Introduction to Lesson Plan
Educating youths about the social issue of mass incarceration in the United States is a complicated task. Critiquing the justice and incarceration systems – institutions that are central to the country’s creed and moral fiber – can be extremely disarming to youths that have been inculcated with distinct messages of what it means to be a good citizen, and what it means to be a criminal. But socially responsible teaching should take up this challenge. Teasing apart these deeply rooted social messages of crime and punishment and elucidating how they are bound to race and socioeconomic status will help students rethink an ostensibly just crime and punishment system. To set up this complex issue, this lesson plan will focus on a quietly destructive system that is ancillary to mass incarceration: the school to prison pipeline. This issue is an ideal entry point for students because it frames the alarming problem of mass incarceration in the school environment, which students are thoroughly familiar with. This introduction to the school to prison pipeline will provide a brief history of the issue to demonstrate the extent of its harm to youths. It will conclude by outlining how this lesson plan aims to address this issue in a classroom setting.
Generally speaking, the school to prison pipeline is a system of legislation, policies, and attitudes that nudges students out of the country’s educational system and pushes them toward the criminal justice system. This already unsettling trend is made even more disturbing by the fact that this system disproportionately affects students of color and impoverished students that attend schools in low-income areas. How can we explain the existence of this system, in a country that hails hard work and education as the pathways for social mobility? The answer is both historical and rooted in educational policymaking. Pedagogical theorist Gloria Ladson-Billings offers the term educational debt to explain how American schools display the long-term historical accruement of racial and socioeconomic disparity in the United States. From de facto racial segregation in the country’s neighborhoods and schools, to the migration of wealth and job opportunities into predominantly White exurbs, these historical inequities manifest themselves in the vast chasm between the nation’s richest and poorest schools. These low-income schools – not coincidentally, often predominantly comprised of minority students – are underfunded, understaffed, and, as a result, underachieving.
These schools became an (overdue) national wake-up call. State and federal legislators scrambled to find the solution to these underperforming schools; the problem was that they sought answers in the wrong places. Many legislators focused on the youths themselves. The proliferation of “zero tolerance policies” began in the 1990s as a way of flushing out “troublesome youths” from schools by tightening punishments on rule infractions. These policies started specifically as a way of controlling what policymakers perceived to be an acute gun problem in low-income schools, but these policies eventually spread to other offenses. Other legislative advances focused on raising expectations for school performance. The rationale of sweeping policy packages like No Child Left Behind was that high-achieving schools should be awarded with funding and support, while low-achieving schools would be phased out. America adopted an obsession with assessment and high-stakes testing as a way of proving the educational worth of a school.
These policies together were supposed to introduce order and achievement into low-income schools, as a means of leveling the playing field. But these policies did little to erase the deep historical inequities that these schools suffered from – if anything, it exacerbated them. Unreasonably stringent zero tolerance policies have created educational environments that resemble penitentiaries more than they do schools. Metal detectors, police dogs, locked gates, and pugnacious officers are mainstays in schools that are ostensibly keeping law and order on campus. Suspensions, expulsions, and even on-site arrests become a reality for many schools; most distressingly, many of these punishments are for minor, non-violent offenses. The national fixation on school performance and assessment is no help to this toxic environment, either. In the wake of the high-stakes testing craze, many schools have deliberately organized their student populations so as to focus on the more “promising” students that can raise the school’s test scores (and, subsequently, secure that school’s funding). In this phenomenon called tracking, much of the school’s resources and attention are placed on a certain section of the student population for operational efficiency, while lower “tracked” students – often the same youths that are the target of zero tolerance policies – are thrown to the wayside in mediocre educational pathways.
The culminating effect of these policies is the mass movement of youths (many of them poor, of color, or both) from the nation’s school system to the incarceration system. The constant presence of law enforcement and Draconian punishments on school campuses sets a foreboding precedent: you are, or have the potential to be, a criminal. Criminalizing youths only adds more daily stressors to the lives of youths that often have to cope with impoverished circumstances. Youths that fall into a school’s lower track are hard pressed to find any hope in their schools. Unstimulating classrooms and dispassionate teachers perpetuate these messages of criminalization and low expectations. And for those youths that end up in the juvenile justice system, many landlords and employers close off opportunities to them simply because of their “criminal history.” With few options for social advancement, criminalized youths often turn to the only sources of livelihood that society has offered for them, whether that be trying their hand in the drug economy or finding their way back into the incarceration system. This is the school to prison pipeline.
This lesson will employ an interactive, multimedia approach to introduce the class to the detrimental effects of the school to prison pipeline. The lesson will begin with a video called “Taking Back Our Schools: Organizing to Fight the School to Prison Pipeline.” Following the video is a discussion that will introduce the students to the main concepts at hand: zero tolerance policies, mass incarceration, and the like. Students will then have the chance to interact with visual representations of the school to prison pipeline. Finally, the lesson will conclude with ruminations of the future, and how students themselves have the opportunity to get involved against the fight to cut off the school to prison pipeline.
Keep in mind that this lesson plan engages in unsettling ideas; be patient and sensitive to student opinion. Allow for dialogue. Also keep in mind that exploring the school to prison pipeline is meant as a vantage point for understanding mass incarceration. As students toss around questions of social justice in schools and juvenile halls, keep this larger issue in the crosshairs.
Educating youths about the social issue of mass incarceration in the United States is a complicated task. Critiquing the justice and incarceration systems – institutions that are central to the country’s creed and moral fiber – can be extremely disarming to youths that have been inculcated with distinct messages of what it means to be a good citizen, and what it means to be a criminal. But socially responsible teaching should take up this challenge. Teasing apart these deeply rooted social messages of crime and punishment and elucidating how they are bound to race and socioeconomic status will help students rethink an ostensibly just crime and punishment system. To set up this complex issue, this lesson plan will focus on a quietly destructive system that is ancillary to mass incarceration: the school to prison pipeline. This issue is an ideal entry point for students because it frames the alarming problem of mass incarceration in the school environment, which students are thoroughly familiar with. This introduction to the school to prison pipeline will provide a brief history of the issue to demonstrate the extent of its harm to youths. It will conclude by outlining how this lesson plan aims to address this issue in a classroom setting.
Generally speaking, the school to prison pipeline is a system of legislation, policies, and attitudes that nudges students out of the country’s educational system and pushes them toward the criminal justice system. This already unsettling trend is made even more disturbing by the fact that this system disproportionately affects students of color and impoverished students that attend schools in low-income areas. How can we explain the existence of this system, in a country that hails hard work and education as the pathways for social mobility? The answer is both historical and rooted in educational policymaking. Pedagogical theorist Gloria Ladson-Billings offers the term educational debt to explain how American schools display the long-term historical accruement of racial and socioeconomic disparity in the United States. From de facto racial segregation in the country’s neighborhoods and schools, to the migration of wealth and job opportunities into predominantly White exurbs, these historical inequities manifest themselves in the vast chasm between the nation’s richest and poorest schools. These low-income schools – not coincidentally, often predominantly comprised of minority students – are underfunded, understaffed, and, as a result, underachieving.
These schools became an (overdue) national wake-up call. State and federal legislators scrambled to find the solution to these underperforming schools; the problem was that they sought answers in the wrong places. Many legislators focused on the youths themselves. The proliferation of “zero tolerance policies” began in the 1990s as a way of flushing out “troublesome youths” from schools by tightening punishments on rule infractions. These policies started specifically as a way of controlling what policymakers perceived to be an acute gun problem in low-income schools, but these policies eventually spread to other offenses. Other legislative advances focused on raising expectations for school performance. The rationale of sweeping policy packages like No Child Left Behind was that high-achieving schools should be awarded with funding and support, while low-achieving schools would be phased out. America adopted an obsession with assessment and high-stakes testing as a way of proving the educational worth of a school.
These policies together were supposed to introduce order and achievement into low-income schools, as a means of leveling the playing field. But these policies did little to erase the deep historical inequities that these schools suffered from – if anything, it exacerbated them. Unreasonably stringent zero tolerance policies have created educational environments that resemble penitentiaries more than they do schools. Metal detectors, police dogs, locked gates, and pugnacious officers are mainstays in schools that are ostensibly keeping law and order on campus. Suspensions, expulsions, and even on-site arrests become a reality for many schools; most distressingly, many of these punishments are for minor, non-violent offenses. The national fixation on school performance and assessment is no help to this toxic environment, either. In the wake of the high-stakes testing craze, many schools have deliberately organized their student populations so as to focus on the more “promising” students that can raise the school’s test scores (and, subsequently, secure that school’s funding). In this phenomenon called tracking, much of the school’s resources and attention are placed on a certain section of the student population for operational efficiency, while lower “tracked” students – often the same youths that are the target of zero tolerance policies – are thrown to the wayside in mediocre educational pathways.
The culminating effect of these policies is the mass movement of youths (many of them poor, of color, or both) from the nation’s school system to the incarceration system. The constant presence of law enforcement and Draconian punishments on school campuses sets a foreboding precedent: you are, or have the potential to be, a criminal. Criminalizing youths only adds more daily stressors to the lives of youths that often have to cope with impoverished circumstances. Youths that fall into a school’s lower track are hard pressed to find any hope in their schools. Unstimulating classrooms and dispassionate teachers perpetuate these messages of criminalization and low expectations. And for those youths that end up in the juvenile justice system, many landlords and employers close off opportunities to them simply because of their “criminal history.” With few options for social advancement, criminalized youths often turn to the only sources of livelihood that society has offered for them, whether that be trying their hand in the drug economy or finding their way back into the incarceration system. This is the school to prison pipeline.
This lesson will employ an interactive, multimedia approach to introduce the class to the detrimental effects of the school to prison pipeline. The lesson will begin with a video called “Taking Back Our Schools: Organizing to Fight the School to Prison Pipeline.” Following the video is a discussion that will introduce the students to the main concepts at hand: zero tolerance policies, mass incarceration, and the like. Students will then have the chance to interact with visual representations of the school to prison pipeline. Finally, the lesson will conclude with ruminations of the future, and how students themselves have the opportunity to get involved against the fight to cut off the school to prison pipeline.
Keep in mind that this lesson plan engages in unsettling ideas; be patient and sensitive to student opinion. Allow for dialogue. Also keep in mind that exploring the school to prison pipeline is meant as a vantage point for understanding mass incarceration. As students toss around questions of social justice in schools and juvenile halls, keep this larger issue in the crosshairs.