The School-to-Prison Pipeline: School Discipline

Last week, I wrote an article about implicit biases and briefly mentioned school discipline. This week, I am going to expand on the inequity in school discipline and how the presence of cops in schools and zero-tolerance policies disproportionately harm students of color. This is the first part of a series on the school-to-prison pipeline, and school discipline is the starting line of this pipeline.

What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

The school-to-prison pipeline is a national trend showing that children, many of those who have suffered from abuse or learning disabilities, are channeled from public school systems into the juvenile and criminal justice system. How this happens is a complex issue, so I am writing a series of articles to explore it further.

Why Students Are Disciplined

The main reasons students are disciplined are for “disrespectful” or “disruptive” behavior, absenteeism, and tardiness. Absenteeism most commonly occurs in LGBTQ students or students experiencing homelessness. Thus, these are situations outside of school that are out of control of students and prevent them from going to school, and the punishment for this is to suspend students which further keeps them out of school.

When discussing “disrespectful” and “disruptive” behavior the idea of implicit bias comes back into play as the perception of what is disrespectful or disruptive is up to the teacher, with minimal direction as to what qualifies. Black students are significantly overrepresented in every single disciplinary category: suspension, expulsion, referral to law enforcement, and school-related arrests. Black boys are suspended three times more than white boys and black girls are suspended six times more than white girls. Black girls don’t misbehave more than white girls, but they are more often dress coded and “adultified,” held to a higher standard and given harsher punishments than their white peers for the same actions. One example of this is at a high school in Texas where two students made derogatory comments. The black girl was given two days of suspension and the white student got a parent-teacher conference and warning to “think before you speak.” In addition to these racial biases, students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended than students without disabilities.

Police in Schools

In recent decades, there has been an exponential increase in the presence of police officers in school. As of 2017, New York City Public Schools employs 5,200 school resource officers, effectively police officers assigned to schools. This gives the city more police officers in schools than counselors. Schools state that they have these officers in schools for student safety, and that a desire for a greater police presence was sparked following horrific school shootings such as Columbine, which created an uptick in the desire to protect students.

Unfortunately, having these police officers present often does more harm than good to the students in these schools. Just having police present led to the handling of any school discipline by law enforcement as opposed to school officials – setting up a direct link to the justice system from schools. Furthermore, the schools that have the most police officers in them are in urban areas, which have disproportionately higher numbers of black and latinx students.

Zero-Tolerance Policies

The Columbine shooting combined with other movements in the country at the time, such as the War on Drugs, to prompt zero-tolerance policies in schools. The idea was founded on the concept that cracking down on minor violations would prevent larger tragedies – such as bringing guns to school.

These minor violations range based on schools and districts, from having alcohol or drugs, small fights, swearing to a teacher or principal, and “disrespectful” behavior, which could mean something as small as cutting a student in the lunch line.

These zero-tolerance policies have not been proven by research to work. Instead, these minor offenses that used to result in a visit to the principal’s office now end in suspension. The US Department of Education reports that one in five students are suspended at some point in middle and high school. Thus, instead of helping to protect students, they have only increased the rate that students are suspended and out of school, which has magnified the racial disparities in school punishment.

Resulting Effects of Suspension

Once a student is suspended they “not only fall behind academically, but are significantly more likely to drop out of school altogether, fail to secure a job, rely on social welfare programs,” and having more free time as a result of not being in school leads to more unsupervised time and further disengagement from academics and society.

Steps – Forward and Backward – by the Federal Government

The Obama administration took steps to eliminate these zero-tolerance policies and provided disciplinary policies intended to reduce the number of suspensions among black children. Unfortunately, in 2018 Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos rescinded these guidelines citing that they “made schools less safe,” because teachers were not free to discipline students as much, although her evidence was mostly anecdotal and had little research to back it up.

The Current Moment

Everyday we see more policy, corporate, and individual changes to improve race relations in this country in response to the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd over a month ago. One major call has been to get police out of schools. Some areas have already stepped up – the Minneapolis School Board announced that it would sever its ties with the Minneapolis Police Department, eliminating the police officers from school hallways. And there have been calls in other major cities to do the same. These calls aren’t falling on deaf ears, and more school boards are holding votes on whether or not to eliminate the police in schools. Activists and the public are putting more pressure on these measures to pass.

There is a long journey to creating more equitable treatment in school discipline, but this is a start. We need to fully utilize the current movement to continue to put pressure on those in power who have the ability to make students safer by keeping police out of schools.

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Kelly

Kelly Edwards was a Writing and Research Intern during summer 2020. She is a senior at Vanderbilt University studying Public Policy and Child Development, with a minor in Human and Organizational Development.