The Importance of Arts Education for (Post)Incarcerated Girls
In the spirit of Beyond the Bars 2018: Closing Jails and Prisons taking place next weekend at Columbia, taking a look at the role arts education can play in the life of a vulnerable yet resilient population.
Many girls and young women across America face incarceration due to institutionalized problems that have been continually ignored. Racial and gender oppression, class barriers and lack of attention have left a large group of girls exposed to continued trauma and abandonment in a world that is quickly diversifying and becoming more complex. Limited in resources (both fiscally and emotionally), the evaluation of this population must recalibrate to take a more holistic approach to their discipline, and it is imperative that they are encouraged and nurtured in order to further their personal, academic and professional development. This can be achieved through an honest and direct re-evaluation of the current education system (and the school to prison pipeline in place), a revoking of the permission to fail that is being granted by non-empathic or overworked teachers, and a focused effort to stimulate growth through the arts and education.
SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE
There are public elementary schools in America that don’t have recess (Morris), where children are expected to sit still for eight hours a day and follow the transmission model of education that hasn’t changed in over a century and lacks much of the cultural relevance necessary to engage modern students. Children and their families are often clustered together in schools based on race and/or class signifiers that work to specifically oppress whole communities. Minorities and lower income families are especially and specifically targeted in many of the most damaging policies in the American education system.
Race plays a major role in the decisions made around punishing students, and the disparity in gender is vast. During the 2011–12 school year, “twelve percent of all African American female preK-12 students received an out-of-school suspension” (Smith-Evans and George 2014); this rate is six times that of white girls and significantly higher than that of any other racial distinguished group of girls, and several groups of boys. Girls of African-American descent are the largest growing population within the education system who have experienced school-related arrests.
This treatment and criminalization displays the damage being done to girls before they’re even able to graduate high school, and in fact, works to decrease the likelihood of that even happening. As more studies are being conducted to research these institutionalized problems, the current model of punishment is now slowly being re-evaluated and reformed. More research is being conducted (i.e. Evans-Winters) in order to understand what steps are being taken for young women who are considered “at risk” to empower them to thrive and go on to succeed in their careers and lives. By examining the extremes of treatment and pre-determined educational tracks, a more holistic understanding of the problem can continue to form.
PERMISSION TO FAIL
Young African-American women are policed literally and figuratively in school. Whether through restrictive school policies that punish students based on body shape or hair texture/style, overly harsh punishment of (mis)behavior (Rovner), or an actual police presence that decreases the possibility of community being built in a school, the possibility for girls to excel and enjoy gaining an education in such an environment is not feasible.
These endangered girls are often neglected or misunderstood by teachers, especially if they’re already flagged for being behind the rest of the class or as having special needs or different learning capabilities. Additionally, negative remarks made by previous teachers outside of formal documentation can lead to judgments that greatly affect their success. After incarceration or court-involvement, this exclusionary behavior further exacerbates the stigmatization and trauma inflicted upon girls in this environment.
If teachers were to foster this group’s personal growth they would increase self-efficacy and in turn, future success. This has been evidenced in the success rates of many restorative justice and post-incarceration programs, and in New York state, quite notably in the work of the Department of Education’s Pathways to Graduation program. But because many teachers are not intervening and thus not impacting the lives of these young women in meaningful ways, they are implicitly giving these girls the permission to fail. While it must be recognized that many teachers within the education system are overworked and underpaid (most especially those in the types of schools to which the young women have been funneled as noted above), it is clear that the negligence of some teachers in implementing and harnessing empathy allows for this overlooked group to continue to be harmed. This, in turn, impacts our society negatively through continued oppression and the likelihood of more increased targeting, profiling and/or delinquency.
THE BENEFIT OF ARTS EDUCATION
As administrators and education leaders search for restorative practices (i.e. Leadership and Public Service High School in Manhattan’s Financial District) to heal their student body, the arts are beginning to be considered a tool to bring about change in the school community. By incorporating artistic activity into the curriculum, many schools are reporting greatly positive and popular reform within their environment (Ruppert). The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) asserted that the arts are a core academic subject that should be taught in schools, yet many places of learning lacked the resources to develop comprehensive programs that allowed for this; Obama’s 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act further emphasized the importance of the arts in communities and the necessity for flexibility to better support students (Jones).
Research into cognitive development has shown that arts curricula have the power to promote “vocabulary development, reasoning, comparing/contrasting, abstraction, integration of concepts, and conceptual development” (Baker) in children; if its strengths were leveraged and applied to young women during and post-incarceration, recidivism rates would be drastically impacted.
For female scholars who are behind in expected academic achievement, the arts can work as an accelerator to re-engage them with school after going through the court system. For the large number of court-involved girls who have experienced trauma, the arts can act as an intervention, creating opportunities for therapy and self-expression, enabling these young women to come to examine the experiences they have been put through in a less harmful way. In general, education as a whole works to support teens and decrease the likelihood of continued delinquency (Koyama). Studies delving into arts education in the criminal system have consistently shown lowered rates of recidivism (Nally, et al.) and increased rates of self-confidence and stronger social and coping skills (Moller). By investing in this form of education, girls who are or have been incarcerated will feel they have the power to shape their own lives for the better, and will thus be more likely to try.
In this time of critical change, it remains imperative that we continue to question the way things have always been done, exploring new options and potential solutions. Emphasizing the urgency for change can demonstrate to these girls that we refuse to abandon them, refuse to neglect their needs as valuable members of our society, and refuse to be complacent to the attacks they face in the places where they should be made to feel safe.
