The People We Learn to Be

What? Take a moment to think about your elementary school. I hope your teachers encouraged you. Can the same be said for you middle school? Did your early education prepare you for high school? Now think about the other schools in your district. Was your school better, or worse? Growing up, the schools we attend plays an important part in our identity. But the problem with our current system is that the school we are sent to — and later on the opportunities we are provided — are determined by where we live. So what does it say about your identity when your zip code determines that you will spend the first two decades of your life in low-performing schools?

In the podcast, The Problem We All Live With, Nikole Hannah-Jones reports on the achievement gap and disparities present in our education system today. Her story follows the experiences of black students from the accidental integration program of the Normandy School District in Normandy, Missouri, from recent years. Through their powerful stories, we are reminded that children already living in disadvantaged communities are pushed further into an irreparable situation caused by unequal access to reliable teachers, helpful resources, and an overall good education. In the situation of Normandy, students from the predominantly black school district were given the chance to move to better, predominantly white schools in the area after their district was discredited. Despite the immediate and incredibly harsh backlash of many white parents, the students proved them wrong. Test scores didn’t drop. Violence rates didn’t increase. The students from Normandy preformed equal to their white peers. The case wasn’t that these students didn’t have the right work ethic to succeed; It was that they didn’t have the right resources available to them. However, this accidental integration was only temporary. The Normandy School District was able to come back with a new name and new credit, forcing the students back to where they began. In the end, the only people who suffered from this ordeal were the students from the Normandy School District. The truth is that this accidental integration worked. But rather than pushing forward, we stopped too soon. “And when it proved difficult, as we knew it would be, we said integration failed, instead of the truth, which is that it was working, and we decided it wasn’t worth the trouble” (The Problem We All Live With).

As was the case with the children the system had failed, the video, Ending the Cradle to Prison Pipeline, argues that the poor minority are the people at the ultimate disadvantage. Throughout their conference, the speakers stress the importance of education. Although difficult to admit, it is a fact that to this day there is an unequal distribution of resources available to students. You can deny that this is a race issue all you want, but you cannot deny that some schools have better funding than others. When this occurs, the underserved students are provided less opportunities to grow and succeed. As a result, these students end up in what the video describes as “chronic joblessness”, which in turn lead to the despairing conditions that give rise to violence. But the problem is that even though these children showed so much potential in their youth, the education system sees only violent individuals with no work ethic and so treats them as such. If this continues without any change, these bright children learn to distrust the system that was meant to nurture them, growing up understanding that they were treated unfairly and desperate for a solution. They end up becoming all that was expected of them from the beginning. There is enough money and resources to provide the necessary education to send children down the path to become intellectual, independent thinkers; We can see it in the money that is invested to the prisons reserved for students who fall victims to structural racism in education. So why do we invest all that money on good prisons to send children to after they graduate rather than to ensure them access of opportunities while they’re still trying to complete their education?

This is the unfortunate case of the school-to-prison pipeline, best described by Ijeoma Oluo. The excerpt we read from So You Want To Talk About Race? begins with Sagan’s story. He was a student behaving violently and disrupting class by ignoring instructions, assaulting staff, and making guns with his fingers to threaten classmates. As a result, he was suspended. This seems like a logical solution — until you consider that he was only five years old. When a five-year-old child behaves this way, you must keep in mind that it won’t cause irreparable harm and the child is still learning self-control and empathy. Rather than practicing patience, the school was treating him like a criminal, punishing him for behaving badly without trying to resolve the issue by taking the time to listen to him. Why aren’t you participating? What’s wrong? What happened? What can we do? Of course, Sagan eventually had to go back to school. But only five months into kindergarten and “Sagan had already learned that his teachers did not want him in class, that he was too ‘bad’ to be educated” (Oluo 123). Sagan is fortunate in that his mother fought against his harsh punishment. But the impact of this event lasts a lifetime. Would the school have treated him differently if he wasn’t black?

“The ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline is the term commonly used to describe the alarming number of black and brown children who are funneled directly and indirectly from our schools into our prison industrial complex, contributing to devastating levels of mass incarceration that lead to one in three black men and one is six Latino men going to prison in their lifetimes, in addition to increased levels of incarceration for women of color” (Oluo 125).

It all begins with high levels of suspensions and expulsions. Often times, these punishments are unfair — such as the case of Sagan — as students of color are given harsher punishments and more frequently than other white students who commit the same acts. Children become what we expect of them. When we treat them like the scholars and critical-thinkers we know they are capable of being, this is precisely who they grow up to be. But when our public-school system acts in accordance to prejudice, they see only violent, disruptive, unpredictable future criminals — unintentionally creating the people they fear the most.

So What? Like Sagan and too many others, the constant and overly harsh discipline fosters distrust and contempt between the child and the school. The damage is internalized and is carried inside as the student is further trapped into this cycle of trouble and unfair punishment. In all studies of the school-to-prison pipeline, statistics show that students of color receive the short end of the stick. The excerpt from A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law further explain the effects this has on our youth.

“It pains me to say it, but I have to say it: at every school I go to, I say to the kids of color, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much kindness you have in your heart. If you’re black or brown in this country, you will go places where you’re going to be presumed dangerous and guilty. There is a presumption of danger and guilt that follows black and brown people” (Stevenson et al. 50).

Children are highly perceptive. They eventually come to understand the reasoning behind this prejudice even if no one speaks of it out loud. The effects of the school-to-prison pipeline are life-long. When they are burdened with the sense of constant hopelessness, we rob them of the endless possibilities of childhood. Without relief from the trauma, they are forced mature quickly into hardened adults with scars on their self-esteems from the years of being told they are inferior.

We need more programs like my community partner at Next Generation Scholars to provide a welcoming space to encourage students rather than bring them down. I appreciate the environment where doing well in school and pursuing education is expected rather than encouraged. The fact that these college bound students are driven and intelligent won’t always be taken into account when strangers judge them based solely on their appearance. They may not be given the same opportunities as others because of this. But when they are successful adults, we don’t want them to think “I was able to do this even though I’m Latinx”. We want them to know the potential that was inside them was just as potent as that in any other person. We want them to think “I am able to do this because I am Latinx”.

Now What? It is not enough to remind students that the inequities in our current education system are wrong. If we truly care for our children, we need to analyze the structural causes of such social issues to attack and end the prejudices that haunt our schools once and for all. This is a complex issue that will take time to unravel. If anything, the best place to begin will be to address and confront the issues in conversation. From including the school-to-prison pipeline in discussions of racial inequality and oppression to normalizing the achievements of black and brown students, these actions challenge the white-centered education that dominates our school system. We cannot just stand by and say “this is good enough.” To do that is to keep failing our children. “I think we also have to think about and focus on continuing the empowerment of local communities, and their voices, in these issues. Local communities are still responsive. People have to demand better. They do” (Lynch et al. 57).