This is a great and pertinent segment of Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now,” featuring leaders of the fight for Educational Justice in our schools.
The activists on the front lines include Jitu Brown, National Director of Journey for Justice (and a member of the board of the Network for Public Education); Zakiya Sankara-Jabar, the co-founder of Racial Justice NOW! and field organizer for the Dignity in Schools Campaign. And in New York City, we speak with high school teacher and restorative justice coordinator E.M. Eisen-Markowitz and Mark Warren, co-author of “Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out!”
The transcript begins:
AMY GOODMAN: As Brett Kavanaugh objects to being held accountable for his behavior in high school, we look at 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?
Where do schools get the idea that children should be treated like criminals? Is this an effort to replicate the no-excuses model of punitive discipline?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is beyond horrible and disgusting.
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And saddest truth: old news. The mainstream media has not been willing to bring long years of complaint and despair about the test-score/PayForSuccess school-to-prison pipeline to the public eye.
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I hate to put on my tinfoil hat for this one, but here goes. Jerry Brown is a charter guy; the local control argument that puts most of the discipline decisions at the school site or district level is what allows charter schools to suspend more often, particularly AA’s and SPED. The charter authorizers have no control over suspensions and discipline at these schools since each one operates as its own LEA, and it allows charters to do whatever they want to push kids out.
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“Where do schools get the idea that children should be treated like criminals?” — when I am comparing schools with prisons I am being shushed. Funny. As I said before, the whole system is broken. The idea of detention is completely foreign to many countries. Four-minute recess is unthinkable. Metal detector? Sniffing police dogs? Police officer on campus? Chicken-wire fence? Double-door gates? Cameras? Puh-lease.
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What galaxy are you from? Children are being shot in schools (Statistically the safest place for children, is in a public school). Schools must have security cameras, metal detectors, fences, guards , to protect children’s lives.
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We are on the wrong track if teachers feel the need to resort to physical restraint of young students. In addition. it is much harder for teachers to do their jobs in districts with large classes of poor students and few resources with which to meet their needs. Many teachers are feeling abandoned and frustrated by systems that seem not to care about them or the students they serve.
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I wonder if the teacher that cut the four year old lose did it because that teacher didn’t agree with the teacher that zip tied the four year old in the first place.
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Good question and an important one, Lloyd. Thank you.
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Makes me so sad.
Read: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.
Film debuts soon.
The Hate U Give https://g.co/kgs/11o6Ks
Thank you, Diane.
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This is some very good news–
Reverend William J. Barber II, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C. is the founder and president of Repairers of the Breach.
He is a speaker with the power of MLK Jr. and the author of many books.
He is now a 2018 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship – a so-called genius grant. I heard him speak at an NPE conference, with grace power and humility after being insulted and delayed by the airline operator.
http://www.wesa.fm/post/macarthur-genius-grant-winner-rev-william-j-barber-ii#stream/0
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Frustrated teachers with their hands tied will do almost anything. We should review these incidents as evidence that the climate that produces this type of behavior is not some cynical or perverted individual, but someone whose own hands have been tied. Perhaps the answer is not passing laws restricting what punishments schools can apply, but in passing laws supplying teachers with the resources needed to solve all the dramatic problems that confront them.
Making a law to prevent teachers from doing something is counterproductive. Who will enforce such a ban, any ban? Passing a budget that funds small classes and pays professional wages reduces the probability that unprofessional behavior will be kept to a bare minimum.
No one wants to treat children in a cruel way. The probability that this will not occur lies more in the budget than in the ban.
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Curious…I often read “black & brown” and I wonder if Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians are lumped into the “brown” racial category? If so, should they not be called out separately in the fight for educational justice? Keep in mind, “off-reservation boarding schools” still exist in the United States. I would argue our indigenous students are the most underserved, marginalized, and “invisible” demographic group in America.
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Last summer I watched a performance of Blackfeet dancers at Glacier NP. They were from Browning, about thirty miles away. A very nice lady from Billings we met in a campground warned us not to go over to Brownning because of their high crime rate. Four of the adults presenting us with a lesson on their culture were teachers at the local public schools at Browning. Their drummers and singers were amazing. I got the impression their school was underfunded in the extreme. The contrast between these nice folks and their community reputation was reminiscent of other parts of our ignored country.
It was not so many years ago that a republican congressman used the federal government’s underfunding of the reservations as an example of how the government screws everything up. For him failure of federal policy failure was a justification for privatization of the world.
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not only marginalized in school curricula, but in many cases completely disappeared…
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