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/
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