos. Because blacks are the primary inhabitants of these ghettos, we have—as Levine warns us—created a new system of segregation, one that uses economic differences to scapegoat the reality of the underlying racism that enabled their development. Separate and unequal is the reality of American public education for blacks in 2017.

The consequence of the survival of separate but equal schools is the emergence of a bias within teachers and administrators at the schools that are clearly less well funded, have fewer resources etc. This creates a stigma of fear and perpetuates cultural misunderstandings that lead to teachers to move quickly to discipline students. Zero tolerance policies are their favorite method of this type of discipline. The result is that more students at these schools that are “less”—remember that a majority of these schools are in high poverty areas where lots of minorities live—are suspended or expelled, thus putting them directly in the school to prison pipeline.

Another topic that went unmentioned is the potential for connection between a growing system of privately run—charter—schools and an ever-growing network of private prisons. This topic is relatively new—widely accepted data on charter schools at all is still being developed. As such, the topic will not be treated in depth here—but it is an important connection to bear in mind.

One on the biggest takeaways from this project was the critical need for more minority teachers in schools. This was a topic we discussed in depth during the year in this course, however this issue really grounded that topic for me–especially in terms of what happens when there aren’t minority teachers–kids are excluded quickly and without second thought. Many of the journals and articles examined for this project re-emphasized that increasing the number of minority teachers in urban public schools would have a significant positive impact on students. These teachers would be better at connecting with the students, less likely to misinterpret cultural norms as “threatening” and would serve as role models for minority students.

Grassroots organizations play a huge a role in combatting the school to prison pipeline. However, they need to coordinate with national organizations in order to be most effective in determining policy and amending laws. The change in the Colorado law demonstrates how one law can quickly divert hundreds of students from the school-to-prison pipeline. Grassroots organizations are creating important change within communities and they shouldn’t stop such work but they should simultaneously work together at the national level.

 

 

Referenced and summarized:

Black, L. S. (2017, April 3). The 21st Century Segregation of Black America: How Residential Segregation Keeps Black America Separate and Unequal. Brunswick.

with specific references to:

[1] “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1).” Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/347us483. Accessed 30 Mar. 2017.

[2] Erica Frankenberg. “Pursuing The Promise of Brown In The Twenty-First Century.” America’s Urban Crisis and the Advent of Color-blind politics: Education, Incarceration, Segregation, and the Future of U.S. Multiracial Democracy edited by Curtis L. Ivery and Joshua A. Bassett, Rowman & Littlefield, 2011, pp. 127

[3] Ibid. P. 127

[4] Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American apartheid: segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2003. Print. P. 125

[5] Ibid. P. 123