Reroute, Reframe, and Refocus: How Teachers Can Avoid Contributing to the School-to-Prison Pipeline

By: David Felipe

The school-to-prison pipeline is a widely discussed issue amongst educators and policymakers in the United States. Essentially, the pipeline emerges from disciplinary school rules and regulations that push the nation’s most at-risk students into the juvenile justice system. Harmful policies such as zero-tolerance policies, suspensions, school law enforcement, and expulsions for nonviolent offenses all contribute to this according to the American Bar Association, “ 2.7 million K-12 students received one or more out-of-school suspensions during the 2015-16 school year. This number revealed a disproportionate impact on Black or African American students. While this demographic made up just 8% of both the male and female students, they represented 25% and 14% of their respective gender’s out-of-school suspensions." Evidently, the school-to-prison pipeline disproportionately impacts students of color, LGBTQ+ identifying students, and generally, students from underrepresented backgrounds. The pipeline is actually much closer to us than we believe. Educators can play an everyday role in actively taking a stance against the school-to-prison pipeline with their teaching methods, practices, and beliefs. 

Learning For Justice has a “toolkit” for teachers that discusses exactly that. The first step in this toolkit is to “adopt a social-emotional lens,” or in other terms, “teach the whole child.” What this means is being able to incorporate social-emotional wellness in classrooms and teachings, promote mental health and wellness services to children, and actively look out for a student’s basic needs. This is critical to establishing trusting relationships with students, ultimately showing the importance of a teacher’s role. 

The second step would be to “know your students and develop your cultural competency.” In other terms, this would mean learning about your students, their backgrounds, and what different types of capital they bring to the classroom setting. Many students bring a wide set of social, cultural, and emotional capital that they are unaware they hold. A lot of times, it isn’t until someone they look up to makes it explicitly clear that they are strong in their own individual way, that they realize their potential. Affirming a student’s culture, or even just acknowledging/representing it, makes a very big difference in the level of their comfort. Learning about their families, being open to connecting with parents, and asking appropriate questions about name pronunciations greatly aid as well. Knowing your students also means making sure you do not use a deficit model to teach them. When you interpret a student’s behavior, try to focus on what they have been doing right and what they’ve been improving on. 

The third step would be to plan and deliver student-centered lessons. Essentially, as Edutopia puts it, “teachers encourage student-centered learning by allowing students to share in decisions, believing in their capacity to lead, and remembering how it feels to learn.” This will continue igniting their love of learning in a way that has their best interest at heart. 

The last two steps are very crucial to helping students avoid the school-to-prison pipeline: moving from punishment to development and resisting the criminalization of school behavior. Learning for Justice asks educators to focus on and celebrate student progress and incorporate intervention methods (conflict resolution, peer mediation, etc.) in the classroom. A point that they emphasize is: “Keep kids in the classroom and police out.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) mentions that there are 1.7 million students who attend public schools in the U.S. with police officers, but who have zero school counselors. They go on to say that these same schools also lack nurses, psychologists, and social workers. That means that 90% of students in public schools have some sort of law enforcement presence, but no other critical resources necessary to student well-being and success. Further, the ACLU points out that Black students and Native American students at at the highest risk of arrest, even more disproportionately impacted if they have a disability present. 

For all these reasons, teachers must make an active effort to protect their students from falling into this school-to-prison pipeline that has existed for years on end. Together, with educator support, we can lower the number of students arrested annually and better support our youth.