the criminalization of black and brown students that’s led to what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline. The movement saw a setback on Sunday when California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have expanded a statewide ban on suspensions for students in kindergarten to third grade to include fourth through eighth graders. The ban focused on suspensions for, quote, “disruption and defiance.” A recent UCLA study found black seventh and eighth graders lost nearly four times the number of school days to such suspensions than white students.
Just last week at Oak View Elementary School in Decatur, Georgia, two teachers resigned after students complained they punished them by zip-tying their hands behind their backs like they were under arrest by police. The students were 4 years old. Writer and activist Shaun King tweeted, “This is the (pre) school to prison pipeline.” One of the girls’ mothers spoke to WSB-TV.
MOTHER: This has really shaken me, to the core. … She said that one teacher tied her up and the other cut it loose. And she said, “Mommy, I was scared to tell you, because I thought I was going to get in trouble.” … I want them to pay. I want them to not have any license to teach, because they don’t need to teach. Who would do this? I mean, would they like this to happen to their own kids?
Jitu Brown talking:
I would just say that we don’t have a policy problem in public education. We have a values problem. There’s a belief system, that is rooted in the hatred of black and brown children, that fuels education policy. Just think, that parent, Zakiya, had to fight because her son was being suspended in preschool. I’ve seen this story over and over again. In Pittsburgh, parents had to organize to stop the suspension of kindergarten through third graders. In New York, this has been a fight. In Chicago, young people fought to stop 10-day suspensions in Chicago Public Schools. If the discipline policies are administered through a lens of hatred, that often these policymakers would not apply to their own children, and that’s why the numbers around the suspension of black, brown and white students for the same infractions are so glaring, that there is a belief system—and we know research says this, first—that black and brown children are viewed as older than their white counterparts.
So, I think we have to challenge that. And not just challenge that strictly around discipline, but also around just the starving of neighborhood schools. I’ve experienced, in the Journey for Justice Alliance, across the country, black and brown schools not having pre-K services, half-day kindergartens, not having libraries, no teacher aides in the building, overcrowded classrooms, but then, in the same cities, their white counterparts having a completely different experience. Now, we don’t have any acrimony towards those babies that happen to be white or wealthy having the things they need, but the fight should be to make sure that all children have what they need, not punish those schools for being starved. So, along with the suspension policies, the policy of closing—starving and then closing schools has had a disastrous impact in our communities across the country.
Zakiya Sankara-Jabar talking:
I began organizing very organically as a parent pushing back, when my son was actually 3, what is now known as the preschool-to-prison pipeline, as you mentioned. And one of the things that I did as a parent, you know, not thinking initially that it was a race issue or a class issue, is that I just questioned their policies and practices, or questioned what was actual normal behavior for a 3-year-old to be exhibiting in a classroom. Some of the things that they would complain about was, you know, “Oh, he has problems transitioning,” or, you know, “He’s having temper tantrums.” And so, what I saw was happening and began to realize was that there was a pathologizing of normal childhood behavior of my son.
I then began to take a deeper look and, you know, noticed that he was the only black boy out of only two black students in a class of 19—and then just the overall teacher representation, as well, at the school, was overwhelmingly white; the administration was all-white—and beginning to put those factors together as I began to ask other black women, black parents at the school, if they were having similar experiences.
And so, once I did that, I went to my co-founder of Racial Justice NOW!, professor Vernellia Randall, and talked to her about what I was experiencing. And that was basically how Racial Justice NOW! was founded in her living room, saying that we needed to really have a response to this, to organize and begin to shift and change policies and practices of how young people, particularly black students, and our families were being treated in the school at that time.
And so, that has led to a deeper analysis. And until just recently, because of the work of working-class poor and working-class black parents in the city of Dayton, Ohio just recently passed a law, House Bill 318, to ban most out-of-school pre-K-through-third-grade suspensions across the entire state. And so, that’s a huge victory for a small organization, a community-based organization like Racial Justice NOW!, in a very conservative state like Ohio. But it took years of organizing and being supported by national organizations like Dignity in Schools campaign, and even Journey for Justice Alliance, being supported on the ground to be able to get that work done and be able to get something so big accomplished in a very conservative state.
Mark Warren talking:
it’s becoming increasingly known now that the school-to-prison pipeline starts in pre-K, which is really shocking. So these are children as young as 3- and 4-year-olds who are often exhibiting, as Zakiya said, normal behavior—jumping around in the class or acting out in different kinds of ways. And, you know, unfortunately, many of these children, particularly if they are black and brown children, particularly if they’re boys or special needs, but also girls, are labeled very early on. And the solution is seen as pushing them out of the classroom, getting rid of the so-called troublemakers. And, you know, this starts a train of labeling and harsh discipline that carries on through elementary school and into middle school.
And many studies have found that students who are repeatedly suspended in elementary and particularly middle school are very likely to fail to graduate from high school. Either they’re expelled, or they become so alienated and so far behind that they choose to leave school on their own. And then, once that happens, they’re out on the street, where they are also subject to oftentimes discriminatory policing and police abuse, and then they end up in the juvenile criminal justice system. We actually have now more law enforcement officers in our schools than we have social workers. So it’s not just that they’re facing police in the streets. Many young children and high school children are facing police right in their schools. In Chicago, people may not know that the Chicago Police Department actually has substations located in high schools. These are not school police; these are Chicago police. And they are arresting and booking children in schools.
And so, in this book, what we tried to do is to bring together the voices of people who are actually working to combat the school-to-prison pipeline. Our starting point is the systemic racism that children are facing. But what we’re trying to show people is that there our alternatives. And when grassroots people, whether they are organizers and parents like Jitu and Zakiya, or whether they are teacher organizers and activists, like E.M. that we’ll be hearing from, start to organize in their communities, they can change these kinds of discipline policies, and they can organize and build alternatives like restorative justice.
E.M. Eisen-Markowitz talking:
restorative justice, in this context, in the way that we’re advocating for it to be grown at school sites around the country, is a relational approach to discipline. We talk about it in sort of three tiers. And the base of the tiers is intentional community and relationship building, which is a shame that we have to even put that in there as that schools are not doing and not prioritizing, not allocating resources to. But as you heard from Jitu, who explained very clearly what’s happening to starving schools across the country, especially in black and brown neighborhoods, there is an intentional community building and relationship building. Once those relationships are there, restorative justice practices are there to help people reflect on behavior and change from those behaviors. A lot of that looks like mediation. It looks like guidance interventions. It looks like community circles related to conflict that’s happened.
disproportionately, like in New York City, there are 27 percent of New York City students are black, and 54 of our suspension—54 percent of our suspensions are black students.
they’re suspended for all sorts of things, but the biggest—like the disproportionate suspensions that are happening are around subjective offenses like insubordination or defying authority, which you heard a little bit about from Zakiya and from Jitu. So, what that means is that teachers—teacher bias is influencing a large number of students that are being suspended, even for five days or more, for relatively minor offenses. We’re not talking about even fighting or bringing a weapon to school. We’re talking about insubordination or defying authority.
Jitu Brown talking:
I would like to make a connection to Betsy DeVos, if I could. So, Betsy DeVos, who has been a major contributor to ruining education in the state of Michigan, who helped destroy the elected school board in Detroit and took Detroit’s—or, Michigan’s schools from near the middle of the pack to almost at the bottom of educational achievement in the United States, was rewarded with the promotion to be the U.S. education secretary. And so, of course, she’s going to have policies that are outlandish, that make no sense in regards to educational achievement and are hyper-political in regards to their views.
But there’s a problem that I don’t think that we connect to. Arne Duncan was also unqualified to be superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, and they made him CEO. Educational achievement flatlined on his watch, massive resistance to school closings, students doing actions on him around the school-to-prison pipeline. And he was rewarded with becoming the education secretary of the United States. And what’s the real difference between him and Betsy DeVos? Vouchers? So, I think, if there was no Arne Duncan, there would be no Betsy DeVos.
We have to realize that education is too important for talking points. Education is the—education, for black people, has been a way to combat a suffocating oppression and a way to build a future for our families and communities across the United States. For immigrant families, it has been a way to make sure their children don’t have to live in fear and that they can build a future in the United States. So, we should be making policy that is rooted in sound educational principle—like where Arne Duncan sends his children, a University of Chicago Lab School. They don’t have metal detectors in Lab School.
They don’t have overcrowded classrooms. So I think Betsy DeVos is doing what she’s supposed to do as an ultra-right-wing, unqualified person in a position she has no reason to be in, other than to advance an agenda.
Jitu Brown talking:
Every city where school privatization has taken root—and school privatization takes the school-to-prison pipeline to another level, the way that young people are treated in charters and things of that nature. Every city where school privatization has taken root, and the loss of affordable housing, you’ve seen a massive decrease in the African-American population. Every city—Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore. And so, to us, that’s not a coincidence. The school-to-prison pipeline is a weapon to remove us from these spaces. Since we’re not valued, we’re treated as if we’re not valued. And these spaces are now being taken over by white folks who fled the cities in the ’50s and the ’60s. And so, I don’t think we need to—we should ignore that point, because this is about our right to exist, our right to exist in cities that we helped shape through our sweat equity.
a great man once taught me that—avoid strong opinions, for they suit weak men and women better. And public policy now is being implemented based on a white America’s opinion of our communities. And what we’re—so what we’re saying now is that the fight, bigger than—even bigger than the school-to-prison pipeline, is to make America realize the demand for equity, because we must have equity in how children are disciplined. We must have—now, I’m not saying equality—equity in school curriculum. We must have equity in how schools are resourced. So, the money that Betsy DeVos is saying that she wants to spend on guns, why doesn’t she try fully funding IDEA and Title I?
Zakiya Sankara-Jabar talking:
there is a deep hatred and in a value system of how we view black children, starting even at 3 years old, how we view black girls and black boys. Unfortunately, black girls are disciplined six times as much as white girls, whereas for our young black male students, while they represent, you know, most of out-of-school suspensions, expulsions and even interactions with law enforcement in schools, are three times as likely to be suspended than their white male counterparts. So this is absolutely an issue that is prevalent. It has been, even before, unfortunately, this administration. And we continue to organize and push for the right solutions, that are not hardening schools but are using positive approaches like restorative justice, that are using positive approaches like social emotional learning and trauma-informed care. And again, to Mark’s point, it also goes back to resources. So we have organizations also in Dignity in Schools that are make-suring that we’re pushing for equitable distribution of resources in our communities that need them the most.
Mark Warren talking:
What we mean is that the failures of our public school system are really a profound issue of racial and social justice in this country. It’s really coming out—the failures of our public school system really come out of the lack of power that low-income communities of color have in this country. And it’s a question of racial equity—Jitu spoke to this—the kinds of resources that are going into whiter, more affluent communities, compared to the lack of resources that are going into our urban and low-income communities. It’s a question of the way that poverty and racism interlock into our society, so that, for example, we don’t believe that you’re going to—we’re going to solve the issues facing public education solely within the four walls of schools, because education is a fundamental part of a larger systemic racism in our society, that children are coming to school living without adequate housing, in families where their parents are struggling to make a living—even when they’re working, they’re living in poverty—where there’s environmental degradation, where there’s police violence in communities. So we need a broader social justice movement that has public education at its heart, if we’re really going to transform the conditions and create an empowering public education system that really lifts up our young people and prepares them to be not just cogs in an industrial machine or fodder for our prisons, but really, you know, healthy, empowered participants in a socially just society.
E.M. Eisen-Markowitz talking:
I think even in the 13 years that I’ve been working in New York City public schools, there’s been a lot of rhetorical change around energy and like language to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and the preschool-to-prison pipeline and to reduce racial disparities in discipline and to create community schools and to empower parents. There’s a lot of change in rhetoric. There’s very, very, very little change in money, in resources. And it makes it really impossible to, as, you know, in teacher—like Mark said, we believe that the issues that are facing young people in schools are much bigger than the four walls of schools. And as teachers, we experience that every single day. Schools are microcosms of what’s happening across our neighborhoods, across our country, around the world. But there’s a reason why we focus in schools, too. There is change that can be done collaboratively in the school building with the people who are there every day, but those changes are really limited, if we’re just talking and we’re not actually reallocating resources. So, a big campaign like we heard from Zakiya nationally in Dignity in Schools Campaign is a divestment from policing and from metal detectors and a reinvestment in positive and supportive school cultures.
it’s money that they’re putting into metal detectors and the expansion of the—we call them school safety. We don’t we use the word ”SRO,” or “school resource officer,” in New York City. But they’re NYPD. So, they’re a division of the NYPD.
And those are the folks that then run the metal detectors. And there are lots of schools in New York City. There are over—I actually don’t know the number right now, so I won’t say it. But there’s a number of schools in New York City that still have metal detectors. And there are school communities that are organizing against the metal detectors right now, even at the same time as sort of like nationally there is, and specifically in New York City, there’s a push for more policing, because of the incidents that we’ve seen in schools. We are pushing against metal detectors and against the overfunding of police and policing of our young people.
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Jitu Brown
national director of the Journey for Justice.
Zakiya Sankara-Jabar
co-founder of Racial Justice NOW! and field organizer for the Dignity in Schools Campaign.
Mark Warren
co-author of Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out! He is a professor of public policy and public affairs at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and founder and co-chair of the Urban Research-Based Action Network.
E.M. Eisen-Markowitz
restorative justice coordinator, high school teacher and board member of Teachers Unite.
— source democracynow.org | 2018/10/3