The school to prison pipeline is a term used for the militarization of schools funneling kids from classrooms into the criminal justice system.  Discretionary violations – those where punishment is not mandated – disproportionality impact Black students overwhelmingly leading to persistent involvement with law enforcement.  

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What is disproportionality?

Disproportionality refers to the “overrepresentation” or “underrepresentation” of a particular demographic group relative to the presence of this group in the overall student population.  In education, there is disproportionality in special education (Cruz & Rodl, 2018), in gifted programs (List & Dykeman, 2019), and in suspension and expulsion data (Mizel, Miles, Pederson, Tucker, Ewing, & D’Amico, 2016).  While there is much controversy around how we define under and over representation, the data are clear that teacher bias, both explicit and implicit, influences recommendations of suspensions and expulsions as early as preschool (Gilliam, Maupin, Reyes, Accavitti, & Shic, 2016) and that Black boys are three times more likely to receive those suspensions and expulsions than white students.  That’s just one way disproportionality shows up in schools and it has dire, life altering consequences for far too many.

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Explicit Bias.  These are the biases that we generally think of as racism (a belief that members of specific ethnic and/or racial groups are inherently inferior).  These biases are consciously held and slow to change. People with explicit biases toward specific ethnicities, races, or gender norms tend to support punitive punishment structures such as zero tolerance (McIntosh, Girvan, Horner, & Smoklowski, 2014).

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Implicit Bias.  These biases are unconscious, deeply held, and often do not align with our declared beliefs (Kirwan Institute, 2018).  These are the biases that are activated involuntarily. Everyone has implicit biases! We come to them from our upbringing, our lived experiences, and our professional training.  We must work to bring our implicit biases into our consciousness in order to diminish the negative impacts on our learners, our colleagues, and our communities.  

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The Obama administration passed a regulation designed to ensure children of color were not disproportionality suspended, expelled, or identified for special education.  However, the Trump administration’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, delayed implementation of this regulation until just now when a federal court ruled it must be put into effect immediately.  This is a consistent and documented reality for kids and families in our educational system.

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What does this look like in our schools?

First, let’s consider what the (pre)school to prison pipeline looks like in our schools.  The pipeline can be seen in the School Resource Officers flanking the front doors and walking the halls of schools.  It can be seen in zero tolerance policies and mandatory suspension/expulsion guidelines. It looks like moving kids to self contained classrooms with labels of emotional behavior disability without then providing them with access to the general curriculum and meaningful, intentional supports for self regulation. It can be found in calling families to come pick up their child early from school or telling preschool families their child “isn’t a good fit” for the program. It is evident in statistics showing that 70% of the students involved in school-related arrests or who were referred to law enforcement were Latinx or Black or that Black students were three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers