What Is The School-to-Prison Pipeline?

 

The “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to the policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.  This pipeline reflects the prioritization of incarceration over education.  For a growing number of students, the path to incarceration includes the “stops” below. (You can also download this information as a PDF.)

Failing Public Schools

For most students, the pipeline begins with inadequate resources in public schools. Overcrowded classrooms, a lack of quali­fied teachers, and insufficient funding for “extras” such as counselors, special edu­cation services, and even textbooks, lock students into second-rate educational envi­ronments. This failure to meet educational needs increases disengagement and dropouts, increasing the risk of later court­involvement. (1)  Even worse, schools may actually encourage dropouts in response to pressures from test-based accountability regimes such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which create incentives to push out low-performing students to boost overall test scores.(2)

Zero-Tolerance and Other School Discipline 

Lacking resources, facing incentives to push out low-performing students, and responding to a handful of highly-publicized school shootings, schools have embraced zero-tolerance policies that automatically impose severe punishment regardless of circumstances. Under these policies, students have been expelled for bringing nail clippers or scissors to school. Rates of suspension have increased dramatically in recent years—from 1.7 million in 1974 to 3.1 million in 2000 (3)—and have been most dramatic for children of color. 

Overly harsh disciplinary policies push students down the pipeline and into the juvenile justice system. Suspended and expelled children are often left unsupervised and without constructive activities; they also can easily fall behind in their coursework, leading to a greater likelihood of disengagement and drop-outs. All of these factors increase the likelihood of court involvement. (4)

As harsh penalties for minor misbehavior become more pervasive, schools increasingly ignore or bypass due process protections for suspensions and expulsions. The lack of due process is particularly acute for students with special needs, who are disproportionately represented in the pipeline despite the heightened protections afforded to them under law.

Policing School Hallways 

Many under-resourced schools become pipeline gateways by placing increased reliance on police rather than teachers and administrators to maintain discipline. Growing numbers of districts employ school resource officers to patrol school hallways, often with little or no training in working with youth. As a result, children are far more likely to be subject to school-based arrests—the majority of which are for non-violent offenses, such as disruptive behavior—than they were a generation ago. The rise in school-based arrests, the quick¬est route from the classroom to the jailhouse, most directly exemplifies the criminalization of school children. 

Disciplinary Alternative Schools

In some jurisdictions, students who have been suspended or expelled have no right to an education at all. In others, they are sent to disciplinary alternative schools. 

Growing in number across the country, these shadow systems—sometimes run by private, for-profit companies—are immune from educational accountability standards (such as minimum classroom hours and curriculum requirements) and may fail to provide meaningful educational services to the students who need them the most. As a result, struggling students return to their regular schools unprepared, are permanently locked into inferior educational settings, or are funneled through alternative schools into the juvenile justice system.

Court Involvement and Juvenile Detention

Youth who become involved in the juvenile justice system are often denied procedural protections in the courts; in one state, up to 80% of court-involved children do not have lawyers.(5) Students who commit minor offenses may end up in secured detention if they violate boilerplate probation conditions prohibiting them from activities like missing school or disobeying teachers. 

Students pushed along the pipeline find themselves in juvenile detention facilities, many of which provide few, if any, educational services. Students of color—who are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended, expelled, or arrested for the same kind of conduct at school (6)—and those with disabilities are particularly likely to travel down this pipeline.(7) 

Though many students are propelled down the pipeline from school to jail, it is difficult for them to make the journey in reverse. Students who enter the juvenile justice system face many barriers to their re-entry into traditional schools. The vast majority of these students never graduate from high school.


Endnotes
1 American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on School Health, “Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion,” PEDIATRICS (Vol. 112 No. 5, Nov. 2003), p. 1207. See also: Johanna Wald & Dan Losen, “Defining and Re-directing a School-to-Prison Pipeline,” NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT (No. 99, Fall 2003), p. 11.

2 David N. Figlio “Testing, Crime and Punishment,” JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS (Vol. 90 Iss. 4-5, May 2006).

3 Advancement Project, EDUCATION ON LOCKDOWN:  THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO JAILHOUSE TRACK (Mar. 2005), p. 15.

4 American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on School Health, “Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion,” PEDIATRICS (Vol. 112 No. 5, Nov. 2003), p. 1207. See also: Johanna Wald & Dan Losen, “Defining and Re-directing a School-to-Prison Pipeline,” NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT (No. 99, Fall 2003), p. 11.

5 ACLU, The Children’s Law Center & The Office of the Ohio State Public Defender, A CALL TO AMEND THE OHIO RULES OF JUVENILE PROCEDURE TO PROTECT THE RIGHT TO COUNSEL (Jan. 2006), p. 1.

6 Russel J. Skiba, ZERO TOLERANCE, ZERO EVIDENCE (2000), pp. 11-12; The Advancement Project & The Civil Rights Project, OPPORTUNITIES SUSPENDED: THE DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES OF ZERO TOLERANCE AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE POLICIES (June 2000), pp. 7-9; Russell J. Skiba, et al., THE COLOR OF DISCIPLINE: SOURCES OF RACIAL AND GENDER DISPROPORTIONALITY IN SCHOOL PUNISHMENT (2000).

7 David Osher et al., “Schools Make a Difference: The Overrepresentation of African American Youth in Special Education and the Juvenile Justice System,” RACIAL INEQUITY IN SPECIAL EDUCATION (Daniel J. Losen & Gary Orfield eds., 2002), p. 98.
 

Yes, U.S. schools still discipline students based on their race

 

President Obama is making a push to end the practice. But conservatives say the administration has gone too far.

By Dana Liebelson | 6:08am ET

  

inShare

All on equal footing? (Thinkstock)

I

t sounds like something from 1955: In a public school in the United States, kids who come to school less than five minutes late are allowed to go directly to class — unless they're Native American. When these students are tardy, the school's safety officer detains them until the grace period is over, and then sends them straight to the principal's office, according to a report released jointly this month by the Department of Education and Department of Justice.

With two million American kids suspended or expelled from junior and high schools each year, the Obama administration decided to figure out what the heck is going in America's classrooms. The results of the investigation weren't pretty: Discriminatory policies that push students of color, and those with disabilities, out of the U.S. education system.

The administration has now issued guidance that aims to end discrimination and curb out-of-school suspensions, particularly for nonviolent offenses. But with conservatives arguing that the recommendations go too far, and resources for public school teachers stretched thin, change won't be easy.

Fifteen percent of students in the report's data pool were African-American — but they accounted for 44 percent of students suspended more than once. The discrepancy was "not explained by more frequent or more serious misbehavior by students of color," the investigators wrote.

One district, for example, booted more black students than white students to the alternative school, even though both groups had committed a similar number of offenses. Investigators also found policies that weren't intended to be discriminatory, but ended up having a disproportionate impact on minorities.

"There's this idea that young people are pushed out of school for violent behavior, and that's just not the case — it's things like truancy, cell phone use, not having supplies, and uniform violations," says Thena Robinson-Mock, director of the Advancement Project's Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track program. "And students of color are punished at higher rates. It's a fact."

Reform advocates say that America has a "school-to prison-pipeline," whereby a combination of overcrowded classrooms, inadequate resources, and zero-tolerance policies force kids out of school and into the justice system. In 2011, a sixth-grade girl in Austin, Texas, says she sprayed herself with perfume in class, because bullies were telling her that she smelled. She ended up with a misdemeanor and a $150 fine from law enforcement, which cited her for disrupting class.

"When I was in school, I might get a talking to by the principal, but now you have law enforcement coming in, which creates criminal records," says Deborah Vagins, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU. According to the Obama administration's guidance, schools should rely less on outside law enforcement to solve in-school problems.

Conservatives say that the Obama administration is going too far. "As best I can tell, they are telling schools that even if you have policies that are clearly neutral, that are clearly evenhanded, that are clearly designed to create safe environments for students and educators, [the Department of Justice] still might come down on you like a ton of bricks," Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, told the Daily Caller.

But Robinson-Mock, from the Advancement Project, disagrees, arguing there's overwhelming evidence that the Obama administration's guidance is long overdue. "Racial profiling doesn't work outside of the classroom and it won't work inside," she notes.

Many teachers say they approve of the general principles behind the Obama administration's plan. But some educators are concerned that the resources to keep troubled kids in schools simply aren't available. "Out-of-school suspensions are less effective in many cases," writes Ian Keith, a teacher at Randolph Heights Elementary School in Minnesota. "But I'm worried that without a strong commitment to [alternatives], that the problems in our classrooms will only get worse." (As part of the plan, the Obama administration is proposing to dedicate $150 million to place more counselors and resource officers in U.S. schools.)

James Forman Jr., a clinical professor at Yale Law School, told the New York Times that schools also currently have a strong incentive to kick out students, rather than give them second chances: "A kid is causing trouble, that's probably not a kid who is testing well."

Vagins, of the ACLU, acknowledges that "this is only the beginning, we need schools to make sure that these are implemented." But Robinson-Mock says keeping classrooms safe and productive, while ending discriminatory policies, are not contradictory goals: "There are clear practical approaches in this guidance. And we put our budget where our values are. I've heard people say, how can we afford to do this? Well how can afford not to?"

It's Just Not That Cold.

The news media needs to just stop trying to terrify us with news about how cold it is.  Currently it is -2° in my home town of Evanston, Il. So what.  At first it was kinda cool having -° temperatures, now the novelty has worn off.  Next week they say the weather is going to be 5, 2 and 9 on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  I'm not terrified of this.  Al queida is terrifying, the weather is not.  At least not the cold part.

For seniors and young children, yes, we need to take precautions.  People with asthma and COPD, like I have, need to be cautious as well, but then we always need to be cautious about our breathing.  But I am over being overly concerned about how cold it is going to be.

Yesterday my brother called and asked if I needed to be dug out from the overnight blizzard of lake effect snow.  I did,  and he came over and dug me out.  I went out as well and hung with him for awhile as he did so.  The weather was not so daunting that I feared going out in it. 

Syria’s Christians – who will help them?

By Lela Gilbert

Published January 21, 2014

FoxNews.com

• 
  An old damaged Orthodox Church is pictured in the besieged area of Homs. (Reuters)

It all started during the early days of the Arab Spring -- another “peaceful” protest defying another despotic regime. Today, nearly three years later, that protest has exploded into Syria’s ferocious civil war.
Radicalized Sunni warriors have swept across the borders, seized control of moderate forces, and are waging jihad against Iran-backed President Bashar Assad and his Shia fighters.
News reports have grown increasingly horrific: Massacres. Chemical weapons. “Barrel bombs” designed to mutilate. “Infidels” beheaded on YouTube videos.  The U.N. has given up trying to accurately update the death toll, which has soared beyond 100,000.

In the midst of widespread butchery, Syria’s ancient Christian community is being devastated.

And in the midst of widespread butchery, Syria’s ancient Christian community is being devastated.
Just days ago, Investors Business Daily reported, "the relentless carnage and horror that has engulfed Syria over the past two and a half years has taken a particularly heavy toll on the country’s Christian minority. An unknown number of civilians, including religious figures, have been kidnapped or killed or remain missing, in a conflagration that seems to have no end…."
Friday, my friend Judy Feld Carr emailed me.  “I cannot understand,” she wrote, “why there is not one word in the media about the destruction of the churches in Syria.  Nobody even mentions it!”
Judy Feld Carr knows more than her share about dangers emanating from Damascus, and about how an historic population’s way of life can be annihilated. Besides the torture, murder, or flight of thousands of 20^th Century Syrian Jews, most of their synagogues, sacred books and millennia of their history are lost forever.
Carr also knows something about activism. Over the course of 30 years, she all but single-handedly smuggled, ransomed or otherwise snatched 3,228 Syrian Jews out of Hafez al-Assad’s iron fist.
Long before the Internet, she tracked down and telephoned courageous rabbis; hid coded messages in books, and identified urgently at-risk Jews. Gradually, Carr raised enough money to ransom them – usually one or two at a time.
Judy Feld Carr’s story is heroic – she deserves far more accolades than she has received. And her concern for Syria’s Christians is genuine. Like many other Jews, she asks why their plight is met with near-complete silence and inaction by Western Christians.
Mass graves have been found in Christian villages. Priests and clergy have been abducted, tortured and murdered.  A dozen nuns from the battered Christian village of Ma’alula are still held captive, while their surviving co-believers remain hidden away from the fierce gaze of the “freedom fighters.”
Radical Islam’s hatred of Jews and Christians has long been inscribed in blood across the Muslim world. Today it continues to be writ large in Syria.
Chatter about peace continues, but nothing changes. Geneva II, scheduled for January 22, offers vague possibilities for a truce, but brutality continues to pound the Syrian people into submission or worse.
In October, Nina Shea quoted Syriac Orthodox archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh, "We have shouted to the world but no one has listened to us. Where is the Christian conscience? Where is human consciousness? Where are my brothers? I think of all those who are suffering today in mourning and discomfort: We ask everyone to pray for us."
The archbishop’s cry stirs many of us, including Judy Carr.  In an interview about the ongoing violence in Syria, she remarked, “Thank God, there are hardly any Jews left there [to kill or torment]. The Christians are next.”
As the saying goes, "First the Saturday People, then the Sunday people."
Of course nowadays, smuggling Christians out of Syria isn’t the answer – hundreds of thousands have already fled, some barely surviving in squalid refugee camps.
Still it bears repeating that not so long ago, one determined woman – a Canadian housewife, mother and music teacher – took action, engaged others, and turned a deadly tide. If Judy Feld Carr could rescue more than 3,000 endangered Jews, what about us?
There are millions of believing Christians in the world. Perhaps together we can awaken dozing Christian leadership. Pound on political doors. Publicly protest. Inform each other. Broadcast the story. Support responsible relief efforts. Watch and pray.  
Suppose every Christian took action to help our brothers and sisters in Syria. What might happen?
Lela Gilbert is author of "Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner" and co-author, with Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, of "Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians." She is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and lives in Jerusalem. For more, visit her website: www.lelagilbert.com.

White Castle slider called 'most influential' burger

AP Photo-Jay LaPrete

This June 21, 2004 file photo shows a White Castle restaurant in Columbus, Ohio.

3 days ago By AP

 

White Castle's iconic square patty beat out McDonald's original burger to top Time magazine's list of burgers that changed the world

COLUMBUS, Ohio  — Time magazine says White Castle's small, square "sliders" are "the most influential burger of all time."
The magazine notes the "now-iconic square patty" that debuted in 1921 in Wichita, Kan. was the first burger to spawn a fast-food empire. White Castle has been based in Columbus since 1934.
The Time story puts the White Castle burger at the top of the list of the 17 most influential burgers of all time, beating out burgers from McDonald's and In-N-Out.
White Castle vice president Jamie Richardson tells The Columbus Dispatch that "slider" has been a term of endearment for the delectable little burgers since the 1950s.

A Brief History of Palm Trees in Southern California

by Nathan Masters

on December 7, 2011 12:30 PM

Early 20th-century postcard depicting Santa Monica's Palisades Park. The text on the reverse read, 'Atop a lofty bluff is Palisades Park, one of the most beautiful on the Pacific Coast, where amid tropical palms and gay flowers, one may rest and view the grandeur of the blue Pacific.' Courtesy of the Werner Von Boltenstern Postcard Collection, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Loyola Marymount University Library.

More L.A. Tree History
Who Eucalyptized Southern California?

The Oak Trees of Southern California: A Brief History

El Aliso, Ancient Sycamore, Was Silent Witness to L.A. History

If you close your eyes and imagine a typical Southern California landscape, chances are that you've pictured at least one palm tree, if not several, rising from the ground. But despite the diversity and ubiquity of palms in the Los Angeles area, only one species—Washingtonia filifera, the California fan palm—is native to California. All of L.A.'s other palm species, from the slender Mexican fan palms that line so many L.A. boulevards to the feather-topped Canary Island date palm, have been imported.

Although they conjure the image of Los Angeles as desert oasis, L.A.'s palm trees owe their iconic status more to Southern California's turn-of-the-century cultural aspirations and engineering feats than to the region's natural ecology. Though watered in some places by perennial streams like the Los Angeles River, Southern California's pre-1492 landscape was decidedly semi-arid, a patchwork of grassland, chaparral, sage scrub, and oak woodland. As monocots, palms are actually more closely related to grasses than they are to woody deciduous trees. They need an abundance of water in the soil to grow successfully, and so they—like the manicured lawns they often adorn—rely on the vast amounts of water that Southern California imports from distant watersheds.

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Southern California's native palms grow far away from Los Angeles, in spring-fed Colorado Desert oases tucked deep inside steep mountain ravines. Centuries before palms were cultivated for their horticultural value, the Cahuilla Indians used these Washingtonia filifera as a natural resource, eating the fruit and weaving the fronds into baskets and roofing.

Native Washingtonia filifera palms growing in an oasis near Palm Springs, circa 1900. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.

Men rest beneath two fan palms, perhaps planted by Spanish missionaries, in front of Mission San Fernando, circa 1886. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.

Early 20th-century postcard depicting the historic Los Angeles Plaza and La Iglesia Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles. Courtesy of the Werner Von Boltenstern Postcard Collection, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Loyola Marymount University Library.

Palms in Westlake (now MacArthur) Park circa 1915. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.

Palm trees on Figueroa Street south of 16th Street circa 1890. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.

Elias J. (Lucky) Baldwin's gardens in Arcadia teemed with palms. Baldwin's estate is today the Los Angeles County Arboretum. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.

California's eighteenth century Franciscan missionaries were the first to plant palms ornamentally, perhaps in reference to the tree's biblical associations. But it was not until Southern California's turn-of-the-twentieth-century gardening craze that the region's leisure class introduced the palm as the region's preeminent decorative plant. Providing neither shade nor marketable fruit, the palm was entirely ornamental. Its exotic associations helped reinforce what Kevin Starr describes in Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era as "Southern California's turn-of-the-century conviction that it was America's Mediterranean littoral, its Latin shore, sunny and palm-guarded."
Although they lacked the zealous advocacy that Abbot Kinney's eucalyptus trees enjoyed, palm trees soon appeared throughout Los Angeles, from the front yards of the mansions along Figueroa Street to public spaces like Pershing Square, Eastlake and Westlake Park, and the historic central plaza near Olvera Street.
The 1930s witnessed the largest concerted effort to plant palm trees in Los Angeles. Pasadena planted palms at 100 feet intervals along Colorado Boulevard and considered renaming the thoroughfare the "Street of a Thousand Palms." In Venice, gardening enthusiasts planted 200 Washingtonia robusta (Mexican fan) palms on Washington Boulevard to celebrate the bicentennial of the nation's first president, for whom the tree was named. The Los Angeles Times regularly printed articles praising the palms' "magical" qualities and comparing the trees to "plumed knights."
In 1931 alone, Los Angeles' forestry division planted more than 25,000 palm trees, many of them still swaying above the city's boulevards today. This massive planting effort—conceived by the city's first forestry chief, L. Glenn Hall—is often characterized as a beautification project for the 1932 Olympic games. But impressing foreign athletes actually played less of a role than did getting L.A.'s unemployed back to work; the $100,000 program that planted some 40,000 trees in total was part of a larger unemployment relief program, funded by a $5 million bond issue. Beginning in March 1931, the city put 400 unemployed men to work planting trees alongside 150 miles of city boulevards. Mexican fan palms—then costing only $3.60 each—were spaced 40 to 50 feet apart.
Today, many of the palm trees planted in the 1930s are nearing the end of their natural life spans. The recent arrival of the red palm weevil—known to devastate palm populations across the world—augurs poorly for the fate of younger trees. The L.A. Department of Water and Power has indicated that as the city's palm trees die, most will not be replaced with new palms but with trees more adapted to the region's semi-arid climate, requiring less water and offering more shade.
Like the palm, the orange tree was also once a ubiquitous feature of the landscape and a symbol loaded with cultural meaning. In fact, early-twentieth-century postcards and other promotional materials often featured scenes of tranquil orange groves framed by exotic palms. Those groves have largely vanished from Southern California. It remains to be seen whether the palm's future will be any different.

Workers plant palm trees on Wilshire Boulevard between Western and Wilton in 1926. Courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Officials of the Ebell Club and the Women's Community Service Auxiliary of the Chamber of Commerce plant a Washingtonia fan palm on Wilshire Boulevard in honor of Arbor Day, 1935. Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Young palms line Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, circa 1918. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.

Postcard courtesy of the David Boulé Collection.

Many of the archives who contributed the above images are members of L.A. as Subject, an association of more than 230 libraries, museums, official archives, personal collections, and other institutions. Hosted by the USC Libraries, L.A. as Subject is dedicated to preserving and telling the sometimes-hidden stories and histories of the Los Angeles region. Our posts here will provide a view into the archives of individuals and cultural institutions whose collections inform the great narrative—in all its complex facets—of Southern California.

About the Author

A writer specializing in Los Angeles history, Nathan Masters serves as manager of academic events and programming communications for the USC Libraries, the host institution for L.A. as Subject. MORE

Sen. Reid: I Support Legalizing Medical Marijuana

Sen. Reid: I Support Legalizing Medical Marijuana: Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) –- On today’s “The Roundup,” Trish Regan, Adam Johnson, Matt Miller and Jeffrey Hayzlett wrap up the day’s top market stories on Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart.” (Source: Bloomberg)