The ads for the program describe the crisis of the school to prison pipeline. According to the ad on Sirius for the Sunday 4 pm show, Arne Duncan will explain what the school to prison pipeline is and why it starts in school.
I hope someone listens. I am sure it doesn’t start in school, unless he means the bootcamp schools where children are dehumanized.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The school to prison pipeline is easy to explain. It is when you are a public official in the area of education who then sells out for your own interests, gets caught and ends up in prison. I am sure Arne is an expert.
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I would love to see Arne experience first hand a USDOE-to-prison pipeline by going to jail himself and experiencing all the horrors hardened criminals have been known to encounter in poorly managed and corrupt prison systems.
Arne has committed crimes against humanity, and his biggest one is his failure and wilingness to recognize how our society’s plutocratic design encourages the growth and spread of poverty and destabilization of families, and that THAT is what breeds crime far more than anything else.
Arne is a loathsome creature, desperate to blame teachers and administraors or middle class white suburban moms who “cannot face that their kid is not all that briliant any more.”
Of course, besides the usual round of plutocrats, like Eli Broad and other viruses, Obama and magazine-cover-obsesseed wife Michelle are equal to Arne in thier quest for destruction, rape, and plunder of many democratic institutions.
A few years ago, there was a noticebaly controversial New Yorker cover done up by the ever silly Barry Blitt protraying Obama and wife as militatnt terrorists from the Middle East.Of course, this was a comment on many an idiot’s claim that Obama was not an American and had sinister intentions towards the USA. While terrorism is never anything to laugh about, the idea of satirizing those two as terrorists who have decapitated public education is not far from the truth and works just fine in the realm of imagery and metaphors in my mind.
Hateful is as hateful does . . . . . All in the name of opportunism. That’s cabana boy Arne, and his pimp president for you. Glad to see Arne go.
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No one would buy your pipeline as-is – it only has one official in it.
If we build it up, buy some people in congress, promise a few jobs created from the incarceration of USDOE officials and relentlessly take public funds while exploiting the environment to make a little more room to house them…
We could sell that. Arne’s ego for his vast deep understanding of black and brown children in poverty could be one wing.
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I agree with you in all directions, except that I think we should be relentlessly CREATING public funds by in part, redistributing wealth and revolutionizing our tax system back to when it was far more equitable and when everyone paid thier fair share.
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The pipeline can be filled in Ohio, Arne’s number 1 state for new charter expansion.
The opportunity to hold Hansen accountable has been thwarted by Kasich’s appointee to the Ohio Board of Education, who claims the Ohio Dept. of Ed. has lawyer/client privilege for e-mails, which would elucidate data scrubbing that led to Hansen’s resignation. (Dayton Daily News)
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Robert,
Agree!
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Thank you . . .
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From Wikipedia
>The term “school-to-prison pipeline” is a phrase that is used by scholarsand education reform activists and organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to describe what they view as a widespread pattern in the United States of pushing students, especially those who are already at a disadvantage, out of school and into the American criminal justice system. They argue that this “pipeline” is the result of public institutions being neglectful or derelict in properly addressing students as individuals who might need extra educational or social assistance, or being unable to do so because of staffing shortages or statutory mandates.The resulting miseducation and mass incarceration are said to create a vicious circle for individuals and communities.
Components of the STPP:
Educational researcher Christine Christle and her colleagues have determined that school-level practices correlate to delinquency and incarceration. These practices include searches of students, strict rules outlined in the school handbook and code of student conduct, excessive policing at schools, and high-stakes testing that slates students for failure, grade retention, and dropping out of school.
High-stakes testing
More and more schools are being sanctioned for poor performance under the No Child Left Behind Act; as a result, teachers in these schools must bend to the standardized tests that are used for evaluations. Minority students are disproportionately subject to exit examinations that determine whether they can graduate from high school. These same students are likely to be in schools that have less funding and larger class sizes. Furthermore, their schools are often suffering—due to being punished for low test scores.<
It will be interesting to hear if Arne is asked about the role of high-stakes testing in the "school-to-prison pipeline?
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I wonder if anyone in ed reform will ever address this:
“Chicago school officials are taking steps to make sure dropouts aren’t being mislabeled to make the city’s graduation rates look better.
The action comes after WBEZ and the Better Government Association reported widespread problems in how student were being classified when they left high school”
After this came to light, CPS said the (real) increases were attributable to “credit recovery” alternative schools. Many of them are online for-profits (as they are in my state, Ohio). I believe one of the superintendents in my area of Ohio (although not the superintendent of my local school) pushes low performing kids into these online schools which makes his grad rate higher than anyone else in a 3 county area. We have economically diverse schools- they’re about half low income kids and the low performing kids are mostly low income. I believe he’s pushing those kids out and into online schools because parents of those kids have told me the school made it impossible for them to stay, with really draconian punishments. So is this what ed reformers want? Low quality for-profit online schools for the most vulnerable kids so they can brag about grad rate increases, like Rahm did in Chicago?
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The only way that schools can respond to the inertia of community/family culture is by bending to it. The dog (CFC) always wags the tail (schools).
I continue to appreciate your relentless reminders of just how little attention improving public schools gets, beyond the nonsense of test scores. Thank you.
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Here in NY state ed is between a rock (Common Core algebra I and ELA graduation tests) and a hard place (graduation rates). NYSED has yet to release the statewide results from tests that were taken and scored last June. Failure rates are significantly higher than the old Regents exams that were also required for HS graduation. Curious to see how they wiggle out of this one.
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Did Rod Paige (Bush’s Sec of Ed) do something similar to pushing out low test performers when he road his ‘Houston Miracle” into becoming Sec of Ed?
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What I have found is that politicians spout slogans and have no clue.
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Our schools have nothing to do with why the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This graph shows incarceration rates by state. Note that the southern states have the highest rates.
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/
The drug war and its use against minority communities has a lot to do with the excessive imprisonment of citizens in the United States. Our school systems did not create a police state. Our school systems did not pass get-tough-on-crime laws such as California’s three strikes law. Our schools did not decide that crack cocaine possession should be punished much more severely than powder cocaine possession. Our schools did not create for-profit prisons. And so on.
Duncan and others in power are just trying to deflect blame and make schools and teachers the scapegoats for all the ills of our society. Several years ago, politicians, including President Obama, were blaming higher education for high unemployment because students weren’t taking the right majors. Of course, picking the right major doesn’t matter much when no one is hiring in the depths of a serious recession caused by lax banking regulations, but who cares about reality when educators are such an easy target?
Now, the politicians want to blame the schools for our very own gulag archipelago. Classic scapegoating.
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Legislatures in red states rank highest in ALEC memberships.
The role ALEC played in filling prisons has been widely reported in the media.
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“Because of its complexity, the relationship to management, how labor is one, you can introduce a system … and people say, ‘No, we’d rather have no system at all, completely leave us alone,’ ” he said. “That’s a real possibility, if you don’t nurture these systems and get it so there’s critical mass. That’s a level of uncertainty that we don’t have in most areas we work in.”
It’s fun to watch Bill and Melinda Gates grapple with how difficult it is to operate in a democracy. Often their “systems” are questioned and even opposed. People simply will NOT just show the proper deference and admit how clearly superior their ideas for their children are.
I don’t know- couldn’t he have learned all this much more quickly by talking to a school board member or a county commissioner or something? “The public” tends to complicate matters in public systems?
“Bill Gates said he never anticipated the political pushback to the Common Core ”
He never anticipated that a huge national program they jammed into just about every public school in the country with no public debate would cause “pushback”. He thought no one would notice? Why do they believe public school parents don’t value their public schools and are okay with anything ed reform rolls out? What if we think it’s not an improvement?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/improving-us-schools-tougher-than-global-health-gates-says/2015/10/07/56da9972-6d05-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html
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Just wondering how minority advocate groups can, on one hand, insist that high-stakes testing is a “civil right” yet on the other hand, rail about the discrimination that produces the “school-to-prison pipeline” – when high stakes testing plays such a pivotal role in creating artificial, super-failure rates. Just wondering?
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Excellent observation. One explanation: Bill Gates has poured millions into co-opting major civil rights groups. Another is that some civil rights groups think the tests are an “objective” way to disclose inequities in education. Another is that key leaders in the civil rights groups who endorse high stakes testing are ignorant of the ugly history of standardizing testing as a means of stigmatizing people by race… a practice that can be said to continue to this day via the aggrandizement of test scores as measures of achievement and the “gap” in scores as predictors of life-outcomes. The latter is the sad contribution of economists, many psychometricians, and policymakers in education including, most recently President Obama, Arne Duncan, and a Congress likely to keep the high stakes tests in any reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
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I think the reason ed reform doesn’t hang together, why the pieces contradict and clash so often and appear incoherent, is because it’s really a collection of political actors. They have to keep all the various parties on-board and those parties have conflicting goals and priorities.
They try to paper those over but an outsider to the “movement” spots them immediately because one reform piled atop another often makes no sense.
I don’t think dismissing every criticism as “politics” will work forever, because public systems are inherently political- they have to be. Ed reformers know this, which is why they often launch what amount to well-funded political marketing campaigns.
Just saying “we want what’s best for kids” as if that takes care of all disagreement is nonsense- we all don’t agree on what’s best for kids, obviously, or this “movement” wouldn’t be so incoherent and contradictory. There’s a group of parents here who are very loud who would be thrilled if the school booted every disruptive kid immediately. They don’t get what they want because the school has to serve all kids, so their wishes have to give way to the larger goal.
Ed reformers won’t admit that. It’s easier to pretend everyone can have everything they want in a public school, but that’s simply not true and it will never be true, because when you pull one string the fabric changes. What benefits one often harms another.
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Isn’t it time that someone called the “high-stakes testing is a civil right” groups out on this curious contradiction? Maybe Arne will today . . ?
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NY Teacher,
You and others make an important point about the relationship of high-stakes testing to the “school-to-prison pipeline.” All standardized tests are normed on a bell curve. There is always a bottom half. With the advent of Common Core, the curve was shifted so that 70% fall below what is necessary to be “proficient.” The kids at the bottom fail year after year. At what point do they give up and lose interest in a game that is rigged against them?
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Here in NY we have already reached that point. In the JHS I teach in, roughly 8 out of 10 of my 8th graders have failed the Common Core math and ELA tests for three consecutive years. Education thought leaders like Cuomo, King, and Tisch and their Regents Reform Agenda has created chronic, institutionalized failure in the majority of our students and at a very vulnerable age ( 8 to 14). The harm inflicted my be irreparable, yet they just won’t stop.
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Diane
NYSED has yet to release the statewide results of the new Common Core aligned Regents exams in Algebra I and ELA. These are the first truly high-stakes CC tests as they are “must pass” for HS graduation. These tests were administered in June and, like the old Regents, are scored in-house within a few days of being administered. The reluctance of NYSED to release these scores must be looked into. What could they possibly be afraid of”
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It is oh so trendy and the mode of the day to blame poverty and its deleterious effects on teachers and public schools.
But OOPS! reality doesn’t fit that neoliberal, neoconservative, rightwing, plutocratic narrative at all.
1. Public schools and teachers do not operate independently. Their budgets, curriculum, restrictions, requirements, textbooks, materials, resources, and personnel are all dictated to them by politicians at the federal, state, and local level. Holding the teachers accountable for policies and budgets they have voice in setting is patently unfair and the lowest form of demagoguery.
2. Good paying jobs no longer exist in communities of poverty and color. Even when poor people of color attain college education and find a job they are paid far less than their white, middle class coworkers.
http://www.allgov.com/news/where-is-the-money-going/majority-of-black-and-latino-workers-earn-less-than-15-an-hour-majority-of-white-workers-earn-more-150415?news=856243
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley-diversity-tech-hiring-computer-science-graduates-african-american-hispanic/14684211/
http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/Your-Money/Debt-Management/A-True-Story-of-Predatory-Lending
3. Stereotypes about communities of color and their problems are political tools with a long, sordid, and very disturbing history of this country. Passing a 3rd, 8th, or 11th grade ELA and Math test will not end poverty nor will it address the true problems poor people of color or white face in inner cities and all poor people face in rural areas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/28/five-stereotypes-about-poor-families-and-education/
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on-drugs-how-president-nixon-tied-addiction-to-crime/254319/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
4. Getting into college and paying for college (including the cost of living and transportation while meeting family survival obligations) are near insurmountable obstacles that prevent poor children of color and poor white children alike from pulling themselves up by the mythological bootstraps of capitalistic success so favored by the reformists.
Click to access College_Affordability_for_Low-Income_Adults.pdf
http://convosofcolor.com/2013/04/15/race-and-college-admissions/
http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/06/the-us-governments-predatory-lending-program-000094
What this Arne Duncan/Obama/reformist demagoguery does do is absolve the selfish, rich people, greedy politicians and their supporters, racists, false religionists, and xenophobes of any obligation to care for their fellow human beings, to strive for justice for all, support the ideals of equality upon which this country was founded, and tell them that their antisocial, greedy, hate-filled, racists thoughts and actions are A-OK and NOT THEIR FAULT.
Arne Duncan has much to answer for as do Obama and all the other reformists who are using poor children of color, inner city poverty, and rural poverty to further a heinous and destructive ideology that benefits the very few and leaves the rest to suffer and die without recourse.
For-profit prisons, militaristic police forces, demonization of the other, fear of those who are different, scapegoating teachers, destroying the field of teaching and colleges of education, and underfunded, abused public schools being replaced by for-profit charters and private schools will never fulfill Friedman’s sick dream of profiting while simultaneously achieving equality. It has been proven a failure over and over again in place after place. It is a sick and cruel ideology that must be abandoned to the dustbin of history ASAP.
They must be isolated, challenged, and stopped so we can achieve a higher level of equality and living for all of our citizens.
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Number one should say “little to no voice”
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A concise explanation of the school-to-prison pipeline is provided by ACLU. It is worth reading. See link below:
https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-pipeline
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Arne the fraud.
Arne the psychopath.
Arne the liar.
Arne the greedy.
Arne the power hungry.
Arne the monster.
My older brother spend 15 years of his life in and out of prisons and the schools were not the cause. He cut school as often as he could. He often defied our parents. He ran with a motorcycle gang in his youth, because he wasn’t in school most of the time. He drank. He smoked. He did drugs and no one at school taught him to pick up those habits that would send him the prison repeatedly through his 64 year long life of working for poverty wages in non union jobs.
Our father drank and smoked too. Our father also spent time in jail as a youth, and he dropped out of high school at the age of 14 during the Great Depression. The schools did not cause the Great Depression. My father wanted to stay in school, and so did our mother who also had to drop out at age 14 to work as a waitress in a coffee shop to help earn money at poverty wages to help her mother and younger sister survive.
If I could, I’d slug Arne’s face in front of national TV, but only after I had been allowed to tell the truth to this country about the streets/poverty to prison pipeline and that the only escape is through the underfunded, under attack public schools that lack support from people like Arne the Barnum and Bailey circus freak, because corporate Charters would throw kids like my brother and me out on the streets, and they do it without a second thought. Then the corporate Charters ignore us and pretend we don’t exist while they cherry pick and manipulate the numbers to fool as many fools as they can.
There is no school to prison pipeline, Arne, that is a fiction created by the corporate education deform movement that paid for your soul. You work for the devil.
The school to prison pipeline is a fiction supported by the Walton family.
It is a fiction supported by the Bill Gates cabal.
It is a fiction supported by Eli Broad.
It is a fiction supported by people like Michelle Rhee and her corrupt and criminal husband.
It’s a poverty to prison pipeline.
It’s a gang to prison pipeline.
It’s a streets to prison pipeline.
It is an Arne Duncan to prison pipeline.
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This is what ACLU says:
“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.
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 beenexpelled for bringing nail clippers or scissors to school. Rates of suspensionhave 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
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.
David N. Figlio “Testing, Crime and Punishment,” JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS (Vol. 90 Iss. 4-5, May 2006).
Advancement Project, EDUCATION ON LOCKDOWN: THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO JAILHOUSE TRACK (Mar. 2005), p. 15.
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.
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.
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).
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.”
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This suggests that privatization in the form of charters could create a true school-to-prison pipeline.
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Raj, your level of ignorance and ability to be fooled is incredible. Where did you get your education? You have clearly swallowed hook, line and sinker the propaganda from the for profit privatize the public sector movement in the U.S.
Educate yourself and discover the real prison pipeline built by the for-profit war to privatize the public sector that started in the 1980s when Reagan was President of the U.S.
America’s public schools have been around for almost 200 years. From 1920, to the early 1980s, the prison population in the United States was growing slowly along with population growth and was pretty constant at 200k – 250k.
In 1980 the U.S. population was 226.5 million and less than 0.1% of the population was in the prisons and that percent held constant for decades up to the 1980s regardless of the public schools that have been around since the 18th century.
Then in 1983, President Reagan released the fraudulent and flawed A Nation at Risk Report that was the for-profit based shot that launched the corporate education reform movement against the U.S. public schools followed by decades of propaganda funded by oligarchs like the Walton family, Eli Broad, and the Bill Gates cabal to create the myth of America’s failing public schools.
What happened to the U.S. prison population after 1983 has nothing to do with America’s public schools and everything to do with the fraudulent, corrupt, autocratic, for-profit corporate education deform movement that parallels the growth of the private-sector for-profit prison movement in the U.S. that spends millions annually to lobby government to increase the length of prison sentences and increase the number of crimes that leads citizens, who mostly live in poverty, to prison
Federal and state governments have a long history of contracting out specific services to private firms, including medical services, food preparation, vocational training, and inmate transportation. The 1980s, though, ushered in a new era of prison privatization. With a burgeoning prison population resulting from the War on Drugs and increased use of incarceration, prison overcrowding and rising costs became increasingly problematic for local, state, and federal governments. In response to this expanding criminal justice system, private business interests saw an opportunity for expansion, and consequently, private-sector involvement in prisons moved from the simple contracting of services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons. [9]
The modern private prison business first emerged and established itself publicly in 1984 when the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) was awarded a contract to take over a facility in Hamilton County, Tennessee. This marked the first time that any government in the country had contracted out the complete operation of a jail to a private operator.[10] The following year, CCA gained further public attention when it offered to take over the entire state prison system of Tennessee for $200 million. The bid was ultimately defeated due to strong opposition from public employees and the skepticism of the state legislature.[11] Despite that initial defeat, CCA since then has successfully expanded, as have other for-profit prison companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#In_the_United_States
How for-profit prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/how-for-profit-prisons-have-become-the-biggest-lobby-no-one-is-talking-about/
The real title of this pipeline should be ALL of the following options:
The Arne Duncan to Prison Pipeline.
The Walton family to prison Pipeline.
The President Reagan to Prison Pipeline.
The A Nation at Risk to Prison Pipeline.
The G. W. Bush to Prison Pipeline.
The Clinton to Prison Pipeline.
The President Obama to Prison Pipeline.
The for-profit, autocratic corporate education deform movement to Prison Pipeline.
The for-profit war to privatize the public sector to prison pipeline.
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Akademos,
You may be right, but it is not as important as the statement of the first paragraph:
“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)”
It does not blame the teaching profession.
Blame is shared by everyone, including the public (funding/taxation), government (NCLB just to name one) and later on takes on the juvenile court system (government).
This is most concise and documented explanation I have seen published by a well respected organization who fights for our civil liberties.
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Raj, read my response at 12:30 pm EST
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It is already posted.
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The ACLU:
“We are for high-stakes testing as a civil right, AND we believe it contributes to the discriminatory STPP.” Say what?
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Those are the effects of poverty combined with lack of responsibility on local and wider levels of gov’t.
It starts with poverty, though. As simple as that.
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“Starts with poverty”, and made worse by the political policies of the U.S. oligarchy
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Lloyd
Every time the news reports a particularly heinous crime and the criminal is perp- walked in front of the cameras I think, there goes the former student of at least 50 different teachers. On the local news I occasionally see a former student; and what teacher hasn’t perused the police blotter in their local paper picking out former students as well. If you asked the criminals who was at fault for their wayward ways, the last person they would ever name is their 5th grade teacher or their principal. A fiction indeed.
What many outsiders seem to forget is that our public schools are the one and only institution that directly serves every single American, be they law abiding or not. So they take this unavoidable correlation, people who went to school (everyone) and prisoners (some people who went to school) and start pointing fingers at the one institution that provides the opportunity for escaping a life of crime.
What in God’s name did the millions of people who entered this “helping profession” ever do to deserve such scorn?
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Go Lloyd Lofthouse!!!
Great spirit you have!
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Simply ask who benefits from the school to prison pipeline. What academic disciplines are responsible for the inappropriate philosophy that shaming, guilting, cohersion, intimidation and blaming the victim will help learners academically? Principals? Lawyers? Judges? Cops and Prision guards and those invested in prisons for profit?
Yeah, all of them and until they are exposed for the hacks they are education will continue to suffer. Suffering is their answer for everything…Yeah, we’ll fix education with more suffering. Effing crazy.
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