How Can One Teacher Make a Difference in the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

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The headline was making the rounds on social media: “Do #BlackLivesMatter in schools? Why the answer is ‘no’”.  As a teacher educator, it was upsetting because I knew so many of the myriad ways it was true.  I strive to prepare teachers to see the classroom as a site for social change and social justice, but this is the question that keeps me up at night: Is it possible to change the schools from within or do we need to raze it all and start over?  If the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house , am I sending new teachers into the field on a fool’s errand?

As Annamma and Stovall described, schools are no longer the start of the school-to-prison pipeline.  Instead, we are seeing a school-prison nexus where schools look and feel more and more like prison.  What should a teacher do in this situation?  Such a question is akin to a “good” police officer asking if they should remain on the force or a “good” politician asking if they should remain in office.  Such was the question that led a former student teacher, Kayla, to reflect deeply about her position in school.  It started early in the year with this vignette:

After one of my students correctly answered a question that everyone else was struggling with, I eagerly approached him to give him a high five or fist bump, which was apparently not hip enough for him. Instead, he suggested we do a different kind of handshake involving a lot of different twists, finger combinations, and intricate patterns. By being included in this handshake, I felt like after two short weeks my students were beginning to accept me and were welcoming me into their personal lives. Little did I know that I had just participated in a gang affiliated handshake; the class erupted in laughter and I was told I was gangbangin’ and officially a part of the clique, aware of their secret knowledge. - Gass & Laughter, 2015, p. 333.

Clearly the students found this moment funny and interactive, an invitation into their lives through a display of extra-curricular language and action. However, Kayla was concerned that handshakes and signs representing gang affiliation might be used by others to criminalize students within a school setting . 

So, she began to ask a different set of questions: How might I disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline?  Is that even possible?  Over the course of a year, I helped her pursue an action research project exploring how she might disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline through a curriculum purposively designed to generate dialogue around gangs and gang affiliations .  What we found was both hopeful and directive.  

Research on the school-to-prison pipeline often focuses on disproportionate application of criminalizing discipline policies , what has been termed the discipline gap; however, the students at the center of these policies are often raced, classed, and gendered in ways that make a future prison term (seemingly) inevitable . 

In the United States, the prison population continues to grow due to “tough on crime” policies  like mandatory minimum sentencing and three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws .  While crime statistics do not directly implicate K-12 education, they are historically related.  In short, as stated by Toldson & Morton: “priorities to incarcerate compete against priorities to educate” (2011, p. 2).  Coincidental with the rise in funding for incarceration are several school-disciplinary policies, like zero tolerance and out-of-school suspensions, that both mirror “tough on crime” laws and lead directly to increases in the potentiality of incarceration .  

According to Mallet, such disciplinary policies are the foundation of the school-to-prison pipeline: “policies and practices in schools that make it more likely that students face criminal involvement with the juvenile courts than attain a quality education” (2015, p. 1).  According to Valles & Villalpando, these policies and practices are associated with “lower academic achievement, less college readiness, increased likelihood of becoming a push-out, and racial disparities which impede students from participating in the college pipeline” (2013, p. 262).  The justification for such policies is a perceived rise in juvenile violence.

However, the rise of juvenile violence is a myth; in fact, the last twenty years have seen steep declines in violent crime.  Nevertheless, schools have responded to perceptions with an increase in policies now associated with the school-to-prison pipeline: more metal detectors, more CCTV surveillance, more police officers in schools, more zero-tolerance approaches, and more expulsions .  In short, responses to just the perception of juvenile delinquency may in fact be driving that delinquency.  

Amid this context, I worked with Kayla to envision what one teacher could do from within the classroom, if anything.  Her action research project was a redesigned curriculum for English I “Repeaters,” sophomores who had failed the end-of-course exam as freshmen.  Centered around Autobiography of My Dead Brother , the project analyzed data from (a) observational field notes of classroom interactions, (b) student journals and a questionnaire, (c) an anticipation guide and focus group discussions, and (d) member checking.  A fuller report of the research process and findings can be found in Gass and Laughter’s 2015 article.   Here, I focus on what we discovered one teacher could do.

In short, teachers can make a difference if they take time to get know their students.  When the subject of gangs first came to the fore, Kayla pulled up a desk and told her students, “Okay, y’all are my teachers.  Y’all lead the conversations.”  This willingness to engage students as people with valuable knowledge was an important first step toward upending a system that had already labeled these participants as failures in a Repeaters’ Class.  Throughout the year, Kayla developed a space where students experienced academic success and felt like experts, a crucial goal for teachers wanting to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

In responding to an Anticipation Guide, students agreed or strongly agreed that “Teachers/parents/other adults have encouraged me and led me to believe that I am capable of passing high school and being successful.”  However, these teachers/parents/other adults must be in real relationships with the students.  This involves standing up to systems that label students through deficit perspectives, systems that expect certain outcomes based on imposed racial, class, behavioral, or academic labels .  The school-to-prison pipeline begins when schools see students as more likely to be incarcerated than achieve academically.  Over the course of Kayla’s time with her students, they often discussed how school reminded them of being incarcerated: Failure in one class resulted in a label that restricted their placement in other classes, restricting where they could move within the school.  Even cinderblock walls and the imposition of a schedule over which they had no control reminded the students of prison.  The reality of In-School Suspension reified the idea that isolation was an effective disciplinary policy.

This was the most important feature of Kayla’s curriculum and day-to-day interactions with her students.  A teacher’s rejection of the school-to-prison pipeline begins when she offers students a place to succeed, develops ways for students to feel in control, and facilitates student voices to reject the labels put on them by others.  It is not a big step to include knowledge of and conversations about the school-to-prison pipeline as important pieces of a teacher’s conceptual repertoires of diversity .  While such work in the classroom might not seem to have a direct impact on illegal activities or delinquent behavior, it does provide an alternative, a response to what too many students see as an unavoidable choice .

There is a need to attack the school-to-prison pipeline as a hegemonic system; likewise, there is much that can be done in the classroom by an individual teacher.  The school-to-prison pipeline works when students do not see school preparing them for anything but prison.  On paper, Kayla’s students were failures; they were not going to graduate from high school.  Kayla was able to carve out at least one classroom where they felt successful, included, and knowledgeable.  She provided a space where students chose to participate in readings, activities, and discussions reflecting their own lives.

It may be discouraging for teachers to learn that schools are not always meritocratic institutions where every student can rise above imposed labels; it may offer no relief to learn that these labels should not be used as excuses for student failure.  But coming to such realization is an important step toward disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline.  Disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline begins by creating classrooms that do not mimic prisons.  As demonstrated by Kayla, this is something a teacher can begin by offering a place where students succeed, feel in control, and escape imposed labels.  

References

Annamma, S., & Stovall, D. (2020, 14 July). Do #BlackLivesMatter in schools? Why the answer is ‘no.’ The Washington Post. Available at www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/07/14/do-blacklivesmatter-schools-why-answer-is-no 

Barnert, E. S., Perry, R., Azzi, V. F., Shetgiri, R., Ryan, G., Dudovitz, R., Zima, B., & Chung, P. (2015). Incarcerated youths’ perspectives on protective factors and risk factors for juvenile offending: A qualitative analysis. American Journal of Public Health, 105, 1365-1371. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302228 

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Valles, B. G., & Villalpando, O. (2013). A critical race policy analysis of the school-to-prison pipeline for Chicanos. In M. Lynn & A. D. Dixson (Eds.), Handbook of critical race theory in education (pp. 260-269). New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2051-231720160000004004

Judson Laughter is associate professor of English education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He teaches courses in sociolinguistics, trends and issues in education, and critical teacher education. His research interests include critical race theory, culturally relevant education, and social justice education. Significant portions of this article were previously published as Gass & Laughter (2015).

(c) 2020 Judson Laughter