“The fifth graders in Jade Cooney’s classroom compete against a kitchen timer during lessons to see how long they can sustain good behavior — raising hands, disagreeing respectfully and looking one another in the eye — without losing time to insults or side conversations. As reward for minutes without misconduct, they win prizes like 20 seconds to kick their feet up on their desks or to play rock-paper-scissors.”

When The New York Times ran the above story on February 29 many were horrified by the idea that California was going to begin testing kids on these behaviors, but not enough were horrified by the notion that shaming of children because of non-compliance and because of cultural and individual difference has become so inherent in many of our public schools that even Angela Duckworth, who makes a living promoting Eugenicist Theories, is now backing away.

In fact we now have two different pipelines running parallel through our schools. We have the School to Prison Pipeline, which moves kids through a disciplinary system that leaves that no place for them to go in our society, and we have the School to Abusive Society Pipeline, which creates both leaders and followers who believe that some of the humans among us are inherently both worthless and dangerous.

These two pipelines have always existed and have always been interdependent. But now, led by the work of Duckworth, who has allowed schools to revive racial and ethnic stereotypes without shame, our schools have doubled down on this division of our students for the future, creating both of vast prison population and an increasingly dangerous government policing ethic.

Walk the halls of your school today and take a moment to see your kids the way “the public” might. Who is heading to jail? Who will be the enforcer of public compliance? Who will be the leader who encourages the enforcer? Who will be the bystander who lets it all happen?

I watched the videos from Eva Moskovitz’s little child factories last month and realized that I was watching ‘Donald Trump’s America’ being crafted. One in ten children to enter a “Success Academy” are sent packing within a year — a future prison population of 35 million? — a much higher percentage get dumped before they might take a test and mess up the school’s average. Those who make it through will be trained into the authoritarian mindset which predicts Trump and future neo-fascist voters. Those who make it through will be thoroughly trained to believe that those who fail to comply will deserve their fate, whether it be Eric Garner or Oscar Grant, unless they match the skin color and wealth of Eva Moskovitz.

But it is hardly only Moskovitz who creates these twin pipelines. In every school where “Grit” is celebrated and where non-compliance and the lack of the manners and attention patterns of the White Protestant church are punished, we are dividing children into these parallel and unfortunate pathways: Prisoners on one side, cops without empathy and the public who employs them on the other.

“But in Los Angeles and other places most citizens have been happy in the knowledge that the urban enemy is afraid of the warriors in blue,” I wrote in The Times in 1992 when the cops who beat Rodney King were initially acquitted. And now, is it really almost a quarter of a century later? we find the same citizen beliefs, and we find them reinforced daily in our schools.

“That power is made manifest when a group of white female educators of students of color wear t-shirts supporting police officers who had just killed a black man,” Jenn Borgioli Binis writes in an unrelated but highly worth reading Medium post today. It is made manifest every time a student is chastised for a behavior not to the cultural liking of the teacher. It is made manifest when the In-School Suspension Room looks like a gathering of the Black Student Association — not as funny as it sounds — or when African American and Latino males are judged too loud. It is made manifest every time a teacher publicly indicates that an ‘ADHD student’ is on medication (difference is a sickness), and whenever students see a student punished for something they can’t really help (think about the slow reader missing recess or a special because they must “finish their work”). It is manifest every time a kid with a crap home life gets in trouble for not finishing homework…

I have been on all sides. The bad kid, the cop, the educator. But escaping the actual pipelines has not meant that I haven’t watched them closely.

The sad thing we in education must face is that we fill both pipelines. Our compliance trained kids killed Eric Garner just as much as our schools failed him. Our unpathetic kids shot Oscar Grant just as our schools failed him. And our honor roll-AP kids, now graduated to leadership, tolerate all.

We can tolerate it all, we can say it’s hard to change, or we can act. I think I’m part of a team that is acting, and I hope you’ll join me.