The School-to-Prison Pipeline

[Camille]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/opinion/new-york-citys-school-to-prison-pipeline.html


School officials across the country responded to a surge in juvenile crime during the 1980s and the Columbine High School shootings a decade later by tightening disciplinary policies and increasing the number of police patrolling public schools. One unfortunate result has been the creation of a repressive environment in which young people are suspended, expelled or even arrested over minor misbehaviors — like talking back or disrupting class — that would once have been handled by the principal.

The policies have not made schools safer. However, by criminalizing routine disciplinary problems, they have damaged the lives of many children by making them more likely to drop out and entangling them, sometimes permanently, in the criminal justice system. The policies are also discriminatory: black and Hispanic children are shipped off to court more frequently than white students who commit similar infractions.

The need to chart a new course in school discipline is underscored in a report scheduled to be released on Thursday by the New York City School-Justice Partnership Task Force, a working group led by Judith Kaye, the former chief judge of the State of New York, and composed of people from the fields of law enforcement, education, philanthropy, civil rights and child advocacy.

The task force examined disciplinary practices in the city’s 1.1 million-student system during the 2011-2012 school year. It found that “the overwhelming majority of school-related suspensions, summonses and arrests are for minor misbehavior, behavior that occurs on a daily basis in most schools.”

The numbers are startling. The city schools imposed nearly 70,000 suspensions in the 2011-2012 school year, 40 percent more than the period six years earlier. Of the 882 arrests during the school year studied, one in every six was for “resisting arrest” or “obstructing governmental administration,” charges for which there is often no underlying criminal behavior. The authorities also issued more than 1,600 summonses — tickets that require the student to appear in criminal court and that can lead to arrest for those who fail to appear.

The discriminatory application of disciplinary policy is particularly troubling. For example, the study found that black students in New York City are 14 times more likely to be arrested because of school-based incidents than their white peers; Hispanic students are five times more likely to be arrested than whites. Special-needs children are also disproportionately affected, and are four times more likely to be suspended that than their peers.

The good news is most of the city’s schools manage to handle misbehavior without resorting to draconian measures. Only a small percentage of schools account for a disproportionate number of the suspensions, summonses and arrests. As the report notes, New York City can fix this problem by embracing comprehensive, systemwide guidelines that have proved successful in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati and Clayton County, Ga.

The report makes many detailed recommendations. For starters, it calls on the next mayor to convene an interagency leadership team — including educators, social service officials, court officials and others — to keep more students safely in school while cutting down on the use of the harshest measures. It also suggests a “graduated response protocol” that would show schools how to resolve nonserious misbehavior themselves, reserving the court system for the most egregious cases. And it asks schools with low rates of suspensions, arrests and summonses to share solutions with schools that struggle with this problem. All of these ideas make good sense for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s successor.

http://www.nycourts.gov/ip/justiceforchildren/school-justice.shtml#NYCpartnership

 

[Camille]

 

[Camille]

Time for a Moratorium on School Suspensions?

http://www.theroot.com/buzz/time-moratorium-school-suspensions

(The Root) -- A sociologist presenting at a strategy session at the NAACP Leadership 500 Summit in Naples, Fla., on Friday proposed a radical change to school discipline policies that she said would improve educational outcomes, in particular for black and Latino children, who are subjected to disproportionately harsh punishments.

"We need to look at a national moratorium on school suspension," Kasandra A. Pontojo, professor of sociology at New Jersey's Hudson Community College and former chief operation officer at YouthBuild Newark, told the attendees of the conference's strategy session on education. "If a child is out of class, how do you expect them to learn?"

Pontojo's recommendation was based on what she said was suspension's role among the "push-out" (versus "pull-out") factors that lead students to drop out of school. "The push-out are internal factors that have led students not to be fully engaged with [the] learning process, whether it's because they feel classes are boring, teachers aren't interested or they're afraid to be in the school, " Pontojo explained. "The pull-out factors are those external factors -- family demands, pregnancy and the need to generate income, for example. What we're realizing now is that we're dealing with predominantly push-out issues versus pulling-out issues."

Suspension, she said, is in the latter group because "we know students who have experienced three or more days of suspension are more likely to drop out."

Pontojo disagreed with the idea that students who misbehave must be suspended so as not to interfere with their classmates' education. "We need to look at a more support-based form of education, training teachers to use different forms of discipline and different forms of encouragement. We need to teach them what you can do to [avoid suspensions but] make sure learning still occurs for the rest of the students in the classroom," she said.

A national moratorium, she told The Root, "is a national movement that the NAACP should be aligning itself with."

The NAACP's Leadership 500 summit's strategy sessions are designed to yield recommendations related to the organization's national agenda, which are reviewed by the organization's board of directors at its annual national conference.

 

[Camille]

Shocking Numbers Of Kindergarten, First Grade Suspensions

http://www.courant.com/news/education/hc-kindergarten-suspensions-20130525,0,6059434.story


When Kazzmaire Dorsey was in kindergarten and first grade at the Luís Muñoz Marin School in Bridgeport, he spent more of his school day sitting in the office or suspended at home than he did in the classroom, his lawyer says.

"He definitely felt very bad about it," said Kathryn Meyer, the lawyer, who acts as an advocate for children in Kazzmaire's situation. "I don't think he understood why he had this trouble. The school's reaction just increased this feeling that he's bad and deserved to be excluded, instead of teaching him the right ways to be."

The suspension of very young children has drawn statewide concern in Connecticut with the release of numbers from the state Department of Education that show 1,967 suspension incidents — including in-school and out-of-school cases — last year, involving 998 children who were 6 years old or younger. The vast majority of the children suspended were attending schools in the state's larger cities.

While it's difficult to assess whether those numbers are high or low — they account for a small fraction of the 110,818 instances of suspension last year in kindergarten through grade 12 statewide — many educators and advocates consider them shocking.

Jamey Bell, the state's Child Advocate, who requested the numbers on suspension, said young children with problem behaviors often are acting out in response to trauma or troubles at home or because of an undetected disability that is impairing learning.

"I don't believe that they are acting out with any forethought and volitionally misbehaving and not following the rules. Therefore, it's an inappropriate consequence to exclude them from school," Bell said. "So many of these kids are disproportionately from urban areas with the greatest degrees of poverty, lack of employment, struggle and disconnection from economic success. These are children of families that are struggling."

Walter S. Gilliam, an associate professor of child psychiatry and psychology at the Yale's Child Study Center, said "We know the best place for young children is to be in school. Removing a child from that opportunity only puts that child behind educationally and gives rise to more problems."

Gilliam said there is "no data anywhere" to suggest that suspension is helpful for children, adding, "There is a lot of reason to believe it's probably more harmful."

He said research shows that if teachers are provided "with a little bit of assistance, you can bypass a lot of these expulsions and suspensions."

In many cases, Gilliam said, it seems schools are trying to send a strong message to families and children in the hope that somehow the children will behave better as a result. But, he said, the best predictor of getting suspended again is having been suspended in the past.

State Department of Education Spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly said in an email that it "is unacceptable for students to be removed from the classroom excessively or needlessly." She noted that the state's overall number of suspensions for all students in kindergarten through grade 12 has declined by about 14 percent in the past five years.

Rates Of Suspension Vary

The difference in rates of suspension between suburban and urban districts is substantial, with West Hartford and Farmington having five or fewer incidents of suspensions in this age group in 2012, while Bridgeport had 293 and Hartford had 238.

In some cases, the rates of suspension are quite different even between somewhat similar districts and schools.

For instance, Hartford has only about 240 more children enrolled in kindergarten and first grade than New Haven, but had 238 instances of suspension compared to 89 incidents in New Haven.

Amistad Academy in New Haven and Achievement First Hartford Academy are both public charter schools run by Achievement First, with very similar enrollment numbers in the early grades. But while Amistad had 38 instances of suspension during the last school year among children age 6 and younger, Achievement First Hartford Academy had 114 in the same age group.

An even more dramatic comparison: The incidence of suspension of kindergartners and first graders at Achievement First Hartford Academy last year was an estimated nine times the rate in Hartford public schools.

Put another way, an estimated 11.7 percent of kindergartners and first-graders at Achievement First Hartford Academy were suspended last year an average of 5.4 times each. In the Hartford public school system, 3.3 percent of kindergartners and first-graders were suspended an average of 2.1 times.

Asked about Hartford's numbers, district spokesman David Medina said in an email response that "there are times that suspension is necessary for appropriate reasons. They are typically temporary and instruction is provided."

Marc Michaelson, regional superintendent for Achievement First, said the school, where students annually out-perform their Hartford peers by significant margins on state standardized tests, has "a very high bar for the conduct of our students and that's because we've made a promise to our scholars and our families that we are going to prepare them for college."

 

[Camille]

http://www.whatkidscando.org/featurestories/2011/03_suspension_stories/

Young Activists Challenge the “School-to-Prison” Pipeline

CHICAGO, IL—“He who opens a school door closes a prison,” Victor Hugo wrote in his 19th-century masterpiece, Les Miserables. Yet in today’s United States, students as young as six years old are being suspended, expelled, and even arrested at school for matters that once were handled by a phone call home.

And increasingly, activist youth and adults are questioning why the school doors are closing on these 21st-century “miserables” just when they most need to learn.

The “school-to-prison pipeline,” a term coined by youth advocates almost a decade ago, is still going strong, due in large part to “zero tolerance” policies. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), over 3 million students are suspended at least once each year and over 100,000 are expelled. In Chicago, out-of-school suspensions quadrupled to 93,212 between 2001 and 2007. In Pennsylvania, school-based arrests almost tripled between 1999 and 2006, to 12,918.

Now a remarkable website started by a group of young Chicago activists—all women between the ages of 12 and 22—is collecting the personal stories of such students in print, video, and audio and combining them with survey research, popular education, art, and more.

The site, called Suspension Stories, sprang from the work of the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) in partnership with Project NIA, a Chicago community justice group. Its young founders explain:

[We] are concerned about youth in our community and how they are being “pushed out” of school because of zero tolerance policies. We believe there is a need for youth voice to “talk back” to the educational system and to show how these policies are actually harming children. We believe that harsh disciplinary policies, such as zero tolerance, contribute to the school to prison pipeline by criminalizing students and pushing them out of school. Restorative practices, on the other hand, offer an opportunity to repair & move forward after a problem arises, keeping more students engaged in their education.

Pairing gut sense with research

These Chicago youth researchers know from experience what national studies confirm: exclusionary discipline is harmful. It breeds disaffection and disengagement, they say, which in turn can exacerbate school failure (a finding corroborated by the American Academy of Pediatrics.).

In one of the videos posted on www.suspensionstories.com, a high school student named Savion J. describes getting his teacher’s permission to go to the restroom, but then being stopped in the hall by the principal, who ordered him back to class. When Savion continued on to the restroom, the principal gave him three days’ suspension.

“I was mad, real mad,” Savion says, “because I didn’t think three days out of school was necessary for going to the bathroom, especially when I already had permission.” Such seemingly small grievances—the norm in many schools—take their toll.

When a suspension is longer, the time out of school can lead students to postpone returning, or to opt out entirely. In another “Suspension Stories” video, Adeola M. tells of being suspended for a week when she and another student got into a fight. She tried to keep up with her schoolwork from home, but when she faced a major test the day she returned, she recalls feeling acutely uncomfortable: “It felt like I hadn’t been in school for a long time.”

“Forcing a child out of school, I don’t see how that’s supposed to help their education,” Adeola, a member of the YWAT leadership team, continues. “When someone fights and gets suspended, they have a lot of anger in them and they probably will do it again and get suspended again. “ It can become a vicious circle, Adeola said, until the student stops coming to school at all. “They figure they might as well drop out, that they’re a bad person. Suspension, it just leads to negative things.”

The research concurs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that out-of-school youth are more likely to be retained a grade, drop out of school, become teen parents, and engage in delinquent behavior. A 2003 study found that school suspension is the top predictor for students who are incarcerated by ninth grade.

The Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) agrees with what the American Psychological Association (APA) recently found: that zero tolerance policies fail to make schools safer and that schools with high suspension rates score worse on standardized tests.

Disparities in enforcement

Just about all of the students in the Chicago youth research team are youth of color. Their informal research shows that exclusionary disciplinary policies fall disproportionately on the shoulders of minority students. Like their counterparts in other cities, they have several theories why this happens.

For one, they see it as a byproduct of the violence (perceived or real) of the neighborhoods where their schools are located. “Yeah, the violence in our community follows us into school. Yeah, there are gangs and stuff,” a young activist belonging to California’s “Books Not Bars” said. “But filling the school with police and metal detectors and no tolerance, in the name of preventing violence, is like saying the students are criminals in the making. Everything starts looking like a discipline issue that needs cracking down.”

And once a school gets a bad reputation, it sticks—most of all to the students themselves.



Another theory focuses on the tensions that can develop between a largely white teaching staff and a student body mostly of color. Many of the suspension stories the YWAT youth have gathered involve a student who “gets into it” with a white teacher. “There’s too many teachers who interpret a student’s behavior as dissing them. Rather than talk about it, they just kick you out,” said one junior.

Again, the national data support the young researchers’ findings. Statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights show that African-American and Latino students receive harsher punishments for similar misbehavior than their white peers. African-American students are nearly three times as likely to be suspended and 3.5 times as likely to be expelled as their white peers, with the numbers decreasing slightly for Latino students. Related research finds that students of color are disproportionately disciplined for “subjective” offenses (e.g., “disrespect”), while their white peers are disproportionately disciplined for “objective” offenses (e.g., smoking).

The discrepancies extend to LGBT youth and students with disabilities. The APA found that students with disabilities are disciplined at a rate roughly twice that of their non-disabled peers. A new study by Yale University researchers reports that, for similar misconduct, gay adolescents were roughly 1.25 to 3 times more likely to be sanctioned by school authorities than their straight peers, and with harsher punishments. The suspension stories gathered by YWAT also feature these historically disenfranchised groups.

Restorative justice

n place of exclusionary disciplinary policies, the Chicago student researchers—along with “school-to-prison pipeline” activists nationwide—offer an alternative strategy: restorative justice. In schools, restorative justice reframes infractions of the rules as harms against a community. It seeks to lessen conflict and avoid suspensions through mediation and other strategies.

The Native American “peace circle,” YWAT interviewee Daniel M. explains, is one such strategy. The responsible parties, the harmed parties, and other members of the community engage in a conversation by sitting in a circle. They follow a set of rules, including speaking only when recognized and promising to be truthful. Students must identify the harm, ask others in the circle how they were impacted by it, and then come up with concrete ways for the responsible party to repair the harm.

“Peer jury” (also called youth court) is another strategy these youth favor. Peer juries typically include trained youth volunteers, hear cases of youth misconduct or minor offenses, ask questions of the referred youth, and develop an agreement with the youth. “The goal,” Daniel said, “is to focus on what the student can do so it won’t happen again, in the future.”

These students seek disciplinary practices that teach and heal, replacing exclusion with communication. Adeola, the student who was suspended for a week after getting into a fight with a classmate, wondered why “they didn’t simply put the two of us in a room, let us settle down, and then talk it out.” She wished a teacher or counselor had asked them: “What are you really arguing about?Why are you fighting? Is it necessary? Is it that important?”

“If there’s no communication,” said Salvador S., a high school junior, “then we’ll never learn what we did wrong.”


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Twitter Hastag #School2Prison

 

[Greed]

High School Exit Exams Fuel the School-to-Prison Pipeline

High School Exit Exams Fuel the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Takepart.com
15 hrs ago

Critics have long lamented high school exit exams.

As a prerequisite for graduating, these exams have become more commonplace in recent years as they are touted as tools to hold students—and teachers—accountable for academic knowledge.

Nearly half of all states have such tests, which focus primarily on math and language arts, although some states like Florida also focus on science and history.

While Texas has eased the number of end-of-course exams required in high school, other states are considering making them more rigorous.

According to a 2012 Center on Education Policy report, exit exams will soon align with Common Core State Standards. The report noted: "Students who are already struggling with the current state standards will soon be expected to pass exit exams aligned to more rigorous standards, and there’s a good chance many will fail to do so."

That same report stated that three states are "phasing in requirements for end-of-course exit exams, and six more states currently require or will soon require students to take, but not necessarily pass, end-of-course exams to graduate."

But a new landmark study may give education leaders pause to these exams. The Effect of High School Exit Exams on Graduation, Employment, Wages and Incarceration by researchers Olesya Baker and Kevin Lang at the National Bureau of Economic Research links exit exams to high rates of incarceration.

The study found that out of the 70 percent of U.S. student who take exit exams, about one percent fail. In turn, they don't receive diplomas. But more startlingly, this same one percent had a much greater chance—12.5 percent—of incarceration.

This new statistic feeds into the national trend that students are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

"Exit exams represent a single set of tests that trumps years of work that students have completed," Anthony Cody, author of the Living in Dialogue blog and a retired Oakland teacher told TakePart. "Research shows some students experience great anxiety when taking high-stakes tests, and are unable to show what they are capable of."

He added that other research shows that "female and minority students are particularly likely to suffer from anxiety."

The study comes as more educators and activists express concerns about the school-to-prison pipeline. For years, zero-tolerance policies for minor infractions have been cited as a key reason for this growing problem, according to the Juvenile Law Center.

The American Civil Liberties Union has long been involved in the issue, stating on its website:

Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished and pushed out.

Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced an agreement with the Mobile County Public Schools in Alabama "to reduce out-of-school suspensions for minor misbehavior and provide alternative forms of discipline." The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit in 2011 on behalf of seven students who received extreme punishment.

But now the focus will likely shift to highlight exit exams, which, some say, could make students feel like academic losers, regardless of their previous 12 years in school, said Ted Wachtel, president of the International Institute for Restorative Practices in Bethlehem, Penn.

"This study is basically confirming the fact that when people don’t finish high school they have a higher chance of ending up in trouble," he told TakePart. "It has to be devastating for a kid to get to the end of high school and suddenly find out they aren’t going to get a degree. I understand the counter arguments, but there is something to be said for a student who demonstrates persistence by simply making it through school for 12 years and getting passing grades."

Exit exams are often cited as a positive means for employers to hire graduates. But the Baker and Lang study noted, "We find no consistent effects of exit exams on employment or the distribution of wages."

Cody feels strongly that schools should stop administering the exams.

"Given that exit exams have been shown to have no benefit for our economy or for the students that take them, and we now know of this very real harm they are causing, they should be discontinued immediately," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/high-school-exit-exams-fuel-school-prison-pipeline-192900336.html

 

[Camille]