The Disadvantage Of School-To-Prison Pipeline In Public Schools

The school-to-prison pipeline is ominous trend in the United States that pushes students out of school and into the juvenile justice system. Students at a disadvantage, such as children with learning disabilities or those faced with poverty, abuse, or neglect are the majority of students funneled through this pipeline. The pipeline is the result of schools failing to identify students in need to extra academic or social assistance. The resulting mass incarceration creates a vicious cycle for students that can be impossible to escape from.

Inadequate resources in public schools are generally the onset of the school-to-prison pipeline. Low teacher to student ratios, underqualified instructors, and lack of funding are all factors that give students the disadvantage in these situations and they’re educational needs are not met. This undoubtedly leads to students dropping out and falling through the cracks in their courses, increasing their risks for ending up in the court systems. The No Child Left Behind Act

encourages schools to push out low-performing students in order to obtain overall higher test scores.
Zero Tolerance policies have been enforced to push out those low-performing students. These policies call for the most severe punishment without looking into the circumstances. For example, a student found with nail clippers could be expelled from school, but had no intent to harm anyone with the nail clippers. Since the No Child Left Behind Act has been in place, suspension rates have increased significantly from 1.7 million in 1974 to 3.1 million in 2000. Exceedingly inflexible discipline policies force students into this pipeline and into the juvenile justice system.
Many schools have increased their reliability on policing their hallways instead of having properly trained authority figures monitor behavior. Police officers employed in schools have little or no training on working with the youth, and are quick to use police tactics on unruly students, which is impractical. Instead of working with students’ behavior issues, they’re being arrested in school for non-violent offenses. The rise in school-based arrests clearly demonstrates that students are being criminalized.
Children in the juvenile justice system have been denied their right for procedural protections. In one state, up to 80% of children in the system do not have lawyers. As students are being pushed through the pipeline, they find themselves in juvenile detention centers that provide little to no educational services. While many students are quickly shoved into this pipeline, it’s near impossible to reverse through it. There are many barriers to reentering traditional schools, so a majority of these students are never able to graduate from high school.
In July 2011, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder announced the launch of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative.

The Supportive School Discipline Initiative is a collaborative project between the Department of Justice and the Department of Education that will address the school-to-prison pipeline. The initiative’s goal is to support good discipline practices to foster safe and productive learning environments in every classroom by building consensus for action among federal, state, and local education and justice stakeholders, collaborating on research and data collection that may be needed to inform this work, developing guidance to ensure that school discipline policies and practices comply with the nation’s civil rights laws and to promote positive disciplinary options, and promoting awareness and knowledge about evidence-based and promising policies and practices among state judicial and education

leadership.
Funneling children out of school and into juvenile criminal justice systems has been a trend aimed at children who deal with learning disabilities, histories of poverty, abuse or neglect. Most of these children simply need mentors, counseling help, and positive influence in their lives. They instead receive isolation, punishment, and are pushed out of schools. The Department of Education has stepped and has been attentively addressing concerns and looking into abolishing the school-to-prison pipeline and help our youth succeed and become more than a statistic.