The School-to-Prison Pipeline

The “School-to-Prison Pipeline” is the practice of removing students from the school setting and pushing them towards the juvenile and criminal justice systems.  In the recent article “The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Time to Shut it Down,” Mary Ellen Flannery discusses how ineffective zero tolerance policies and overzealous suspension and expulsion practices can be when addressing discipline issues in schools. 

Encouraged by disturbing trends like zero-tolerance policies, police officers in schools, and “made worse by school funding cuts that overburden counselors and high-stakes tests that stress teachers,” NEA members agreed in 2013 to stop the unnecessary school-to-prison pipeline.  

NEA executive committee member Kevin Gilbert says, “‘With education resources being cut nationwide, many educators are so caught up in trying to do more with less and many are not aware that when they remove a student from the classroom, they may be unknowingly feeding the school-to-prison pipeline.  We’ve got to make more educators aware and we’ve got to give them better tools and skills.”  

While no one expects that suspensions and/or expulsions should just disappear, Charlotte Hayer offers the advice that “you need to teach teachers how to build relationships with students who might not be like them.”  “Restorative Practices” is becoming a popular strategy to help educators “get to the root of disciplinary issues.”  In this strategy, teachers engage in crucial conversations with the students to teach empathy and responsibility, and to encourage the students to identify how their actions affect others around them.  

Sarah Biehl, of the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio explains, “Suspending a kid or sending them to the office is easy and quick. The things we’re asking schools to do in place of those things are not easy and quick…The answers are complicated and I understand teacher need resources and tools to make these changes.”  

To read the entire article: http://neatoday.org/2015/01/05/school-prison-pipeline-time-shut/   

Connecting the Dots: Matching Rigor and Instruction

The January 2015 issue of Principal Leadership, highlights some interesting ideas on matching instruction to the rigor-level of learning targets.   According to Rosemarye Taylor and Mark Shanoff, authors of “Hitting the Learning Target: How to Facilitate Student Motivation and Resilience,” teachers at Ocoee Middle School in central Florida were concerned that “many students were not proficient in reading or mathematics because the teachers misunderstood the language of learning goals” (28).  Administration at the school was also concerned because “student achievement was not improving continuously” (28).  

Teachers and administration decided to take three key steps to improve student achievement in their school: 

Focus on learning targets - Teachers must have clear intentions for student learning.  Teachers should fully “understand the academic language of their learning targets and how student work might look and sound at those specific levels of rigor” (29).  

Scaffold instruction - Beginning with direct instruction that includes teacher modeling expectations, teachers should scaffold instruction that begins “with high teacher support, then decrease gradually until students could independently demonstrate mastery with low teacher support” (29).  

Systems Development - Administrators adjusted the systems in the school to allow for more collaborative planning time and allocated other resources to follow through with monitoring teacher and student success. 

Teachers and administrators at Ocoee Middle School now feel that “Through carefully scaffolded instruction; heightened, clear expectations; self-monitoring; and quality feedback, students’ self-esteem grew, as did teachers’ beliefs that they could impact all students’ learning, including those who had previously underperformed” (30).