March 26, 2015 • 29 mins
No one ever says they want to be a convict when they grow up. Julie and Robert look at the School-to-Prison pipeline and the variables that form this insidious system in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
today we have a topic that some of you listening
might uh might might have just read the title about
the school to prison pipeline, and you might be a
(00:24):
little a little cautious about it. But but trust us,
this is a fascinating topic and it ties directly into
our subsequent topic that will publish next week. That's right,
we are taking a closer look at racial biases and
how it shapes society. And in order to get into
the mindset of today's show, let's all sort of do
a little pretend imagination thing here. Imagine that you're lining
(00:47):
up with other students and about twenty steps in front
of you, someone is holding a dollar bill. But it's
not just any dollar bill. I mean, this is the
brass ring. This is the thing that's going to to
determine and who you're going to marry, what sort of
job you're going to take, um, what sort of overall
wealth you're going to amass, what your own healthcare um
(01:10):
access will be, and the level of your well being. Okay,
it just determines where you're going to be in life.
This dollar bill, So it's a really important dollar bill. Okay,
that's why everybody is lining up for it, all these students. Now,
imagine that before you can step forward, you discover that
you have been scooted back about five steps because you
(01:31):
live and say a poor community where you have little
or no access to educational resources. Now imagine you look
down and your skin is not white, but it is
of color. Now you have been scooted back another five
steps because statistically, the experience you have in school is
going to be different from the white kid who is
(01:54):
now ten steps in front of you. So when you
hear ready set go, who do you think is going
to get to that dollar bill first, that brass ring,
It's going to be the white kids. It's the white kid.
And unfortunately, um, that analogy is the reality of the
education system today in the United States. And uh, that
(02:17):
is setting up some some very serious ramifications for what's
happening with students success. And in some ways you might
even say that it determines who is going to go
on to college and who is going to go on
to say maybe even a life of crime and poverty. Indeed,
and to and to reference the title of the podcast,
(02:38):
to prison into directly into the prison system. Uh. And
in the course of the United States, it goes without saying,
we have quite a prison system. As of two thousand fourteen,
US prisons contain an all time high of two point
four million people that, by the way, exceeds the population's
entire populations of such countries as Cutter, Nambia, and Iceland. Yeah,
(03:00):
that's right. The US has close to twenty five percent
of the world's prisoners, even though the U s accounts
for only five percent of the world's populations. And some
point to the war on drugs as uh, one of
the reasons why the US prison population is so high.
On September and the end of the most recent fiscal
(03:24):
year for which federal offense data were available, eight thousand,
two hundred inmates we're talking about fifty one of the
federal prison population were imprisoned for possession, trafficking, or other
drug crimes. Yeah. And in fact, in the federal prison system,
more than half of those sentenced to stints of a
year or longer are are still there for drug crimes.
(03:47):
So yeah, now keep in mind that more than fifty
of the US prisoners are black and Hispanic. And when
you look again at possession, trafficking other drug crimes, now
consider that about fourteen million white people report using illicit
drug as opposed to only two point six million African Americans,
(04:13):
and so there are five times as many whites using
drugs as African Americans. Yet African Americans are sent to
prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites.
And what you begin to see emerge here is this
the story of inequality, um, and not just circumstance. Indeed,
(04:35):
I mean it's it's the same laws are on the books,
but it's almost like there are two separate books of laws. Um.
Here are just a couple of more factoids that come,
figures that come to us from then double a cp um.
African Americans now constitute nearly one million of that total
incarcerated population that we mentioned. African Americans are incarcerated at
nearly six times the rate of whites, and one in
(04:58):
one hundred African American women are in prison. So what
if we told you that the cards had been stacked
against this particular prison population from the get go, and
a lot of it had to do with education. Well,
you might look at Brown versus the Board of Education
and say, how can that be? That's right? Now, just
to refresh Brown versus Board of Education, we're talking about
(05:19):
the landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the
court declared state laws establishing separate separate public schools for
black and white students to be unconstitutional. Um, of course,
it would be a number of years before all segregated
school systems were desegregated. But this was responsible that this
(05:39):
Brown and Brown two were responsible for getting the process underway. Right.
This was and this is a moment in time that
we still look back to and say, this is when
the playing field at least is supposedly leveling out right.
Chief Justice Earl Warren had said, quote, in these days,
it's doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to
succeed in life if he has denied the opportunities of
(06:01):
an education. Such an opportunity where the state has undertaken
to provide it is a right that must be made
available on equal terms. Now. In a two thousand and
fourteen interview with The New York Times, Daniel J. Loison,
who is the director of the Center for Civil Rights
Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles Civil
(06:22):
Rights Project said, quote, we here, we are sixty years
after Brown versus Board of Education, and the data altogether
still show a picture of gross inequity and educational opportunity.
So the bottom line is still separate and still unequal.
Even though we sort of dismantled this machine um of segregation,
(06:43):
we end up rebuilding the machine. And uh and and
and in the end, the machine does kind of what
it did before. It's it's heartbreaking stuff. But we're gonna
we're gonna break down exactly how all of this works. Yeah,
and today's episode is ultimately about breakdown and failure, failure
of a society to recognize its systems in place are
(07:04):
so flawed that it's created this insidious atmosphere that is
tantamount to a trap for a large segment of the population.
And again, this is what we're calling the school to
prison pipeline. And although we won't be able to cover
this idea in its entirety, because it's really vast and
it's really complicated, we do intend to discuss aspects of
(07:27):
this acute inequality and education. And one that has created
this metaphorical pipeline to crime and poverty. Yeah, and again
it comes back to just like the basic idea of
what school should be. Right, But the school is the
launching pad for the rest of your life. It's it's
your your education, your forming the tools that you're gonna
(07:50):
need to succeed and uh and and setting setting the
baseline for for what you're going to be as an
adult in society. Yeah, and school is one of those
things that everybody had as these robust, great utopian ideas
of what it can be and should be. But when
the you know, the rubber meets the road, the fact
(08:10):
of the matter is it's just not living up to
a lot of ideals. And the reason we know that
is that we finally have data because last year the
Department of Education Office for Civil Rights conducted the first
analysis in fifteen years of the US public schools and
they found startling inequities. We're talking about nine seven thousand
(08:32):
schools representing forty nine million students. Now, if you are
a white kid, if you are a Caucasian kid, you
are probably going to get these offerings. In fact, seventy
percent of white kids get these offerings. A full range
of math and science courses including algebra, biology, calculus, chemistry, geometry,
(08:54):
and physics. And this really sets those students up for
a the robust future, right because all of those classes,
in particular the science classes are going to lend themselves
to higher scores on s A t um tests and
it's also going to set them up for a career
in STEM. Right then the sciences, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Yeah,
(09:18):
those those key STEM classes that that are so important,
especially if you're you're looking to enter a pipeline into
a career, uh in in some sort of STEM discipline. Alright, So,
like you said, seventy of white students attend to classes
with this full full range of these math and science courses.
How does that break down for Black and Latino kids. Well,
(09:40):
according to the to the fifteen year study, slightly more
than half of all Black students have access to the
full range of math and science courses. Slightly more than
two thirds of Latinos have access and uh and then
if you look to Native American Native Alaskan students, less
than half of them are able to enroll in the
in the sort of high level math and science courses
(10:02):
that again, are available to the white student population. Now,
the survey found that in terms of access to seasoned
teachers for kids of colors, that Black, Latino, American, Indian,
and Native Alaskan students are three times as likely as
white students to attend schools with higher concentrations of first
(10:24):
year teachers, and Black students are more than four times
as likely as white students to attend schools where one
out of every five teachers does not meet all state
teaching requirements, and for Latino students there twice as likely. Now,
one other statistic in here we're gonna throw at you
is that the teacher salary gap between high schools with
(10:47):
the highest concentrations of Black and Latino students and those
with the lowest is more than five thousand dollars a year,
meaning the incentive is not there for seasons teachers really
qualified teachers to go to the schools that need the most.
So the end result here, I mean it's pretty staggerant
because basically you were talking about a situation where students
(11:08):
of color simply do not have the same access two
STEM classes that pave the way for a STEM career
in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and you typically have new
inexperienced teachers tackling low income in African American schools, the
the the the very teaching environments where you ideally would
want to have an experienced educator, someone with the necessary
(11:31):
tools to tackle the students and uh and and engage them. Um.
And this is what Daniel J. Lowson calls a gross
inequity and educational opportunity. And I think there's there's no
there's no more succinct way to say it. Um, Like
the the deck is stacked, and you can get into
a very long discussion about how that deck comes to
(11:55):
be so stacked, how much of it is intentional, how
much of it is accident, how much of it just
comes of building this current educational machines, current school to
prison pipeline without really looking at it for fifteen years. Yeah,
because if you think about it, those first year teachers
are not just inexperienced, it's it's that they they've lacked
(12:15):
all of the additional courses that teachers get throughout their career.
So if you're a teacher with fifteen years experience, it's
not just that you've been teaching for fifteen years. You've
had additional instruction every single year and many different areas,
and some of those areas may even be sensitivity, right. Um,
So it's it's really important to note that the students
(12:41):
again that need these experience really well qualified teachers the
most are not getting them. And if these students lack
any sort of additional educational resources anyway, right, may they
might not have money to go and take extra courses
to um beef up on s A T questions for instance,
Then they're really going to fall behind. So this sort
(13:03):
of data gives you an idea of the disparity in
quality in terms of education. But what about the outcomes
of the white kid versus the kid of color inside
the actual school. Well, it turns out that racial bias
is certainly at play here. Expulsion and suspension rates for
(13:25):
black kids are as you guessed it, quite a bit higher.
A two thousand and intense study of seventy two thousand
schools kindergarten through high school shows that while black students
make up only of those enrolled in the school sampled,
they account for thirty five percent of those suspended once,
(13:47):
of those suspended more than once, and thirty of all
expulsions and overall, black students were three and a half
times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their
white counterparts. And this was interesting too. Black girls were
suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys.
(14:07):
And this leads right into the in school arrest rate.
And this is really interesting because you know, I think
back on my days in school, and I specifically remember, like,
one guy committed a murder on school property. So of
course the police showed up and dealt with it. That's
pretty cut and dry. There's a murder is when committed
you bringing, you bringing the police. It's no longer a
(14:28):
school matter. But but we see this this disturbing national
trend in which you have you have schools turning to
police who are then arresting kids for minor infractions. So
so you end up treating the students more like criminals
and less like students, even for the little stuff. So
(14:49):
they're getting the stigma of criminal instead of just mirror,
you know, misbehavior leveled at them. Uh, in many cases,
they're being they're they're getting thrown out, they're being sent
back to places of stress and disadvantage, which again is crazy,
since the school should be a place of hope, a
place a springboard, a refuge from uh, those those places
of disadvantage and uh and the statistics are pretty uh
(15:11):
pretty depressing when you when you when you shake it
shake it out along these lines. For instance, seventy of
students involved in in school arrest are referred to law
enforcement and referred to law floor enforcement or black or Latino.
And by the way, sixty of all males in state
or federal printed prison do not have high school diplomas.
So yeah, you just have this disturbing trend where the
(15:34):
student is just treated as a de facto criminal, uh,
you know, almost right off the bat, which is heartbreaking
when you think that if that student doesn't have a
safe haven at home, and they don't have a safe
haven at school, then they truly are set up for this.
And by the way, just to throw some more stats
at this from the l a c P. Nationwide, African
Americans represent of juvenile arrest, of youth who are detained,
(15:59):
forty ex percent of the youth who are judicially way
to criminal court, and fifty eight percent of the youth
admitted to state prisons. And we see another disturbing trend
with foster care. Again, another um area where Ideally, there
should be a lot of hope. This should be about
children getting a leg up on society, on their lives,
(16:23):
but instead we see some very disturbing trends. Black and
Latinos make up fifty percent of children in the foster
care system, of foster care youths entering the juvenile justice system,
our placement related behavior cases of young people leaving foster
care will be incarcerated within a few years of turning
eighteen and fifty percent of young people leaving foster care
(16:46):
will be unemployed within a few years of turning eighteen um.
And then an even more startling figure here, uh, this
comes from Community Coalition of South l a nonprofit um
dartling inmates in California State Prison our former foster care youth.
So you see that direct funnel from the foster care
(17:08):
system into criminal and into the prison system. And again
it's telling this story that this is one of the
least supported segments of society. Right, So, if you have
marginalized communities of color and you have foster care kids,
they are not getting the support, the safe haven that
they need. And this kind of stigmatization actually begins shockingly early.
(17:33):
In fact, in preschool because one of the things that
the survey found from the Department of Education uh that
while black children make up of preschool enrollment, close to
half of all preschool children who are suspended more than
once are African American and Latitia Smith Evans of the
(17:55):
u c l A And an interview with The New
York Times said about this quote, it's incredible to think
about or fathom what pre case students could be doing
to get suspended from schools. Yeah, indeed, it just boggles
the mind. I mean, I've I've been watching preschooler and
younger age kid kids and there's what are they doing
that requires drastically different disciplinary action? Yeah, there are four
(18:18):
and five year olds all right. There is no you know,
magic silver bullet here that we can point to that
says it is the reason for why the system is
the way it is. But one of the contributing factors
is something called zero tolerance. Now, this is a policy
that was put into place after the nineteen nine Columbine
High School massacres. It's a basically a bunch of policies
(18:43):
that escalated infractions among the student body, and it was
never intended to be misused, but certainly this is what
has happened over the years. According to Amanda Marcatti, writing
for Slate magazine, quote, students, especially students of color, are
hit with outrageous and disproportionate disciplinary measures in the school system,
(19:05):
and this is what is contributing to those higher rates
of in school arrests, expulsions, and suspensions. Yeah, I mean,
in this you're just you're seeing a situation where, out
of a time of fear and and in particular cases
a time of need for advanced, more powerful tools to
deal with with threats, um, you end up having the
(19:28):
tool chest opened, uh for abuse. You you know, you
see this pretty much in any area of life, right
when you end up giving um law enforcement or government
or any kind of power more power to deal with
a scenario than what happens when they want to use
those powers just across the board. Yeah, absolute power absolutely corrupts.
(19:51):
And we discussed this a bit too in our episode
on the Panopticon, which has definitely some other, uh similar
threads lowing through it. Indeed, now another another theory as
to what's going on here comes down to standardized test um.
Some critics blame the educators. The accusation accusation here being
(20:13):
that they push out students who score lower un standardized
test in order to improve the school's overall test scores.
And if there's a if there's an educator in your life,
then you've probably you've probably heard plenty about what standardized
tests bring to the teaching scenario, what the various pros
and cons are and uh. And here the argument is
(20:34):
that the you know, the the cart ends up pulling
the horse. Uh. Instead of the test being this measuring
stick stick for what the students are doing and being
about uh, you know, gauging the students, helping the students,
it ends up being a situation where you're you're calling
the herd with the with the whole mindset being based
around the performance of the test. So you end up
(20:56):
racially calling the student population in order to achieve higher
test scores for that school. Everything is just completely backwards, right,
because the school would like to purge those test scores, right,
And in that way, the students are purged from the
student body just so that they can rise their numbers
and look all clean and squeaky. Unfortunately, now, another factor
(21:21):
in play is something called implicit bias. In the current
institutes paper on this, they define implicit biases the mental
process that causes us to have negative feelings and attitudes
about people based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, age, and appearance.
Because this cognitive process functions in our unconscious mind, we
(21:41):
are typically not consciously aware of the negative racial biases
that we developed over the course of our lifetimes. So,
of course, in a perfect world administration, school administrations, and
students and teachers would all understand this and be aware
of this implicit bias and be able to bring this
(22:03):
awareness to the classroom and the way that they behave
and they doll out disciplinary measures. But this doesn't exactly happen.
For example, a two thousand and three study found that
students who displayed quote a black walking style were perceived
by their teachers as lower in academic achievement, highly aggressive,
(22:26):
and more likely to be in need of special education services.
In addition, a two thousand and seven meta analysis of
research founds statistically significant evidence that teachers hold lower expectations
either implicitly or explicitly, or both for African American and
Latino children compared to European American children. And this is
(22:47):
something that we touched upon when we talked about, um,
how we behave toward one another, and the sort of
expectations that we communicate, uh, even non verbally, and how
that child will absorb that and then actually it will
become a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, I mean it's the
(23:08):
basis of stigma. You end up attaching stigma and up
attaching titles and expectations of these students and then they
they they match the form. So the cumulative effect here
is is pretty devastating. Um, you have this disproportionate give,
this disproportionate disciplinary action in place, and so the students
(23:29):
that are affected, they end up falling behind in their classes,
you know, in the in some of the better scenarios,
right Uh, and then the worst scenarios, they're suspended, they're
shuffled off to separate classes, etcetera. And this leads to
higher dropout rates, uh, you know, and uh and also
those the subsequent higher unemployment and imprison rates imprisonment rates
that we've already discussed. So this leaves black and Latino
(23:50):
students two times less likely to graduate high school than
their white peers. So again you see the pipeline in
place here where uh, these kids end up falling through
the cracks and uh, and then are far more likely
to wind up in the in the prison system. And
just to bring this down to an individual level too,
(24:10):
I'm sure everybody out there has had that teacher that
nurtured them, that that really fostered their abilities, who saw
something in them, and then you know, you acted accordingly, right,
you rose to the occasion. UM, on the opposite end
of the spectrum, I'm sure everybody also has had that
one teacher that they thought had it out for them
(24:32):
that they kind of maybe shied away from, maybe even
in class, your body language change and you try to
make yourself invisible because you felt like that teacher didn't
have a lot of confidence. And you now imagine that
that was the majority of your experience and how that
would call your perception of the world and your own abilities. Yeah,
(24:54):
you end up with a situation where the again, the
deck is stacked from the start. Now, this, uh, this
sort of school to prison pipeline doesn't exist solely in
the population of children of color. Recently, I had volunteered
with a fantastic group here in Atlanta called Vox teen
(25:16):
and it was a day in which um, the girls
were exploring sex and sexuality, and my group was dealing
with gender equality but also l gb QT equality, and
there were some representatives from Georgia Equality and they talked
a lot about the school to pipeline problem with the
lgb QT community, and it turns out that there are
(25:38):
a lot of parallels here. Indeed, LGB youth, particularly gender
nonconforming girls, are up to three times more likely to
experience harsh disciplinary treatment by school administrators than their non
LGB counterparts. LGB youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system.
They make up just five to seven percent of the
overall youth population, but they rep in fift of those
(26:01):
in the juvenile justice system. And LGBT youth reports significant
distrust of school administrators and generally say they don't believe
that the school fishers officials do enough to foster safe
and welcoming, welcoming school climate. So again you have a
situation where for many of these students, they don't feel
they don't feel feel supported, they don't feel safe even
(26:23):
in the in the in these school environments, and it
ends up, you know, being a failure of the school
as a as a safe haven, as a launching path,
as a as a place of hope. Again because you know,
the the administrations and some of the teachers and again
not all, but some of them carry with them certain
biases and that colors our perception of that kid. And
(26:44):
so if that kid is doing something, then it can
be uh, grossly misperceived as this even sort of grotesque
ory of their behavior, when in fact the kid wasn't
doing any right. Um. Again, the punishment doesn't always correlate
with the actual misbehavior or any it may not even
(27:04):
be misbehavior. So we wanted to bring this topic to
you guys today. Again, we know it's not a light
and everyone, but we thought that you would appreciate it
because this is, uh, this is a huge problem the
prison population. We we are responsible for the largest prison
population in the world. And in order to drill down
(27:24):
into that and try to figure out why, you have
to look at schools. Yeah, I mean, certainly there are
other other parts of the problem. You can get into
the privatization of prisons, etcetera. But this is a major
component and and his uh, you know, it's it's not
pleasant information, but particularly if you're if you're a citizen
in the United States, I feel like it's it's really
(27:45):
important to have some of these facts bouncing around in
your skull. And as we get into um greater discussion
of of how racial bias works in the brain in
a subsequent episode. UM, you know, it's important to have
this to the all back to because it's easy to
sort of fall back on, oh, well, you know, implicit
bias that just relates to how I, you know, how
(28:06):
I interact with you know, a person of another race
and the elevator or something. Uh, it's it's good too,
but it's good to to remember that they are far larger,
overreaching um issues in play that are shaping children right
now in classrooms and their future behavior and their future
successes and failure. All right, so there you have it again. Uh,
(28:28):
stay tuned for another episode coming up that's going to
really get into racial racial bias and how that works
with with the human mind and you know, how we
can approach it as individual humans. Uh. In the meantime,
if you would like to check out more of our content,
past episodes, etcetera. Videos, anything you like, you'll find them
(28:48):
a stuffabole your mind dot com. That is the homepage
the Mothership and uh that's where you also find links
up of social media accounts that we handle, and if
you guys have any first person experiences you would like
to share with us, we hope you do so, and
you can email us blow the mind at how staff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
(29:11):
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
today we have a topic that some of you listening
might uh might might have just read the title about
the school to prison pipeline, and you might be a
(00:24):
little a little cautious about it. But but trust us,
this is a fascinating topic and it ties directly into
our subsequent topic that will publish next week. That's right,
we are taking a closer look at racial biases and
how it shapes society. And in order to get into
the mindset of today's show, let's all sort of do
a little pretend imagination thing here. Imagine that you're lining
(00:47):
up with other students and about twenty steps in front
of you, someone is holding a dollar bill. But it's
not just any dollar bill. I mean, this is the
brass ring. This is the thing that's going to to
determine and who you're going to marry, what sort of
job you're going to take, um, what sort of overall
wealth you're going to amass, what your own healthcare um
(01:10):
access will be, and the level of your well being. Okay,
it just determines where you're going to be in life.
This dollar bill, So it's a really important dollar bill. Okay,
that's why everybody is lining up for it, all these students. Now,
imagine that before you can step forward, you discover that
you have been scooted back about five steps because you
(01:31):
live and say a poor community where you have little
or no access to educational resources. Now imagine you look
down and your skin is not white, but it is
of color. Now you have been scooted back another five
steps because statistically, the experience you have in school is
going to be different from the white kid who is
(01:54):
now ten steps in front of you. So when you
hear ready set go, who do you think is going
to get to that dollar bill first, that brass ring,
It's going to be the white kids. It's the white kid.
And unfortunately, um, that analogy is the reality of the
education system today in the United States. And uh, that
(02:17):
is setting up some some very serious ramifications for what's
happening with students success. And in some ways you might
even say that it determines who is going to go
on to college and who is going to go on
to say maybe even a life of crime and poverty. Indeed,
and to and to reference the title of the podcast,
(02:38):
to prison into directly into the prison system. Uh. And
in the course of the United States, it goes without saying,
we have quite a prison system. As of two thousand fourteen,
US prisons contain an all time high of two point
four million people that, by the way, exceeds the population's
entire populations of such countries as Cutter, Nambia, and Iceland. Yeah,
(03:00):
that's right. The US has close to twenty five percent
of the world's prisoners, even though the U s accounts
for only five percent of the world's populations. And some
point to the war on drugs as uh, one of
the reasons why the US prison population is so high.
On September and the end of the most recent fiscal
(03:24):
year for which federal offense data were available, eight thousand,
two hundred inmates we're talking about fifty one of the
federal prison population were imprisoned for possession, trafficking, or other
drug crimes. Yeah. And in fact, in the federal prison system,
more than half of those sentenced to stints of a
year or longer are are still there for drug crimes.
(03:47):
So yeah, now keep in mind that more than fifty
of the US prisoners are black and Hispanic. And when
you look again at possession, trafficking other drug crimes, now
consider that about fourteen million white people report using illicit
drug as opposed to only two point six million African Americans,
(04:13):
and so there are five times as many whites using
drugs as African Americans. Yet African Americans are sent to
prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites.
And what you begin to see emerge here is this
the story of inequality, um, and not just circumstance. Indeed,
(04:35):
I mean it's it's the same laws are on the books,
but it's almost like there are two separate books of laws. Um.
Here are just a couple of more factoids that come,
figures that come to us from then double a cp um.
African Americans now constitute nearly one million of that total
incarcerated population that we mentioned. African Americans are incarcerated at
nearly six times the rate of whites, and one in
(04:58):
one hundred African American women are in prison. So what
if we told you that the cards had been stacked
against this particular prison population from the get go, and
a lot of it had to do with education. Well,
you might look at Brown versus the Board of Education
and say, how can that be? That's right? Now, just
to refresh Brown versus Board of Education, we're talking about
(05:19):
the landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the
court declared state laws establishing separate separate public schools for
black and white students to be unconstitutional. Um, of course,
it would be a number of years before all segregated
school systems were desegregated. But this was responsible that this
(05:39):
Brown and Brown two were responsible for getting the process underway. Right.
This was and this is a moment in time that
we still look back to and say, this is when
the playing field at least is supposedly leveling out right.
Chief Justice Earl Warren had said, quote, in these days,
it's doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to
succeed in life if he has denied the opportunities of
(06:01):
an education. Such an opportunity where the state has undertaken
to provide it is a right that must be made
available on equal terms. Now. In a two thousand and
fourteen interview with The New York Times, Daniel J. Loison,
who is the director of the Center for Civil Rights
Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles Civil
(06:22):
Rights Project said, quote, we here, we are sixty years
after Brown versus Board of Education, and the data altogether
still show a picture of gross inequity and educational opportunity.
So the bottom line is still separate and still unequal.
Even though we sort of dismantled this machine um of segregation,
(06:43):
we end up rebuilding the machine. And uh and and
and in the end, the machine does kind of what
it did before. It's it's heartbreaking stuff. But we're gonna
we're gonna break down exactly how all of this works. Yeah,
and today's episode is ultimately about breakdown and failure, failure
of a society to recognize its systems in place are
(07:04):
so flawed that it's created this insidious atmosphere that is
tantamount to a trap for a large segment of the population.
And again, this is what we're calling the school to
prison pipeline. And although we won't be able to cover
this idea in its entirety, because it's really vast and
it's really complicated, we do intend to discuss aspects of
(07:27):
this acute inequality and education. And one that has created
this metaphorical pipeline to crime and poverty. Yeah, and again
it comes back to just like the basic idea of
what school should be. Right, But the school is the
launching pad for the rest of your life. It's it's
your your education, your forming the tools that you're gonna
(07:50):
need to succeed and uh and and setting setting the
baseline for for what you're going to be as an
adult in society. Yeah, and school is one of those
things that everybody had as these robust, great utopian ideas
of what it can be and should be. But when
the you know, the rubber meets the road, the fact
(08:10):
of the matter is it's just not living up to
a lot of ideals. And the reason we know that
is that we finally have data because last year the
Department of Education Office for Civil Rights conducted the first
analysis in fifteen years of the US public schools and
they found startling inequities. We're talking about nine seven thousand
(08:32):
schools representing forty nine million students. Now, if you are
a white kid, if you are a Caucasian kid, you
are probably going to get these offerings. In fact, seventy
percent of white kids get these offerings. A full range
of math and science courses including algebra, biology, calculus, chemistry, geometry,
(08:54):
and physics. And this really sets those students up for
a the robust future, right because all of those classes,
in particular the science classes are going to lend themselves
to higher scores on s A t um tests and
it's also going to set them up for a career
in STEM. Right then the sciences, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Yeah,
(09:18):
those those key STEM classes that that are so important,
especially if you're you're looking to enter a pipeline into
a career, uh in in some sort of STEM discipline. Alright, So,
like you said, seventy of white students attend to classes
with this full full range of these math and science courses.
How does that break down for Black and Latino kids. Well,
(09:40):
according to the to the fifteen year study, slightly more
than half of all Black students have access to the
full range of math and science courses. Slightly more than
two thirds of Latinos have access and uh and then
if you look to Native American Native Alaskan students, less
than half of them are able to enroll in the
in the sort of high level math and science courses
(10:02):
that again, are available to the white student population. Now,
the survey found that in terms of access to seasoned
teachers for kids of colors, that Black, Latino, American, Indian,
and Native Alaskan students are three times as likely as
white students to attend schools with higher concentrations of first
(10:24):
year teachers, and Black students are more than four times
as likely as white students to attend schools where one
out of every five teachers does not meet all state
teaching requirements, and for Latino students there twice as likely. Now,
one other statistic in here we're gonna throw at you
is that the teacher salary gap between high schools with
(10:47):
the highest concentrations of Black and Latino students and those
with the lowest is more than five thousand dollars a year,
meaning the incentive is not there for seasons teachers really
qualified teachers to go to the schools that need the most.
So the end result here, I mean it's pretty staggerant
because basically you were talking about a situation where students
(11:08):
of color simply do not have the same access two
STEM classes that pave the way for a STEM career
in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and you typically have new
inexperienced teachers tackling low income in African American schools, the
the the the very teaching environments where you ideally would
want to have an experienced educator, someone with the necessary
(11:31):
tools to tackle the students and uh and and engage them. Um.
And this is what Daniel J. Lowson calls a gross
inequity and educational opportunity. And I think there's there's no
there's no more succinct way to say it. Um, Like
the the deck is stacked, and you can get into
a very long discussion about how that deck comes to
(11:55):
be so stacked, how much of it is intentional, how
much of it is accident, how much of it just
comes of building this current educational machines, current school to
prison pipeline without really looking at it for fifteen years. Yeah,
because if you think about it, those first year teachers
are not just inexperienced, it's it's that they they've lacked
(12:15):
all of the additional courses that teachers get throughout their career.
So if you're a teacher with fifteen years experience, it's
not just that you've been teaching for fifteen years. You've
had additional instruction every single year and many different areas,
and some of those areas may even be sensitivity, right. Um,
So it's it's really important to note that the students
(12:41):
again that need these experience really well qualified teachers the
most are not getting them. And if these students lack
any sort of additional educational resources anyway, right, may they
might not have money to go and take extra courses
to um beef up on s A T questions for instance,
Then they're really going to fall behind. So this sort
(13:03):
of data gives you an idea of the disparity in
quality in terms of education. But what about the outcomes
of the white kid versus the kid of color inside
the actual school. Well, it turns out that racial bias
is certainly at play here. Expulsion and suspension rates for
(13:25):
black kids are as you guessed it, quite a bit higher.
A two thousand and intense study of seventy two thousand
schools kindergarten through high school shows that while black students
make up only of those enrolled in the school sampled,
they account for thirty five percent of those suspended once,
(13:47):
of those suspended more than once, and thirty of all
expulsions and overall, black students were three and a half
times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their
white counterparts. And this was interesting too. Black girls were
suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys.
(14:07):
And this leads right into the in school arrest rate.
And this is really interesting because you know, I think
back on my days in school, and I specifically remember, like,
one guy committed a murder on school property. So of
course the police showed up and dealt with it. That's
pretty cut and dry. There's a murder is when committed
you bringing, you bringing the police. It's no longer a
(14:28):
school matter. But but we see this this disturbing national
trend in which you have you have schools turning to
police who are then arresting kids for minor infractions. So
so you end up treating the students more like criminals
and less like students, even for the little stuff. So
(14:49):
they're getting the stigma of criminal instead of just mirror,
you know, misbehavior leveled at them. Uh, in many cases,
they're being they're they're getting thrown out, they're being sent
back to places of stress and disadvantage, which again is crazy,
since the school should be a place of hope, a
place a springboard, a refuge from uh, those those places
of disadvantage and uh and the statistics are pretty uh
(15:11):
pretty depressing when you when you when you shake it
shake it out along these lines. For instance, seventy of
students involved in in school arrest are referred to law
enforcement and referred to law floor enforcement or black or Latino.
And by the way, sixty of all males in state
or federal printed prison do not have high school diplomas.
So yeah, you just have this disturbing trend where the
(15:34):
student is just treated as a de facto criminal, uh,
you know, almost right off the bat, which is heartbreaking
when you think that if that student doesn't have a
safe haven at home, and they don't have a safe
haven at school, then they truly are set up for this.
And by the way, just to throw some more stats
at this from the l a c P. Nationwide, African
Americans represent of juvenile arrest, of youth who are detained,
(15:59):
forty ex percent of the youth who are judicially way
to criminal court, and fifty eight percent of the youth
admitted to state prisons. And we see another disturbing trend
with foster care. Again, another um area where Ideally, there
should be a lot of hope. This should be about
children getting a leg up on society, on their lives,
(16:23):
but instead we see some very disturbing trends. Black and
Latinos make up fifty percent of children in the foster
care system, of foster care youths entering the juvenile justice system,
our placement related behavior cases of young people leaving foster
care will be incarcerated within a few years of turning
eighteen and fifty percent of young people leaving foster care
(16:46):
will be unemployed within a few years of turning eighteen um.
And then an even more startling figure here, uh, this
comes from Community Coalition of South l a nonprofit um
dartling inmates in California State Prison our former foster care youth.
So you see that direct funnel from the foster care
(17:08):
system into criminal and into the prison system. And again
it's telling this story that this is one of the
least supported segments of society. Right, So, if you have
marginalized communities of color and you have foster care kids,
they are not getting the support, the safe haven that
they need. And this kind of stigmatization actually begins shockingly early.
(17:33):
In fact, in preschool because one of the things that
the survey found from the Department of Education uh that
while black children make up of preschool enrollment, close to
half of all preschool children who are suspended more than
once are African American and Latitia Smith Evans of the
(17:55):
u c l A And an interview with The New
York Times said about this quote, it's incredible to think
about or fathom what pre case students could be doing
to get suspended from schools. Yeah, indeed, it just boggles
the mind. I mean, I've I've been watching preschooler and
younger age kid kids and there's what are they doing
that requires drastically different disciplinary action? Yeah, there are four
(18:18):
and five year olds all right. There is no you know,
magic silver bullet here that we can point to that
says it is the reason for why the system is
the way it is. But one of the contributing factors
is something called zero tolerance. Now, this is a policy
that was put into place after the nineteen nine Columbine
High School massacres. It's a basically a bunch of policies
(18:43):
that escalated infractions among the student body, and it was
never intended to be misused, but certainly this is what
has happened over the years. According to Amanda Marcatti, writing
for Slate magazine, quote, students, especially students of color, are
hit with outrageous and disproportionate disciplinary measures in the school system,
(19:05):
and this is what is contributing to those higher rates
of in school arrests, expulsions, and suspensions. Yeah, I mean,
in this you're just you're seeing a situation where, out
of a time of fear and and in particular cases
a time of need for advanced, more powerful tools to
deal with with threats, um, you end up having the
(19:28):
tool chest opened, uh for abuse. You you know, you
see this pretty much in any area of life, right
when you end up giving um law enforcement or government
or any kind of power more power to deal with
a scenario than what happens when they want to use
those powers just across the board. Yeah, absolute power absolutely corrupts.
(19:51):
And we discussed this a bit too in our episode
on the Panopticon, which has definitely some other, uh similar
threads lowing through it. Indeed, now another another theory as
to what's going on here comes down to standardized test um.
Some critics blame the educators. The accusation accusation here being
(20:13):
that they push out students who score lower un standardized
test in order to improve the school's overall test scores.
And if there's a if there's an educator in your life,
then you've probably you've probably heard plenty about what standardized
tests bring to the teaching scenario, what the various pros
and cons are and uh. And here the argument is
(20:34):
that the you know, the the cart ends up pulling
the horse. Uh. Instead of the test being this measuring
stick stick for what the students are doing and being
about uh, you know, gauging the students, helping the students,
it ends up being a situation where you're you're calling
the herd with the with the whole mindset being based
around the performance of the test. So you end up
(20:56):
racially calling the student population in order to achieve higher
test scores for that school. Everything is just completely backwards, right,
because the school would like to purge those test scores, right,
And in that way, the students are purged from the
student body just so that they can rise their numbers
and look all clean and squeaky. Unfortunately, now, another factor
(21:21):
in play is something called implicit bias. In the current
institutes paper on this, they define implicit biases the mental
process that causes us to have negative feelings and attitudes
about people based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, age, and appearance.
Because this cognitive process functions in our unconscious mind, we
(21:41):
are typically not consciously aware of the negative racial biases
that we developed over the course of our lifetimes. So,
of course, in a perfect world administration, school administrations, and
students and teachers would all understand this and be aware
of this implicit bias and be able to bring this
(22:03):
awareness to the classroom and the way that they behave
and they doll out disciplinary measures. But this doesn't exactly happen.
For example, a two thousand and three study found that
students who displayed quote a black walking style were perceived
by their teachers as lower in academic achievement, highly aggressive,
(22:26):
and more likely to be in need of special education services.
In addition, a two thousand and seven meta analysis of
research founds statistically significant evidence that teachers hold lower expectations
either implicitly or explicitly, or both for African American and
Latino children compared to European American children. And this is
(22:47):
something that we touched upon when we talked about, um,
how we behave toward one another, and the sort of
expectations that we communicate, uh, even non verbally, and how
that child will absorb that and then actually it will
become a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, I mean it's the
(23:08):
basis of stigma. You end up attaching stigma and up
attaching titles and expectations of these students and then they
they they match the form. So the cumulative effect here
is is pretty devastating. Um, you have this disproportionate give,
this disproportionate disciplinary action in place, and so the students
(23:29):
that are affected, they end up falling behind in their classes,
you know, in the in some of the better scenarios,
right Uh, and then the worst scenarios, they're suspended, they're
shuffled off to separate classes, etcetera. And this leads to
higher dropout rates, uh, you know, and uh and also
those the subsequent higher unemployment and imprison rates imprisonment rates
that we've already discussed. So this leaves black and Latino
(23:50):
students two times less likely to graduate high school than
their white peers. So again you see the pipeline in
place here where uh, these kids end up falling through
the cracks and uh, and then are far more likely
to wind up in the in the prison system. And
just to bring this down to an individual level too,
(24:10):
I'm sure everybody out there has had that teacher that
nurtured them, that that really fostered their abilities, who saw
something in them, and then you know, you acted accordingly, right,
you rose to the occasion. UM, on the opposite end
of the spectrum, I'm sure everybody also has had that
one teacher that they thought had it out for them
(24:32):
that they kind of maybe shied away from, maybe even
in class, your body language change and you try to
make yourself invisible because you felt like that teacher didn't
have a lot of confidence. And you now imagine that
that was the majority of your experience and how that
would call your perception of the world and your own abilities. Yeah,
(24:54):
you end up with a situation where the again, the
deck is stacked from the start. Now, this, uh, this
sort of school to prison pipeline doesn't exist solely in
the population of children of color. Recently, I had volunteered
with a fantastic group here in Atlanta called Vox teen
(25:16):
and it was a day in which um, the girls
were exploring sex and sexuality, and my group was dealing
with gender equality but also l gb QT equality, and
there were some representatives from Georgia Equality and they talked
a lot about the school to pipeline problem with the
lgb QT community, and it turns out that there are
(25:38):
a lot of parallels here. Indeed, LGB youth, particularly gender
nonconforming girls, are up to three times more likely to
experience harsh disciplinary treatment by school administrators than their non
LGB counterparts. LGB youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system.
They make up just five to seven percent of the
overall youth population, but they rep in fift of those
(26:01):
in the juvenile justice system. And LGBT youth reports significant
distrust of school administrators and generally say they don't believe
that the school fishers officials do enough to foster safe
and welcoming, welcoming school climate. So again you have a
situation where for many of these students, they don't feel
they don't feel feel supported, they don't feel safe even
(26:23):
in the in the in these school environments, and it
ends up, you know, being a failure of the school
as a as a safe haven, as a launching path,
as a as a place of hope. Again because you know,
the the administrations and some of the teachers and again
not all, but some of them carry with them certain
biases and that colors our perception of that kid. And
(26:44):
so if that kid is doing something, then it can
be uh, grossly misperceived as this even sort of grotesque
ory of their behavior, when in fact the kid wasn't
doing any right. Um. Again, the punishment doesn't always correlate
with the actual misbehavior or any it may not even
(27:04):
be misbehavior. So we wanted to bring this topic to
you guys today. Again, we know it's not a light
and everyone, but we thought that you would appreciate it
because this is, uh, this is a huge problem the
prison population. We we are responsible for the largest prison
population in the world. And in order to drill down
(27:24):
into that and try to figure out why, you have
to look at schools. Yeah, I mean, certainly there are
other other parts of the problem. You can get into
the privatization of prisons, etcetera. But this is a major
component and and his uh, you know, it's it's not
pleasant information, but particularly if you're if you're a citizen
in the United States, I feel like it's it's really
(27:45):
important to have some of these facts bouncing around in
your skull. And as we get into um greater discussion
of of how racial bias works in the brain in
a subsequent episode. UM, you know, it's important to have
this to the all back to because it's easy to
sort of fall back on, oh, well, you know, implicit
bias that just relates to how I, you know, how
(28:06):
I interact with you know, a person of another race
and the elevator or something. Uh, it's it's good too,
but it's good to to remember that they are far larger,
overreaching um issues in play that are shaping children right
now in classrooms and their future behavior and their future
successes and failure. All right, so there you have it again. Uh,
(28:28):
stay tuned for another episode coming up that's going to
really get into racial racial bias and how that works
with with the human mind and you know, how we
can approach it as individual humans. Uh. In the meantime,
if you would like to check out more of our content,
past episodes, etcetera. Videos, anything you like, you'll find them
(28:48):
a stuffabole your mind dot com. That is the homepage
the Mothership and uh that's where you also find links
up of social media accounts that we handle, and if
you guys have any first person experiences you would like
to share with us, we hope you do so, and
you can email us blow the mind at how staff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
(29:11):
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
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