The School to Prison Pipeline

our subsequent topic that will publish next week. That's right, we are taking a closer look at racial biases and how it shapes society. And in order to get into the mindset of today's show, let's all sort of do a little pretend imagination thing here. Imagine that you're lining up with other students and about twenty steps in front of you, someone is holding a dollar bill. But it's not just any dollar bill. I mean, this is the

brass ring. This is the thing that's going to to determine and who you're going to marry, what sort of job you're going to take, um, what sort of overall wealth you're going to amass, what your own healthcare um access will be, and the level of your well being. Okay, it just determines where you're going to be in life. This dollar bill, So it's a really important dollar bill. Okay,

that's why everybody is lining up for it, all these students. Now, imagine that before you can step forward, you discover that you have been scooted back about five steps because you live and say a poor community where you have little or no access to educational resources. Now imagine you look down and your skin is not white, but it is

of color. Now you have been scooted back another five steps because statistically, the experience you have in school is going to be different from the white kid who is now ten steps in front of you. So when you hear ready set go, who do you think is going to get to that dollar bill first, that brass ring, It's going to be the white kids. It's the white kid. And unfortunately, um, that analogy is the reality of the

education system today in the United States. And uh, that is setting up some some very serious ramifications for what's happening with students success. And in some ways you might even say that it determines who is going to go on to college and who is going to go on to say maybe even a life of crime and poverty. Indeed, and to and to reference the title of the podcast, to prison into directly into the prison system. Uh. And in the course of the United States, it goes without saying,

we have quite a prison system. As of two thousand fourteen, US prisons contain an all time high of two point four million people that, by the way, exceeds the population's entire populations of such countries as Cutter, Nambia, and Iceland. Yeah, that's right. The US has close to twenty five percent of the world's prisoners, even though the U s accounts

for only five percent of the world's populations. And some point to the war on drugs as uh, one of the reasons why the US prison population is so high. On September and the end of the most recent fiscal year for which federal offense data were available, eight thousand, two hundred inmates we're talking about fifty one of the federal prison population were imprisoned for possession, trafficking, or other

drug crimes. Yeah. And in fact, in the federal prison system, more than half of those sentenced to stints of a year or longer are are still there for drug crimes. So yeah, now keep in mind that more than fifty

of the US prisoners are black and Hispanic. And when you look again at possession, trafficking other drug crimes, now consider that about fourteen million white people report using illicit drug as opposed to only two point six million African Americans, and so there are five times as many whites using drugs as African Americans. Yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites. And what you begin to see emerge here is this

the story of inequality, um, and not just circumstance. Indeed, I mean it's it's the same laws are on the books, but it's almost like there are two separate books of laws. Um. Here are just a couple of more factoids that come, figures that come to us from then double a cp um. African Americans now constitute nearly one million of that total incarcerated population that we mentioned. African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, and one in

one hundred African American women are in prison. So what if we told you that the cards had been stacked against this particular prison population from the get go, and a lot of it had to do with education. Well, you might look at Brown versus the Board of Education

and say, how can that be? That's right? Now, just to refresh Brown versus Board of Education, we're talking about the landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the court declared state laws establishing separate separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. Um, of course, it would be a number of years before all segregated school systems were desegregated. But this was responsible that this

Brown and Brown two were responsible for getting the process underway. Right. This was and this is a moment in time that we still look back to and say, this is when the playing field at least is supposedly leveling out right. Chief Justice Earl Warren had said, quote, in these days, it's doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he has denied the opportunities of

an education. Such an opportunity where the state has undertaken to provide it is a right that must be made

available on equal terms. Now. In a two thousand and fourteen interview with The New York Times, Daniel J. Loison, who is the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles Civil Rights Project said, quote, we here, we are sixty years after Brown versus Board of Education, and the data altogether still show a picture of gross inequity and educational opportunity. So the bottom line is still separate and still unequal.

Even though we sort of dismantled this machine um of segregation, we end up rebuilding the machine. And uh and and and in the end, the machine does kind of what it did before. It's it's heartbreaking stuff. But we're gonna

we're gonna break down exactly how all of this works. Yeah, and today's episode is ultimately about breakdown and failure, failure of a society to recognize its systems in place are so flawed that it's created this insidious atmosphere that is tantamount to a trap for a large segment of the population. And again, this is what we're calling the school to

prison pipeline. And although we won't be able to cover this idea in its entirety, because it's really vast and it's really complicated, we do intend to discuss aspects of this acute inequality and education. And one that has created this metaphorical pipeline to crime and poverty. Yeah, and again it comes back to just like the basic idea of what school should be. Right, But the school is the

launching pad for the rest of your life. It's it's your your education, your forming the tools that you're gonna need to succeed and uh and and setting setting the baseline for for what you're going to be as an adult in society. Yeah, and school is one of those things that everybody had as these robust, great utopian ideas of what it can be and should be. But when the you know, the rubber meets the road, the fact of the matter is it's just not living up to

a lot of ideals. And the reason we know that is that we finally have data because last year the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights conducted the first analysis in fifteen years of the US public schools and they found startling inequities. We're talking about nine seven thousand schools representing forty nine million students. Now, if you are a white kid, if you are a Caucasian kid, you are probably going to get these offerings. In fact, seventy

percent of white kids get these offerings. A full range of math and science courses including algebra, biology, calculus, chemistry, geometry, and physics. And this really sets those students up for a the robust future, right because all of those classes, in particular the science classes are going to lend themselves to higher scores on s A t um tests and it's also going to set them up for a career

in STEM. Right then the sciences, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Yeah, those those key STEM classes that that are so important, especially if you're you're looking to enter a pipeline into a career, uh in in some sort of STEM discipline. Alright, So, like you said, seventy of white students attend to classes with this full full range of these math and science courses.

How does that break down for Black and Latino kids. Well, according to the to the fifteen year study, slightly more than half of all Black students have access to the full range of math and science courses. Slightly more than two thirds of Latinos have access and uh and then if you look to Native American Native Alaskan students, less than half of them are able to enroll in the in the sort of high level math and science courses

that again, are available to the white student population. Now, the survey found that in terms of access to seasoned teachers for kids of colors, that Black, Latino, American, Indian, and Native Alaskan students are three times as likely as white students to attend schools with higher concentrations of first year teachers, and Black students are more than four times as likely as white students to attend schools where one out of every five teachers does not meet all state

teaching requirements, and for Latino students there twice as likely. Now, one other statistic in here we're gonna throw at you is that the teacher salary gap between high schools with the highest concentrations of Black and Latino students and those with the lowest is more than five thousand dollars a year, meaning the incentive is not there for seasons teachers really qualified teachers to go to the schools that need the most.

So the end result here, I mean it's pretty staggerant because basically you were talking about a situation where students of color simply do not have the same access two STEM classes that pave the way for a STEM career in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and you typically have new inexperienced teachers tackling low income in African American schools, the the the the very teaching environments where you ideally would want to have an experienced educator, someone with the necessary

tools to tackle the students and uh and and engage them. Um. And this is what Daniel J. Lowson calls a gross inequity and educational opportunity. And I think there's there's no there's no more succinct way to say it. Um, Like the the deck is stacked, and you can get into a very long discussion about how that deck comes to be so stacked, how much of it is intentional, how much of it is accident, how much of it just comes of building this current educational machines, current school to

prison pipeline without really looking at it for fifteen years. Yeah, because if you think about it, those first year teachers are not just inexperienced, it's it's that they they've lacked all of the additional courses that teachers get throughout their career. So if you're a teacher with fifteen years experience, it's not just that you've been teaching for fifteen years. You've had additional instruction every single year and many different areas,

and some of those areas may even be sensitivity, right. Um, So it's it's really important to note that the students again that need these experience really well qualified teachers the most are not getting them. And if these students lack any sort of additional educational resources anyway, right, may they might not have money to go and take extra courses to um beef up on s A T questions for instance,

Then they're really going to fall behind. So this sort of data gives you an idea of the disparity in quality in terms of education. But what about the outcomes of the white kid versus the kid of color inside the actual school. Well, it turns out that racial bias is certainly at play here. Expulsion and suspension rates for black kids are as you guessed it, quite a bit higher.

A two thousand and intense study of seventy two thousand schools kindergarten through high school shows that while black students make up only of those enrolled in the school sampled, they account for thirty five percent of those suspended once, of those suspended more than once, and thirty of all expulsions and overall, black students were three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their

white counterparts. And this was interesting too. Black girls were suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys. And this leads right into the in school arrest rate. And this is really interesting because you know, I think back on my days in school, and I specifically remember, like, one guy committed a murder on school property. So of course the police showed up and dealt with it. That's pretty cut and dry. There's a murder is when committed

you bringing, you bringing the police. It's no longer a school matter. But but we see this this disturbing national trend in which you have you have schools turning to police who are then arresting kids for minor infractions. So so you end up treating the students more like criminals and less like students, even for the little stuff. So they're getting the stigma of criminal instead of just mirror,

you know, misbehavior leveled at them. Uh, in many cases, they're being they're they're getting thrown out, they're being sent back to places of stress and disadvantage, which again is crazy, since the school should be a place of hope, a place a springboard, a refuge from uh, those those places of disadvantage and uh and the statistics are pretty uh pretty depressing when you when you when you shake it

shake it out along these lines. For instance, seventy of students involved in in school arrest are referred to law enforcement and referred to law floor enforcement or black or Latino. And by the way, sixty of all males in state or federal printed prison do not have high school diplomas.

So yeah, you just have this disturbing trend where the student is just treated as a de facto criminal, uh, you know, almost right off the bat, which is heartbreaking when you think that if that student doesn't have a safe haven at home, and they don't have a safe haven at school, then they truly are set up for this.

And by the way, just to throw some more stats at this from the l a c P. Nationwide, African Americans represent of juvenile arrest, of youth who are detained, forty ex percent of the youth who are judicially way to criminal court, and fifty eight percent of the youth admitted to state prisons. And we see another disturbing trend with foster care. Again, another um area where Ideally, there should be a lot of hope. This should be about children getting a leg up on society, on their lives,

but instead we see some very disturbing trends. Black and Latinos make up fifty percent of children in the foster care system, of foster care youths entering the juvenile justice system, our placement related behavior cases of young people leaving foster care will be incarcerated within a few years of turning eighteen and fifty percent of young people leaving foster care will be unemployed within a few years of turning eighteen um.

And then an even more startling figure here, uh, this comes from Community Coalition of South l a nonprofit um dartling inmates in California State Prison our former foster care youth. So you see that direct funnel from the foster care system into criminal and into the prison system. And again it's telling this story that this is one of the

least supported segments of society. Right, So, if you have marginalized communities of color and you have foster care kids, they are not getting the support, the safe haven that they need. And this kind of stigmatization actually begins shockingly early.

In fact, in preschool because one of the things that the survey found from the Department of Education uh that while black children make up of preschool enrollment, close to half of all preschool children who are suspended more than once are African American and Latitia Smith Evans of the u c l A And an interview with The New York Times said about this quote, it's incredible to think about or fathom what pre case students could be doing

to get suspended from schools. Yeah, indeed, it just boggles the mind. I mean, I've I've been watching preschooler and younger age kid kids and there's what are they doing that requires drastically different disciplinary action? Yeah, there are four and five year olds all right. There is no you know, magic silver bullet here that we can point to that says it is the reason for why the system is the way it is. But one of the contributing factors

is something called zero tolerance. Now, this is a policy that was put into place after the nineteen nine Columbine High School massacres. It's a basically a bunch of policies that escalated infractions among the student body, and it was never intended to be misused, but certainly this is what

has happened over the years. According to Amanda Marcatti, writing for Slate magazine, quote, students, especially students of color, are hit with outrageous and disproportionate disciplinary measures in the school system, and this is what is contributing to those higher rates

of in school arrests, expulsions, and suspensions. Yeah, I mean, in this you're just you're seeing a situation where, out of a time of fear and and in particular cases a time of need for advanced, more powerful tools to deal with with threats, um, you end up having the

tool chest opened, uh for abuse. You you know, you see this pretty much in any area of life, right when you end up giving um law enforcement or government or any kind of power more power to deal with a scenario than what happens when they want to use those powers just across the board. Yeah, absolute power absolutely corrupts. And we discussed this a bit too in our episode on the Panopticon, which has definitely some other, uh similar

threads lowing through it. Indeed, now another another theory as to what's going on here comes down to standardized test um. Some critics blame the educators. The accusation accusation here being that they push out students who score lower un standardized test in order to improve the school's overall test scores.

And if there's a if there's an educator in your life, then you've probably you've probably heard plenty about what standardized tests bring to the teaching scenario, what the various pros and cons are and uh. And here the argument is that the you know, the the cart ends up pulling

the horse. Uh. Instead of the test being this measuring stick stick for what the students are doing and being about uh, you know, gauging the students, helping the students, it ends up being a situation where you're you're calling the herd with the with the whole mindset being based around the performance of the test. So you end up racially calling the student population in order to achieve higher

test scores for that school. Everything is just completely backwards, right, because the school would like to purge those test scores, right, And in that way, the students are purged from the student body just so that they can rise their numbers and look all clean and squeaky. Unfortunately, now, another factor

in play is something called implicit bias. In the current institutes paper on this, they define implicit biases the mental process that causes us to have negative feelings and attitudes about people based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. Because this cognitive process functions in our unconscious mind, we are typically not consciously aware of the negative racial biases

that we developed over the course of our lifetimes. So, of course, in a perfect world administration, school administrations, and students and teachers would all understand this and be aware of this implicit bias and be able to bring this awareness to the classroom and the way that they behave and they doll out disciplinary measures. But this doesn't exactly happen.

For example, a two thousand and three study found that students who displayed quote a black walking style were perceived by their teachers as lower in academic achievement, highly aggressive, and more likely to be in need of special education services. In addition, a two thousand and seven meta analysis of research founds statistically significant evidence that teachers hold lower expectations either implicitly or explicitly, or both for African American and

Latino children compared to European American children. And this is something that we touched upon when we talked about, um, how we behave toward one another, and the sort of expectations that we communicate, uh, even non verbally, and how that child will absorb that and then actually it will become a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, I mean it's the basis of stigma. You end up attaching stigma and up attaching titles and expectations of these students and then they

they they match the form. So the cumulative effect here is is pretty devastating. Um, you have this disproportionate give, this disproportionate disciplinary action in place, and so the students that are affected, they end up falling behind in their classes, you know, in the in some of the better scenarios, right Uh, and then the worst scenarios, they're suspended, they're

shuffled off to separate classes, etcetera. And this leads to higher dropout rates, uh, you know, and uh and also those the subsequent higher unemployment and imprison rates imprisonment rates that we've already discussed. So this leaves black and Latino students two times less likely to graduate high school than their white peers. So again you see the pipeline in place here where uh, these kids end up falling through the cracks and uh, and then are far more likely

to wind up in the in the prison system. And just to bring this down to an individual level too, I'm sure everybody out there has had that teacher that nurtured them, that that really fostered their abilities, who saw something in them, and then you know, you acted accordingly, right,

you rose to the occasion. UM, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm sure everybody also has had that one teacher that they thought had it out for them that they kind of maybe shied away from, maybe even in class, your body language change and you try to make yourself invisible because you felt like that teacher didn't have a lot of confidence. And you now imagine that that was the majority of your experience and how that

would call your perception of the world and your own abilities. Yeah, you end up with a situation where the again, the deck is stacked from the start. Now, this, uh, this sort of school to prison pipeline doesn't exist solely in

the population of children of color. Recently, I had volunteered with a fantastic group here in Atlanta called Vox teen and it was a day in which um, the girls were exploring sex and sexuality, and my group was dealing with gender equality but also l gb QT equality, and there were some representatives from Georgia Equality and they talked a lot about the school to pipeline problem with the lgb QT community, and it turns out that there are

a lot of parallels here. Indeed, LGB youth, particularly gender nonconforming girls, are up to three times more likely to experience harsh disciplinary treatment by school administrators than their non LGB counterparts. LGB youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. They make up just five to seven percent of the overall youth population, but they rep in fift of those

in the juvenile justice system. And LGBT youth reports significant distrust of school administrators and generally say they don't believe that the school fishers officials do enough to foster safe

and welcoming, welcoming school climate. So again you have a situation where for many of these students, they don't feel they don't feel feel supported, they don't feel safe even in the in the in these school environments, and it ends up, you know, being a failure of the school as a as a safe haven, as a launching path, as a as a place of hope. Again because you know, the the administrations and some of the teachers and again not all, but some of them carry with them certain

biases and that colors our perception of that kid. And so if that kid is doing something, then it can be uh, grossly misperceived as this even sort of grotesque ory of their behavior, when in fact the kid wasn't doing any right. Um. Again, the punishment doesn't always correlate with the actual misbehavior or any it may not even be misbehavior. So we wanted to bring this topic to

you guys today. Again, we know it's not a light and everyone, but we thought that you would appreciate it because this is, uh, this is a huge problem the prison population. We we are responsible for the largest prison population in the world. And in order to drill down into that and try to figure out why, you have to look at schools. Yeah, I mean, certainly there are other other parts of the problem. You can get into

the privatization of prisons, etcetera. But this is a major component and and his uh, you know, it's it's not pleasant information, but particularly if you're if you're a citizen in the United States, I feel like it's it's really important to have some of these facts bouncing around in your skull. And as we get into um greater discussion of of how racial bias works in the brain in

a subsequent episode. UM, you know, it's important to have this to the all back to because it's easy to sort of fall back on, oh, well, you know, implicit bias that just relates to how I, you know, how I interact with you know, a person of another race and the elevator or something. Uh, it's it's good too, but it's good to to remember that they are far larger, overreaching um issues in play that are shaping children right now in classrooms and their future behavior and their future

successes and failure. All right, so there you have it again. Uh, stay tuned for another episode coming up that's going to really get into racial racial bias and how that works with with the human mind and you know, how we can approach it as individual humans. Uh. In the meantime, if you would like to check out more of our content, past episodes, etcetera. Videos, anything you like, you'll find them

a stuffabole your mind dot com. That is the homepage the Mothership and uh that's where you also find links up of social media accounts that we handle, and if you guys have any first person experiences you would like to share with us, we hope you do so, and you can email us blow the mind at how staff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com