Abstract
A most unusual review for a most unusual book
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According to the editors, the school-to-prison pipeline is ‘an amalgamation of a number of different trends’ familiar to philosophers of education in the United States, including ‘the overrepresentation of students of color in special education to the rise of zero tolerance school discipline policies; from an increased fear related to school safety to perverse incentives from test-based accountability systems to push out low-performing students’ (p. 1). Each of these phenomena contributes in its own pernicious way to social injustice in general and cumulative disadvantage in particular (Barry, 2005; see also Anderson, 2012; Blum, 2012; Curren, 1995; Satz, 2012).
Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline seems to have been modeled on Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex (Hartnett, 2010), a collection of essays and case studies by experts and activists interspersed with poems by contributors who have experienced the criminal justice system firsthand. Both the school-to-prison pipeline and the more compendious concept of the prison-industrial complex have garnered much scholarly attention in recent years. The former concept describes the blurring of the line between school discipline and criminal law as students are increasingly channeled into juvenile and criminal justice systems for violating arcane and inflexible school rules. The latter concept describes the remarkable rise in incarceration rates in the United States attributed both to ‘tough on crime’ policies and the privatization of prisons.
Presumably, the editors of Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline shared Stephen John Hartnett’s concern that ‘even the best-intended scholarship can sometimes address social justice issues while marginalizing the voices of the people we work for and with’ (2010: vii). Scholarly audiences otherwise unlikely to hear the voices of students in urban schools have much to learn from reading both collections. I write this with a twinge of irony, as I am probably the kind of scholar Hartnett had in mind. As an academic jurist and philosopher of education, I write about public educational authority and the interests of children in the abstract, far removed from the everyday experiences of students in urban schools. I write about custody as a form of governance appropriate to legally incompetent persons and about liberty as a form of governance appropriate to legally competent persons. I emphasize that the State as parens patriae has a duty to safeguard and promote the publicly determined welfare and developmental interests of children, including the prospective liberty interests associated with rational self governance and legal competence. In the theoretical sense in which I use it, the exercise of public custodial authority by teachers and school officials safeguards a child’s interest in becoming legally competent by structuring his landscape of choice (Ben Porath, 2010) in ways that facilitate the overcoming of his developmental and epistemic vulnerabilities (Curren, 2013), even though this necessarily entails ‘preventing his free choice now’ (Feinberg, 2007: 113).
‘In carrying out their duties as caretakers of youth, school officials serve as both legal and symbolic representatives of state authority’, writes Pedro Noguera in his essay (p. 16). However, as the contributors to Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline make agonizingly clear, there is an enormous difference between public schools as ‘custodial and tutelary’ institutions in the theoretical and formative sense in which the Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the legal relationship between teachers and pupils (Blokhuis, 2013) and the day-to-day realities faced by students in urban schools today. The exercise of custodial authority entails making decisions in the welfare and developmental interests of persons incapable of making decisions for themselves. In theory, public school officials exercise both public custodial authority (as agents of the state as parens patriae) and the delegated custodial authority of parents (in loco parentis). In theory, public school teachers and school officials are to make decisions on behalf of the children in their charge in the manner of a ‘reasonable and prudent parent’. In theory, shared public and private custodial authority safeguards and promotes the independent welfare and developmental interests of children. Yet school officials often seem to be exercising the police power of the State, rather than its sovereign parens patriae duties.
For students in many urban schools today, this may be a distinction without a difference. As I write this review in my office at the Library of Congress, about 40 young people have gathered in front of the Capitol to protest the school-to-prison pipeline. Through a megaphone, a speaker describes how disheartening it is to be surrounded by metal detectors and police officers. Others bear placards reading, ‘Educate, don’t incarcerate.’ To an academic jurist, the term school-to-prison pipeline connotes a tragic continuity of custodial authority extending well into adulthood. For the young people from urban schools contributing to this volume, it connotes oppression – the perpetual denial of the exercise of individual liberties that public schooling was designed to facilitate. According to Randall Curren (2013), no state can be just without a public system that ‘enables most people to understand what is good in laws and voluntarily accept their legitimate demands, participate in civic affairs and processes of public reason with a comparable level of understanding, and do work consistent with recognition as a full citizen’.
Equity allows for the exercise of discretion in particular cases in which the strict application of a legal rule would lead to manifest injustice. But according to the contributors to Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline, there would appear to be very little scope for officials to exercise such discretion in urban schools today. Countless legal cases could be cited here. In Hinterlong v. Arlington Independent School District (2010), a student was expelled after a thimbleful of liquid that smelled like alcohol was found in his car, even though the student had no idea what the liquid was or how it got there. Zero tolerance seems to mean school officials cannot impose discretionary remedies in light of a particular student’s age, level of maturity, domestic circumstances, knowledge, intent, or developmental needs (Pelliccioni, 2003). Instead, infractions of school rules are treated as crimes, and offenders are channeled into the youth justice and criminal justice systems. According to Randall Curren (2013), public schools ‘should be far more proactive in helping students at risk and far more selective in suspending and expelling student offenders’. This, he says, is ‘an aspect of educational justice rarely addressed by philosophers, but surely one of immense importance to the well-being of students in urban schools . . .’
This is the general thrust of Noguera’s seminal 1995 essay, ‘Preventing and producing violence: A critical analysis of responses to school violence’, which now serves as both the introduction to and the lynchpin for Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline. For an academic jurist far removed from the day-to-day experiences of students in urban schools, this book was a revelation. Is the situation on the ground really as bleak and prison-like as the contributors describe it? Answering this question would require some action research – most unusual for the purposes of a book review, but perhaps not for this most unusual book. I called on a respected colleague and Noguera devotee who has been the principal at the Institute of Technology at Syracuse Central (ITSC), an inner-city high school. I asked Principal Williams if I could accompany him for a few hours as he made his daily rounds.
Outwardly, ITSC was not a facility like those described by Jonathan Kozol in Death at an Early Age (1985). The building was brand new, with a gleaming glass and steel atrium and clean, brightly lit corridors. It had well-equipped science labs, the latest Apple computers, an impressive robotics program, and a full commercial kitchen. Indeed, the facility looked a lot better than the dowdy high school I attended decades ago. But unlike my high school, ITSC is not located in a quaint little farm town. My disconnect from the day-to-day realities of inner-city schools became painfully apparent when I spoke with a school resource officer about the potential liability for the district should a student leave the building without permission and be injured by a passing motorist, citing Hoyem v. Manhattanville School District (1976). That sort of thing could happen anywhere. The school resource dryly replied that a student had left the building without permission two years ago – and was shot by members of an urban gang. That sort of thing could not happen anywhere.
At the ITSC, as in many schools across the country, there were zero tolerance policies in effect for drugs, weapons, violence, and gang regalia. Principal Williams assured me that although there was a policy against hats, he did not rigorously enforce it. He also advised me not to confuse ‘zero-tolerance’ with an ordered and safe instructional environment, which depends on how school officials classify infractions and the contextualized manner in which they respond, citing Goodman (2006). So are his students being oppressed in the way the protesters here in Washington and the contributors to Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline say they have been oppressed? Is his school proactive in facilitating the prospective legal competence of its students? Is he able to exercise discretion when dealing with student offenders? I leave these questions for Principal Williams to address in what remains of this review.
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I think it is important to clarify the role that teachers and school officials play within the disciplinary process in general and the suspension process in particular. Teachers often fear losing control of the classroom, and they do not want their authority undermined. As a result, suspensions frequently occur in the absence of actual violence. Students who are singled out by teachers tend to be those who vocalize their displeasure, which teachers perceive as a threat to their control (Fenning and Rose, 2007). Noguera in his essay casts this fear of losing control as a fear of students: ‘A teacher who fears the student that she or he teaches is more likely to resort to some form of discipline when challenged, or to ignore the challenge in the hope that she or he will be left alone’ (p. 12).
In a powerful and deeply personal way, the contributors to Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline remind us of our aims as educators. While we try to be positive forces in the lives of our students, we can sometimes have tremendously negative effects. Contributors Robert Wilson, Seth G. Cooper, and Elizabeth A. Reid bear witness to this reality with personal accounts of the institutional failings of some urban schools.
The themes of control and criminalization as approaches to maintaining school order presuppose that the removal of the ‘bad’ students, and their separation from the ‘good’ students, will result in improved educational outcomes. However, this approach seems rather utilitarian, sacrificing the interests and needs of individual students in order to provide the greatest good for the greatest number. For excluded students, the school has ceased to perform its fundamental educational duties. When a child is excluded from an inner-city school, where does she go? As contributor Michael Satterfield observes, ‘despair is not bred in public schools but elsewhere in this world. It is only that schools, which are meant to act as beacons of light that guide people, such as myself, out of the darkness are failing to do so’ (p. 12). So while the editors of this volume have seemingly centered upon despair, those who have experienced firsthand the failings of schools remind us that as educators we have made and broken a promise.
I would say the situation is not as bleak as some of the contributors to Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline make it out to be. This book allows readers to hear the voices of individuals who have experienced urban schools, but it devotes little attention to what should be done to improve urban schools. To address student disengagement requires nothing short of a transformative approach to discipline and classroom instruction that initiates students into academic pursuits that are of value to them. Like Noguera, Kenneth Strike (2010) proposes that we create school communities in which students feel connected and share a common purpose. If we had schools that embody the ideals of intellectual and democratic communities – schools that are more personal, more caring, smaller, less bureaucratic – then we would be able to engage students in a nurturing environment.
In Syracuse and across the nation, there are urban schools that against all odds offer students meaningful and preparatory educational experiences. This book reminds us that the voices of students need to be heard more often in the study of education in general and urban schooling in particular – along with the voices of school teachers and principals.