The rise of prisons, the rise of school discipline and what we can do to empower communities.

Join us on September 22nd!

Editors note: LEV intern Elliot Helmbrecht, with the help of Nikolas Raisis, Samantha Maloof, Eric Hopson and Lauren Brown bring to you a series of blog posts on the growth of the for-profit university industry.

This is the second post of 3. If you missed the first, check it out HERE.

More often than not, the debate around the cost of college pushes aside first-hand accounts in favor of graphs and charts. Statistics provide cold, solid numbers that have the ability to end a discussion immediately with, say, a correctly timed insertion of a percentage or dollar amount. But the personal stories go behind the digits, and help paint the picture that is worth a thousand words.

Eric Hopson recently shared his story with the League of Education Voters and detailed his struggle to pay for school:

“After graduating with a generic degree from my local community college in New York I was ready to further my education, but unsure of what field I wished to pursue.  The answer came from a nearby private university with a newly instituted program that seemed like the perfect thing for a 20-something male in need of inspiration. The Bachelors in Electronic Media Arts and Communication (EMAC) major promised courses in video game design, electronic music production, computer animation, video production, web page design, and so much more!

I quickly applied, moved off to college, and blindly signed all the necessary student loan documents. I was ridiculously misinformed as to what financial aid awards truly meant. For some naive reason I had perceived these awards as scholarships, not as loans I would have to pay back with interest rates approaching 10%.

After a semester or two, it became increasingly apparent that this was not the best career move for me. Recent graduates of the program were finding it extremely difficult to find any form of related employment, current EMAC students were strongly pressured to focus our studies on more “employable” skills such as computer programming and database design. After 2 years in the program, I felt woefully undereducated and worried about the issue of employment, so I left to pursue more direct and productive experiences.

A few months after leaving the university, I received my first bill from Sallie Mae asking for hundreds of dollars a month, and a total debt approaching $35,000. I was shocked, confused, heartbroken, and completely disgusted, let alone unable to make the monthly payments. Ten years later after countless periods of deferment, forbearance, and simply not paying, I am still in debt with absolutely no relevant education to show for it. It nearly sends me into a panic attack whenever I think about it. Especially now, considering I have a son that I am trying to help support. By the time he is ready to attend college, I will likely still be trying to repay this horrible loan.”

Eric’s story reminds us that there are actual people behind the figures. People who are simply trying to better themselves through education.  Stories like Eric’s his can be found at every public, private, and for-profit school out there. And those stories are what we need to keep in mind when we discuss the merits and detriments of higher education policies.

Editors note: Introducing Schools to Prisons, a collaborative research project between Our American Generation and the League of Education Voters. This project highlights the concerning link between our nation’s prisons and public education systems; a link that turns struggling students into juvenile delinquents. We’re bringing to you three podcasts, released weekly, to shed light on Washington’s growing opportunity gap. Special thanks go out to our researchers Bailee Martin and Kendra Ijeoma and also to Kaleb Gubernick for his sound expertise. For questions please contact Maggie Wilkens [maggie@educationvoters.org] or Scott Davis [scott@ouramericangeneration.org]

Original posting HERE

PODCAST 3: FROM PUPIL TO PRISONER

Welcome to this segment of the League of Education Voter’s and Our American Generation’s “Schools 2 Prisons” series.

The last segment explored the economic, social and cultural cost of educational inequity. This time we’ll be looking more closely at the connection between a broken prison and education system and how ultimately they work together to disenfranchise youth with a very real and lasting effect on their lives.

How exactly do we push kids out of schools and onto a path towards jail? What does that process look like? In this podcast we’d like to paint a picture of exactly how this broken system is changing kids from being pupils to being prisoners. Getting our queue from Michelle Alexander’s recent work “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness” we’ll be looking at how these two systems—education and prison—perpetuate the very same inequities seen in America’s Jim Crow era.

Students experience Jim Crow in the classroom and in the streets through the guise of “zero tolerance policies” and “juvenile justice.” But what does it actually mean for society when huge numbers of the population are imprisoned instead of educated? In what ways do the prison system and the public school system mirror the intention and actuality of Jim Crow politics? Have we progressed?

We’ll attempt to answer some of these questions as well as explore some solutions.

Before we dive in, let’s refresh ourselves about the history and legacy of the Jim Crow era. In some ways we’ve progressed as a society, but in what ways have we stayed the same? What does progress really mean when the inequalities of Jim Crow are repeated in the 21st century?

These days it is common to hear the term “post-racial” thrown around in political discourse when describing contemporary society—but let’s unpack that phrase a bit more. Post-racial is the notion that our society has moved beyond race, as in we no longer hold biases towards others because of the color of another person’s skin.

It is the notion that we don’t need to acknowledge racial differences because there’s a belief that we’re all treated the same under fair and just laws.

Opportunity gap data and jail sentencing data prove this is plain untrue. Race matters. Race is real, and systems and people—whether consciously or not—perpetuate inequalities.

Granted, we are not living in an era such as Jim Crow where the racism was explicitly spelled out in written policy and law. The US doesn’t have an explicit racial caste system anymore, but Jim Crow was more than just a set of laws it was a way of life. It created a society in which people of color in the United States were relegated to the status of second class citizens.

Michelle Alexander argues that Jim Crow never ended but that jails and prisons, because of disproportionate sentencing, are the current extension of Jim Crow laws. We’ll outline in this podcast how some of the public school discipline data mirrors this trend.

We’d like to illustrate how exactly this takes place by painting a picture of the school-to-prison pipeline, specifically focused on how high stakes and zero tolerance policies create hostile classrooms. We hope to show the ways in which policies, both inside and outside of the classroom, perpetuate this pipeline and work to disenfranchise students for the rest of their lives.

We chose to focus on race and gender in this illustration in order to highlight the ways in which non-white, male students are targeted by the public school system.

For the purposes of this podcast we chose to focus on high school because evidence suggests that high school is a turning point in an adolescent’s life—which way they turn is to be determined. We realize that a system as big as public education is complex and is affected by both inside and outside factors.

While we know the education system is complex, we also think it’s the most important place to start. The last podcast outlined the serious consequences for not getting a diploma, and we know that there are young people dropping out of high school as we speak.

Classroom culture, curriculum, teacher to student relationship, classroom management and engagement of students are just a few of the factors that contribute to a young person’s experience at school. As we’ve discussed in earlier podcasts, the range of quality in schools varies from city to city, county to county and state to state. Much of what is being taught in public school classrooms is based on preparing students to take a state standardized test—at test that will determine whether or not youth will graduate. That’s a lot of pressure for a young person.

When we talked with students and teachers alike, they told us how important an inclusive curriculum and diverse learning materials are. However, the teachers we spoke with feel they are limited in what they can cover in class if it does not directly prepare a student for the material covered on a standardized test. A curriculum that does not relate to the lives of students as well as the intimidation attached to failing a standardized test, creates a classroom culture in which kids are less than enthusiastic about the subject and scared they will fail.

Everybody has a part to play in the way we use standardized tests. They are helpful in the sense that they help measure what students are learning and whether or not they are learning the same thing in different schools, as well as assisting teachers in seeing what areas they need to work on. But, there is a tendency for districts, principals and teachers to penalize themselves for not performing well on standardized tests. This type of “all or nothing” method of testing students can create a hostile school culture, one that is based on a dichotomy of pass or fail, which is what creates the stress. School could become a sort of prison for students and for teachers, in some way.

We talked with Dr. Wayne Au, educator and activist, who gave us his insight on the issue of testing.

(Professor Wayne Au)

Some teachers feel the culture of urban classrooms have come to resemble an assembly line model of education that emphasizes conformity and creates a culture of fear for both the teacher and the student. Among the teachers we spoke with, many agree that there are some things students should all learn like reading well by the third grade, writing and basic math skills. That type of conformity makes sense. However, the older students get and the more their learning styles and interests differ, it gets increasingly hard to determine what should be taught or learned in school.

This is when individuality and flexibility makes the most sense. Teachers know their students best and should have the freedom to teach how they like. This is the catch twenty-two of standardized tests: how do we find a balance between agreeable standards and high rigor?

Beyond limited curriculum in the classroom are disciplinary policies that are quick to criminalize, rather than correcting or helping guide student behavior.

As we’ve touched on previously, zero-tolerance policies were initially created as a response to a nationwide crackdown on weapons, drugs and violent behavior in schools. They are enforced when students commit what is called “exceptional misconduct.” In Washington State, each individual school district is allowed to define exactly what “exceptional misconduct” means. In some instances, the definition has expanded to include a zero-tolerance approach to truancy, gangs and even harassment.

If a student breaks a rule that falls under the purview of a zero-tolerance policy, the punishment is severe and formal. Your options for redress, if you feel you were wrongly punished, are limited.

Within the Seattle School District there are 9 categories of “exceptional misconduct” that warrant suspension and immediate referral to police. A few of these offenses range from: trespassing on school property, to intimidation of school authorities, to fighting, to the use of toys as a weapon, to pulling fire alarms, or for partaking in gang or hate group activity.

Black and brown students, because of racial discrimination, are perceived to be more violent and disruptive than white students. The problem with zero-tolerance policies is that they are supposed to objectively punish students for crimes which are subjectively determined by adults.

We spoke with Anne Lee, the Executive Director of TeamChild, which is a group of attorneys who provide free legal representation and advice to help youth assert their civil/legal rights, and to access community-based services that help meet their basic needs. For example, TeamChild would help students get back into school, secure safe and stable housing, obtain health care and mental health services, or to access other kinds of public support.

TeamChild serves roughly 1,000 young people in Washington State with 7 different offices. They have existed since 1997.

When I interviewed Anne, I asked her a question I am sure she gets all the time—“What are students most often suspended for?” I was curious; I wanted to know if it was fighting or something like drug use, but Anne was quick to reframe the question.

Instead of talking about an actual offense that a student committed, she spoke to the reaction that adults had towards the incident. She believes, in a lot of cases, adults overreact. Students misbehave without knowing the severe consequences of their actions and strict policies jack up the stakes, especially when it comes to issues or incidents around gangs.

To some adults, it is not a crime to loiter in the hallways with a group of friends. You could be yelling loudly and goofing around. To another adult, this could look like a gang and you could be perceived as harassing another student.

Under a zero tolerance policy, all of these students would be suspended with no opportunity to explain the circumstances.

There is no evidence that suggest that youth of color commit offenses at higher rates than white kids, yet they are criminalized at much higher rates. What we mean when we say “criminalized” is that these offenses, under zero tolerance policies, have to be reported to the police department. Young people may think they could only get in trouble with school administrators, when in reality they are sent directly into the juvenile court system. This is an example of the ways in which the legacy of Jim Crow still exists in the classroom, through the criminalization of black and brown youth.Zero tolerance policies were intended to keep students safe, but instead have done the opposite.

Nationally, 20% of Black youth are suspended and 5% are expelled. In contrast, 9% of white students are suspended but only 1% are expelled.

In Seattle, the national trend is similar with 28% of African-American middle school students suspended compared to only 7% of White students.

Evidence suggests that roughly one fourth of students of color who are suspended or expelled don’t return to the classroom. For white students, the same is true, but only for less than 1 percent of students.

We’ve seen how Jim Crow-like policies are keeping kids out of the classroom, but they’re also pushing them through a pathway to jail. What happens to kids when they’re not in the classroom? How are youth of color experiencing Jim Crow outside of school? Youth of color who have been expelled from public schools because of discriminatory policies are at risk of being targeted on the street for the very same reasons.

It’s not news to most that racial profiling exists in America. We’re referring to a police person’s use of an individual’s race or ethnicity as a key factor in determining whether or not to engage in law enforcement. Racial profiling is a component to the long-standing Jim Crow legacy in this country, where black and brown bodies are targeted and highly policed in public spaces.

Along with race, I would argue that age is also a factor in discriminatory discipline enforcement. As a society, we often assume the worst of young people. Racial profiling on the streets is where young students of color move through the next section of the “pipeline” towards prison.

One major policy that is often overlooked that ends up having severe consequences on young students of color are “schoolzone” drug laws. “Schoolzone” drug laws are those that increase penalties of an offender for committing crimes near a school. In Washington State, schoolzone laws enhance a standard drug sentence by two years, as well as double the penalty for the manufacturing, selling, delivering, and/or possession of drugs when activity happens within 1,000 feet of a school. Washington goes a step farther by extending the increased sentencing for areas near public parks, public housing projects, school bus route stops and civic centers.

These laws which were intended to keep students safe from drugs often times put youth of color and low-income students at a greater risk of being harshly policed and sentenced. With these types of policies, even a minor, non-violent drug offense committed within a “drug free” zone results in a far harsher punishment. In 2005 in Pierce County, African-Americans were three times more likely than whites to receive the schoolzone enhancement when convicted of drug offenses.

As we’ve discussed in the previous podcasts, students of color don’t use drugs at a higher rate than their white peers. One way this unequal outcome could be explained is by taking a closer look at geography. If schools, civic centers, parks and housing developments are the targeted areas for increased and stricter drug regulations, these policies are more likely to affect individuals living in metropolitan environments, where communities of color and low-income communities are concentrated.

Students of color, when in fact in trouble with police, have been shown to receive harsher penalties within the school system and also outside of its walls. We’ve read studies that show youth of color are more likely to be tried as adults than their white peers in the criminal justice system.

In Seattle, a city with a comparatively small African-American population, 64% of Black youth who had been detained were actually prosecuted compared to only 33% of white youth. This results in a large segment of youth of color behind bars, a trend that mirrors and foreshadows the mass incarceration of people of color that Michelle Alexander writes about.

In recapping, we’re beginning to see how disparities in educational attainment, in discipline in schools, and in convictions outside the classroom build on each other to create overwhelming differences in school experiences for students.

As a tutor in the King County Juvenile Detention Center, I witnessed the learning environment of convicted students and they often got shorthanded when it came to their education while in juvi.

The staff to student ratio is extremely high and detention school teachers are often overwhelmed with large numbers of students, each who have differing learning needs. Many of the students in detention come with learning and behavioral disabilities that teachers are not always equipped to handle. The quality of education in the detention school is compromised by the fact that the students range so much in age and grade levels.

Students from age 10-17 are stuck in the same classroom and expected to learn the same things the same way. Also, a student’s length of stay varies; youth can be detained anywhere from 6 months to over a year. It becomes nearly impossible for teachers and students to have the kind of learning environment necessary for substantial learning. Personally, working at the detention center was a rewarding experience because I was able to connect with students and support them, but during my time there I witnessed a lot opportunities to improve the system.

There are a number of reasons schools deny re-entry to students returning from the juvenile justice system. For example, if a student was convicted of crimes that were perceived as dangerous to others, they may be asked to prove that they have gone through a “behavioral readjustment,” such as an anger management course. Regardless of the crime, that’s no reason to deny a student an education. We found that students are mandated by law to attend classes until the age of 16, yet after a student is expelled or deemed truant, it was confusing to pinpoint exactly who was responsible for re-enrolling that student.

One article we read suggested that district administrators encouraged students to enroll in alternative education programs because the logistical aspect of re-enrolling into a standard public school was cumbersome. Some students just dropped out.

When students do re-enroll, they often find they earned far fewer credits while in a detention center school than in a regular public school. Classes held in detention centers are sporadic and often disrupted by behavioral difficulties. They’re underfunded and with little classroom space and outdated materials. This contributes to a higher dropout rate of students of color who have been involved in the juvenile justice system because they have to take remedial courses to catch up to their peers. A national study concluded that 66% of students who were formerly in custody eventually dropped out of school after their release.

We can see how the right doors close and how the wrong ones open for many students. While these policies and practices are not explicitly making a racialized statement on an individual level, they make a grand impact when viewed from an institutional level. The real problematic connections between the school and prison systems are manifested in the continued, life-long disenfranchisement of youth of color.

Access to a quality public education should be a right for every student regardless of race, class, sex or even former incarceration. By pushing kids out of school, we are not only robbing them of a quality education but also robbing them of serious life chances. An education system infested with discriminatory discipline policies restricts the future economic and social mobility of youth. Having a criminal record makes it extremely difficult to find a job and own a home, which makes an individual more reliant on social services. The irony is that these very services are harder to qualify for if you have a criminal record.

Life-long restrictions for past criminal offenders are a contemporary manifestation of the Jim Crow legacy in our education system. When black and brown students are pushed out of the classroom and into the juvenile justice system, we maintain a Jim Crow-like socio-economic and racial caste system in the U.S. where people of color remain in inferior positions. One lawyer we spoke with asked candidly, “who teaches the bad kids?” The students that need the most help are the ones we end up pushing through the court system.

If this information jars you, you’re not alone. Students, teachers, parents and policy makers alike are working on strategies to ease the gap and are finding what we’d all expect—that complicated and deep-rooted social issues require multifaceted and well-funded policy approaches. It doesn’t help that there seems to be a proverbial “passing of the torch” when it comes to discussing whose feet we’re going to hold to the fire. If you’re looking for a solution; it varies depending on who you ask.
If you ask a student how to fix the opportunity gap, they will most likely tell you that the single most important factor in their education is their teacher. The culture of a classroom has to be inclusive and respectful of differences while still being challenging. If a student knows their teacher cares and is invested in their life, it makes all the difference. Students want curriculum that speaks to their personal histories and represents a variety of perspectives. Think more Howard Zinn and less Founding Fathers. Also, everyone young person we talked to wants to go to college and needs their teachers, principals and parents to help guide the way.
If you ask a teacher how to fix the opportunity gap, they will most likely tell you that the nation as a whole is putting too much on the teacher’s plate. Schools are overcrowded and underfunded, leaving teachers overworked and exhausted. They might say that it starts at home—students need their families to instill a love of learning from an early age and be there for support throughout their school careers. We heard several teachers say it’s hard to teach students who come to school hungry or to teach students who are constantly struggling with issues at home. A teacher would also ask for freedom and flexibility in their curriculum. Think less standardized testing and more project-based learning and assessment.
If you were to ask a parent to fix the opportunity gap, they will tell you the schools need more funding. As long as our neighborhoods are segregated by race and class and our schools depend on levies and bonds that are proportional to a neighborhood’s income bracket, our schools will continue to struggle with unequal resources. The state helps in some degrees, but we can do better. It’s written into Washington’s constitution that it is our paramount duty to adequately fund our public education system, yet we’re still lagging behind the rest of the nation.
If you were to ask a policy maker or politician how to fix the opportunity gap, they would most likely speak to the stalemate nature of bipartisanship and political games that make sweeping changes tedious and slow. They would point to conflicts between two major camps: teachers’ unions and education reformers who constantly struggle to find policies they can agree to work together on.
However, despite the overwhelming nature of the problem, we know that we can close the opportunity gap and end disproportionate discipline problems. There are clear examples of students, teachers, schools, districts and states that have turned the tides and begun the work to close gaps.
We also know that Washington is amongst the states that have the most work to do. A recent report by the Center for Education showed that at the rate Washington State is going, it would take us 105 years to close the gap. One immediate solution is to rethink zero-tolerance policies towards school discipline.

In summary, we started off our podcast series by looking into gaps in academic achievement on standardized tests and on graduation rates. We found that school culture, curriculum and a student’s relationship to their teacher heavily influenced their experience at school. We saw that school districts that made intentional efforts to work on issues of truancy and unequal suspension and expulsion saw promising results.

We then took a look at how discipline policies can and have increased students’ chances of exiting school prematurely. We saw that schools implemented no-second-chances into their discipline policies with a goal of keeping students safe but ended up with drastically unfair results. We looked at the financial costs when students dropout—for students themselves but also for taxpayers.

Lastly, this podcast explored how the opportunity gap and disparities in discipline hurt students of color and students from lower-income households by permanently disenfranchising large portions of the youth population. We explored that juvi not only puts a student way behind in their education but also potentially bars him or her from receiving important social services later in life. We see that our public education system is broken, and in some cases the most vulnerable students are the ones who are hurt the most.

For most folks listening, this may not be the first time you’ve been introduced to these concepts. We’re sure it’s not the last time you’ll hear the phrase “school to prison pipeline.” We hope we’ve achieved our goal—to continue an honest and candid discussion on one of the most pressing issues plaguing our public school system. If you’d like to learn more about the school to prison pipeline or about the League of Education Voters or Our American Generation, please look us up on the web! Thanks for listening!

Editors note: Introducing Schools to Prisons, a collaborative research project between Our American Generation and the League of Education Voters. This project highlights the concerning link between our nation’s prisons and public education systems; a link that turns struggling students into juvenile delinquents. We’re bringing to you three podcasts, released weekly, to shed light on Washington’s growing opportunity gap. For questions please contact Maggie Wilkens [maggie@educationvoters.org] or Scott Davis [scott@ouramericangeneration.org]

Missed our first podcast, “Schools 2 Prisons: The Opportunity Gap?” Check it out here.

PODCAST TWO: THE COST OF INEQUITY

In this podcast, we’ll be taking a closer look at the actual cost of our nation’s inequities within the public school system. When we talk about cost here, we are talking more than a dollar amount. There are definitely lost opportunities for an individual when he or she doesn’t graduate high school, but we’ll also try to shed light on some of the social and cultural costs to school climate under zero-tolerance policies. And, we’ll look at some of the drawbacks for Washington State when we don’t educate our students.

We’ll share some information that might illuminate how the opportunity gap not only affects the students who are denied access to a quality education, but also society as a whole. We’ll also dive into some financial comparisons between our state budget for education and our state budget for correctional services. As you listen, think about how the story we are telling relates to your own experiences in schools, public or private. Finally, think about how you would make our education system better. Where would you invest the public funds and what policies would you change?

It might be easiest to start by talking about what is lost when a young person doesn’t get a high school diploma. What can we predict about this person’s life?

To start off with a really big picture example: one report told us that high school graduates live up to seven years longer than students who dropout. This is an example of a pretty extreme cost and not one that we would usually think to associate with a lack of education. Yet, it’s kind of a huge deal.

Here’s something to be hopeful about: according to the National Center of Education Research, nationally, dropout rates as a whole have declined over the last 40 years. That’s the good news.

However, when we look at graduation rates broken down by income level there are still some pretty big inequities. Low-income students drop out four times more often than their higher-income earning peers. We don’t want to get all D.A.R.E. on listeners, but this is an extremely alarming and tangible loss.

Another study we found from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy released some information that tells us graduating from high school can reduce the chance of criminal activity by up to 10%. A study conducted in 2007 showed that one in 10 young male dropouts are in jail, compared to only 1 in 33 high school graduates. If we know and understand the value of a diploma for a young person, why does it seem like our school discipline policies are designed to keep students out? We read story after story talking about the hurdles families must overcome sometimes to keep young folks in school.

What message are we sending young people about our investment in their success? We’ll unpack some of these policies a bit later and show how some schools’ approaches to discipline actually push students into the criminal justice system and out of the classroom.

Before we do that, here is more info about what’s lost when a young person leaves high school.

The Washington State Institute for Public Policy released a study that shows high school graduates will earn 24% more money in their lifetime than students who dropout.  We’re theoretically talking about moving up an entire income bracket here, all because of a diploma.

Money doesn’t have to be your mode of operation, but it is absolutely a vehicle to steady access to health care. When we were talking about how graduates live longer than dropouts, that study listed indicators such as increased income and better health as measures that contributed to a person’s longer life span. Consider how all these disadvantages might add up as well.

We’re spinning ourselves into a confusing web, where young students of color and young students from lower economic backgrounds are dropping out at higher rates and are also disproportionately affected by discipline polices that create huge hurdles for graduation.

Some students might drop out for other kinds of reasons—maybe they have health issues which are hard to manage with school schedules, perhaps they need to work full-time to help support their families or maybe they just don’t feel safe on campus. There are also some less obvious explanations. We interviewed Professor Wayne Au of UW Bothell to ask his perspective on a few things—as a former teacher in the Seattle Public School system and current editor of an online journal called Rethinking Schools.

(Professor Wayne Au)

We know that students drop out of high school for all kinds of reasons. But we also know that there are specific policies and environments that facilitate this process. In recapping, regardless of why students are leaving the school house, some of the direct results are loss of personal income, increased chance of criminal interaction with the police  and that big one — a shorter lifespan of seven years.

As we discussed in the first podcast, our broken education system is more than just a problem for individuals trying to navigate their way through. There is also lots of data that shows what we as a nation can stand to lose from not educating our young people.

These are messages we’re all pretty familiar with, actually. The importance of educating our young people has held true throughout the last three presidencies. In Clinton’s 1994 state of the union address, he declared the standard by which all performance would be measured:  “Are your children learning what they need to know to compete and win in the global economy?”

Bush’s presidency marked the introduction of the “No Child Left Behind” era…fast-forward to Obama’s 2011 address, where the theme “Winning the Future” illuminated his belief that investing in education will allow us to win back our economic position in the global market.

This feels like good news to some degree, because our nation has identified that we have an education problem that needs to be fixed. However, it also feels like we’re not addressing the elephant in the room: that our schools and prison systems treat students of color and low income students worse than wealthy, white kids.

We’re also troubled by all the rhetoric surrounding the “global economy” and preparing young minds for “the workforce.” We’re losing some very human elements to education if our discussion is only focused on competing for a piece of the global market pie.

For many of us, making money and winning the global economy is not the number one reason to provide young people with a good education. I’ve never heard a teacher describe their calling to teach like that, anyway.

Schools are where we learn identity. They are where we develop passions, try new things by participating in extra-curricular activities, forge friendships and build a foundation for our future. Education is how we begin to develop the values that will shape our decisions throughout life.

But if our decision-makers see schools solely as “human capital” factories, at what point do our students begin to lose their sense of self? Could the perspective of students as “up-and-coming workers” be related to our tendency towards discipline?

Schools need to find a balance between teaching young people the skills they need to find success in the workplace and the skills that teach young people to love learning.  A rich learning environment is one that allows opportunity for individuals to develop their interests and pursuits outside of merely their careers. Therefore, our educational institutions should be best suited to provide young people with opportunities to realize their full human capacity.

Sadly, it is precisely here that we are failing them. We’re not talking about a conspiracy here, either. Some educators we spoke to were pretty explicit in their beliefs – that their main objective was to prepare their high school students for a minimum wage job. That was their idea of success.

If the mighty dollar is the bottom line, any threats to that bottom line will be taken seriously. While education should absolutely prepare you for a career, we think educators and administrators are selling students short if that’s their only goal.

It’s especially true when we come to issues of discipline. Schools across the nation mostly rely on zero-tolerance policies that give teachers little to no wiggle room and are quick to earn students suspension or expulsion for crimes that don’t fit the punishment.

As we discussed in the first podcast, this notion of zero-tolerance policy was once used as a means to crack down on serious threats to students’ safety at school, but have since spread to encompass drugs, truancy, gangs, disrespect, and property damage. Zero-tolerance policies are, in other words, no-second-chance policies.

They can intensify truancy and also establish a pattern of suspension where, as punishment, the student misses so much class that catching back up on schoolwork is impossible.  Dropping out becomes inevitable after months of sporadic attendance.  We’ve already discussed data that suggests dropouts are more prone to criminal behavior, so we’re seeing a literal push of students into the criminal court system in a misguided attempt to create safety.

Zero-tolerance policies go wrong by mandating disciplinary actions that punish instead of analyze and improve a student’s behavior. Although zero-tolerance policies vary from school district to school district, mostly they mandate only three punishments: suspension, expulsion, and in-school-arrest.

A terrific case study of zero-tolerance policies was taken in 2004 in the Baltimore school district. The research found that the intensity and frequency of punishments was increasing but the justification for this increase was nowhere to be found.

During four out of the first five years of zero-tolerance policies, suspension rates were on the rise.  Not to mention that Baltimore already posted the highest suspension rate in the state of Maryland.

Here’s the worst part: Nearly fifteen percent of these suspensions were for tardiness, while a mere two and a half percent were for the weapons violations that spurred zero-tolerance policies in the first place. Furthermore, the connection between our schools and prisons was tightened–in just a single year, in-school arrests increased by over thirty percent.

Another starting point for many juvenile detention cases is the use or possession of illegal substances and many school disciplinary issues arise from possession on school property.  Washington’s statewide policy is that schools are a drug- and weapon-free zone, so school administrators have restricted options in their punishment of students for these cases. Usually nothing less than suspension is accepted.

The issue is not whether young people will use drugs—because some will. But we can change how we educate and monitor young people using drugs on school property. We could adopt a more holistic approach to supporting healthy kids within our educational institutions.

Instead of severely disciplining a student caught using on school grounds, schools could focus on educating toward recovery or responsible use. Schools could alter how they handle discipline so that policies don’t penalize students after they’ve gotten in trouble.  Instead, they could reallocate funding to be spent on punishments towards health and recovery services.

Students will also be disciplined for fighting or perceived gang involvement, which are ultimately issues of safety for young people. Fighting and harassment, both between students and toward faculty and staff, are a real challenge in some classrooms and schools. Sadly, this is another example of where discipline does more to hide the problem than to resolve it.

Cuts to school budgets do not help ease the challenge teachers and principals face in creating safe learning spaces. Newer, younger, more-energized teachers who can relate best to students are the first to be let go when layoffs happen.  Less teachers means more students in each classroom with less personal attention. When school budget crunches happen, other personnel positions are cut too, like counseling services and adult mentor programs, college advisers and community support staff. Textbooks become outdated, facilities deteriorate, sports and arts programs are slashed, and students are left feeling like no one cares and no one is there to help.

Since the 1980’s, Washington’s spending on kindergarten through 12th grade has decreased significantly. We now rank as one of the lowest amongst all 50 states. In terms of how much money the state spends on students in college, the divestment over the last 30 years is even more striking. In 1980, state funding accounted for about 3/4ths of the cost of educating a Washington student. In 2011, that figure has dropped to less than half.

Recently, a school superintendent in Michigan wrote a letter to the Governor there asking that the schools in his district be converted to prisons. He writes:

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This letter is obviously tongue in cheek, but it raises some important issues. If the quality of prison life, in terms of health services, diet and access to technology is better than our public school system, then this is a real problem. It means in some cases there is actually an incentive– and worst-case scenario a dependency– on incarceration to provide social services to young folks.

Since 1995, Washington State’s per-pupil spending has been lagging more and more behind the national average. We spend roughly $10,000 dollars on a student’s public education each year. However, Washington shells out nearly $25,000 per year for prison inmates. This means that as a state, we spend two and a half times more money on prisoners than on our young people’s education.

One reason– but certainly not an excuse– for this difference in education and correctional spending has to do with our state tax system and our funding structure for public schools in general. This was a hot topic of discussion this past legislative session. We’re in a recession folks, this is not news. In actuality, what this literally means is that Washington State owes more money to schools, prisons, social services and state employees than it makes each year from taxing citizens. It owes 4.6 billion dollars to be exact and people are projecting an even greater budget deficit in the coming years.  What exactly happened to get us to this point?

In the fall of 2010, a slew of anti-tax votes happened. State Initiative 1107 passed with flying colors which was an initiative to repeal the “soda tax;” a small tax on items like bottled water, candy, and, of course, soda.

A UW student told us he saw a Coca-Cola Bottling truck on campus with huge letters urging voters to “Vote Yes on 1107!”  In fact, almost $20 million dollars was spent on the campaign to pass 1107, making it the most expensive campaign in our state’s history.  And it worked.  It worked because no one on the other side told the voters where the two-to-three cents per item tax was going: toward education and health care.

Look at our priorities. Twenty million spent on a campaign to stop more funding for public schools.

In addition, a lovely initiative from Tim Eyman required that the house and senate would need a two-thirds majority vote to pass any new form of revenue for Washington. New revenue is in fact a euphemism for new taxes. Because of the nature of our house and senate—which are both fairly evenly split between republicans and democrats—it is near impossible to pass a new tax with a two-thirds approval.

Voters also voted down an initiative that would reform Washington’s income tax structure. Currently, low-income earners pay over six and a half percent more income tax than high-income earners through regressive sales taxes. This was yet another missed opportunity to reform the ways Washington gets revenue for social services.

So, ten months later, here we are facing huge, enormous budget cuts because of a couple measures that have handcuffed our elected officials from stirring up more funding.

But we shouldn’t let legislators off the hook entirely either. This past session they had an opportunity to close tax loopholes on a few large banking corporations in Washington and they chose not to.

Simple faith in human nature leads me to hope that if people actually knew where those tax dollars were going, we would have voted differently.  Over three years, the soda tax was expected to generate $300 million in revenue for our state. But through a campaign of misinformation, corporate lobbyists won and our education system is left suffering.

When we’re talking about the societal cost of educating our young people,  it’s two-fold. It will literally take us restructuring our tax and funding systems through policy changes to create new and stable sources of revenue for our schools. This is the tough work that lies ahead of us.

If we revisit the “human capital” perspective for a moment, we’ll see that even though our Commanders in Chief have demanded higher standards from our schools in order to boost the economy, the investment has not exactly come full force. Funding may not be a silver bullet for education problems but it is a necessary ingredient for schools to get better.

A recent survey from Georgetown University showed us that by 2018, just seven years from now, Washington will be one of the states with the highest demand for post-secondary education. The study shows that 68% of Washington’s job opportunities will require at least 2 years of college.

In Washington only around 75% of our students are even graduating from high school on time. Thirty-five who graduate are going onto college of some sort, yet only 18% are finishing a degree within 6 years of starting college.

Obama and Clinton aren’t that far off in their assertion that education will makes us financially successful; the opportunity gap is proven to directly affect our economic ranking.  The United States trails behind global education leaders like Finland and Korea when it comes to achievement levels.  If we had been able to close that gap, like we were supposed to with the introduction of No Child Left Behind, our Gross Domestic Product could have risen up to 16 percent by 2008.

Additionally, Northwestern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies released a report in 2009 that high school dropouts cost more to our economy than they will contribute over their lifetime. They estimated the figure was about 250,000 dollars.

The way this study measured the contribution was through a comparison of how much a citizen gave through things like property and income tax versus how much they took via social services. It shed light on how costly parole, probation, incarceration and court services really are.

Through national surveys and a targeted study of GED recipients, they were left with the glaring reality that our zero-tolerance policies and focus on “human capital” is actually having the opposite effect of those students being targeted- we’re spending more on them than they are able to contribute. This reveals how costly it is to rely heavily on the juvenile justice system as a crutch to the education system and this is exactly what we have been doing. Disciplinary methods prolong a student’s education and hurt their individual self-confidence. Our current discipline approach intensifies delinquency.

The alternative to discipline and pushing kids out of school is investment and a commitment to the education system. One such investment is the creation of standard early childhood education programs within school districts.

In Washington, we have a state-funded preschool program for low-income families called Head Start. However, the income level required to qualify is super low and because of WA’s tax structure, there are already many folks who actually DO qualify for HeadStart but can’t find a classroom with any open spots.

On the flip-side, preschool is often for the middle- to upper- class who can afford to pay for private education.  We’re literally seeing how class and family income can determine from a very early age what a child’s academic opportunities are going to look like.

Experts say that by investing in high-quality early learning, we can earn a return of anywhere from $3 to $17 for every $1 spent!  Early childhood education can prevent the need for special education programs as children grow older, and have been shown to decrease teen pregnancy rates and welfare services.  It also reduces need for more expensive, later intervention programs like GED courses.

Lastly, and this should make Clinton, Bush, and Obama happy, an American Public Human Services Association report tells us that children who participate in high-quality early learning programs are more likely to graduate, go on to college, and consequently earn more during their lifetime.

Not only is discipline proven to be costly and destructive to our nation’s youth, it is also a wasted cost to taxpayers at large. The researchers behind this podcast are wholeheartedly calling for more investment in education; but we must recognize that the United States is incredibly tax averse and still facing a recession.

In light of this, divestment in other areas of government may be necessary to shore up education investments. We would point to our rapidly expanding private prison systems, which are funded entirely by Government contracts. Juvenile justice programs are proven to be more expensive and less enriching than public education programs – particularly preschool. The Michigan School Superintendent was right to tease about how simple the solution looks; fund our schools at least as much as we fund our prisons.

Going back to the example of the Baltimore school district we can find some hope in progress. Fast forward six years to 2010, and Baltimore has abandoned zero-tolerance policies and suspensions entirely, in reaction to the fallout they brought. Officials increased monitoring and data collection of at-risk children and offered support services for families. The Maryland Secretary of Juvenile Services said,

“We were looking at files and realized that there were many missed opportunities to intervene in their lives… If you have a kid that’s kind of gone off track and you continue to let that situation go unattended, you’re going to have a serious problem later on.”

Over the course of five years, the school district managed to reduce annual suspensions from 26,000 to under 10,000; a drop of over sixty percent. These achievements grew from new found investment in early learning and crime prevention programs and a movement away from discipline and zero-tolerance policies. This goes to prove that nothing is more effective than staying committed to our youth.

We’ll leave you on that positive note for this week. We hope you enjoyed this look at the Cost of Inequity in our Public Education system. Next week, we’ll turn to the implications of this inequality in terms of race- and social- relations within the United States. Thanks for listening!

Editors note: Introducing Schools to Prisons, a collaborative research project between Our American Generation and the League of Education Voters. This project highlights the concerning link between our nation’s prisons and public education systems; a link that turns struggling students into juvenile delinquents. We’re bringing to you three podcasts, released weekly, to shed light on Washington’s growing opportunity gap. Special thanks go out to our researchers Bailee Martin and Kendra Ijeoma and also to Kaleb Gubernick for his sound expertise. For questions please contact Maggie Wilkens [maggie@educationvoters.org] or Scott Davis [scott@ouramericangeneration.org]

To download the full podcast and listen, go here!

PODCAST ONE: THE OPPORTUNITY GAP

Maggie: In this first podcast of the three-part series, we’ll introduce you to the issue of Washington’s opportunity gap.

We’ve been working together, researching and interviewing for several months now, trying to answer some questions that are at the heart of this issue.

What is the Opportunity Gap? What is the school to prison pipeline? What causes these phenomena?

Scott: In short, the opportunity gap is the gap in academic performance between white students and students of color, and also between wealthy students and poor students. The school to prison pipeline is the trend of school’s pushing their “bad kids” out — and into the juvenile justice system. But before we get to these larger questions, let us explain why we were even asking them.

LEV and OAG started work together after some awesome reporting done by a previous research team at OAG. In that report, titled Crime & Community, youth researchers outlined current problems within our criminal justice system.

Those problems are two-fold: for one, the entire prison system is overcrowded with 1 in every 100 Americans detained in a jail or prison at this moment. The second problem is the piece about race and privilege: 1 in 106 whites are in custody, while 1 in 15 African Americans and 1 in 36 Hispanic Americans are behind bars. Despite this, there is a ton of research that shows that whites commit crimes at the same rate as people of color.

Who actually ends up serving time in prison is due in large part to over-policing of areas where people of color predominantly live, and harsher prosecution and sentencing in our court systems.

The United States has a long history of discrimination against people of color—sometimes that discrimination is physically written into laws like segregation in the Jim Crow era. Sometimes that discrimination plays out far more subtly, like who was targeted for subprime mortgages in foreclosure scandals or who can gain access to banks and credit card accounts.

Our history books show that there was once a time when our society believed people of color were biologically less intelligent than white people—an idea known as eugenics that has long been discredited. However, many of the vestiges of eugenics still haunt us. Far too often, politicians and people in power blame social inequities on the characteristics and personality traits of individual communities or ethnic groups. This notion is scientifically unfounded and needs to be squashed. This is the reason it is so important to create distinction between the words achievement and opportunity: it is not a matter of individuals achieving less. It is a matter of how our social systems deny opportunities to underrepresented populations. Dismal learning environments and overuse of juvenile detention services are two examples of where we can begin the discussion!

While discrimination and race-based biases are a known and common thread in our nation’s history, the enormous rate of imprisonment is not. In fact, only three white-houses ago in the Clinton era, the United States embarked on all sorts of “tough on crime” politics. Outside of schools, these politics led to a major escalation in law enforcement: what is known to many as the Drug War. In the context of schools, tough on crime meant the creation of zero-tolerance policies for drugs, alcohol and weapons on school campuses. The outcomes are over-policed public school campuses and tighter links between our schools and juvenile justice systems.

Maggie: When I first read the Crime and Community report, the wheels in my brain automatically started turning and connecting these two institutions: the public school system and the prison system. In particular, I kept remembering a horrifying story that circulates around the education world; some states have estimated the number of prison cells they will need to build in the future based on their public schools’ reading or test scores—from as early on as the third grade.

And then I started remembering the news story where two judges in Pennsylvania plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for accepting over 2.6 billion dollars in kickbacks from private youth detention centers. These judges sentenced over 5,000 young offenders to private juvenile justice centers in exchange for the cash. Four thousand of these rulings have been overturned since those two judges were removed from their jobs.

So with a lot of concern but less knowledge, we set out to explore the opportunity gap and how it relates to the school-to-prison pipeline. The very first piece of information we found was disheartening, but also gave our project greater importance in our eyes: Washington is one of 9 states in this country whose opportunity gap is still growing.

Students of color within our state’s public school system also have disproportionately higher rates of suspension, expulsion, truancy and drop-outs. Not only does this lead to a disproportionate number of students of color falling behind in school, but BIG disparities in the demographics of kids sent off to Juvi as well.

Academically speaking, suspension is the worst thing a school could do to a student. As we could all guess, the less time you spend in the classroom with your peers learning new material and practicing skills, the less likely you are to do well in school. Imagine getting suspended then missing a week’s worth of classes and not being able to make up assignments or projects. Then imagine getting tested on that material you never learned a few weeks later. It’s no wonder where the inequities in standardized tests scores come from.

Scott: On average in Washington’s public school system, 76% of white students graduate high school on time. In contrast, only 60% of Black, Latino and Native Americans graduate on time. Needless to say there is a problem here.

When we look at information that tracks how school districts discipline their students, we see equally alarming data. In 2006, more than 3.3 million students were suspended or expelled which is a ratio of about 1 in 14 young people pushed out of the public school system. In that same year, 15% of our nation’s African American student population was suspended in comparison to only 5% of our nation’s white students.

These “gaps” are already egregious. As they grow, Washington digs itself deeper and deeper into a hole. A hole that unfairly privileges white folks through policy, discriminates against young folks of color, and ultimately leaves our society with alarming social inequities.

Maggie: The use of the term school-to-prison pipeline has become a regular feature in the research we’ve been studying. The language is intentional– it suggests that there are structures and forces that push young folks in certain situations out of the public school system and directly into the custody of our prison systems. This is especially true for young students of color and especially true for students from lower economic backgrounds. The pipeline could also imply the fact that youth are almost always unaware of the full consequences of the behavior and plain don’t know the juvenile detention center is what’s waiting at the end of the pipeline.

However, the idea of one single pipeline is limited. As we come to understand the vast differences in student experience within the school and prison systems, it becomes clear that there isn’t merely one path down this pipeline. We’re pretty sure a pipeline isn’t even close to describing the enormous diversity of pathways a young person navigates to get their education. Gasworks Park couldn’t house as many rusty pipes as we’ve got to describe our journeys.

Some students trip and fall into a cycle of crime, some are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, some students come from challenging home situations that make school a difficult place to stay, while others are simply unable to muster excitement for class work. Whatever the case, public schools have shown a tendency to rely on punitive, disciplinary measures to deal with students. We’ve even heard of teachers and administrators referring students into the juvenile court system for the purpose of getting that young person the social services classrooms aren’t able to offer.

Scott: However, once that discipline starts to involve juvenile hall, we see that youth actually begin committing more and worse crimes– in a sense starting to own the label of “delinquent” they were given at school.

We’re asking readers and listeners to keep this in mind. The “pipeline” metaphor doesn’t speak as much to the range of options young people have, but more to the systematic denial of an opportunity to succeed once students stray from a track towards graduation.

Before we begin to dig deep into how and why there are major disparities in academic achievement and why we have a serious over-representation of students of color facing discipline, we should say a quick word about what literally happens when a student gets in trouble in school. There is incredible variation in the way students are disciplined in within schools and that fact alone isn’t widely recognized. Policies vary widely from student to student, school to school, district to district and state to state.

One consequence of this is that any attempt to contest a punishment is steeped in bureaucracy. Parents have to take time off work to come into schools or courtrooms to fight for their kids. Documents have to be read, understood and filed. Legal fees and fines have to be paid for records to be cleared. Obviously parents that are struggling to make enough money to provide for their families cannot afford all this time off work in order to face up to this paperwork and processing. The consequence of this becomes very real when suspensions are extended simply paperwork hasn’t been done. Reviewing a typical student’s path through the school to prison pipeline starts to illuminate where there could be opportunities for change.

In Washington State alone, there are 295 school districts. This means that as a state, Washington takes 295 different approaches to discipline. The authority to pass district-wide policies regarding suspension and expulsion belongs to each school board and superintendent. They adopt a set of rules and it becomes up to the principals to ensure that the teachers within their building are enforcing those rules.

The gamut of discipline is wide: you can receive detention, get a phone call home, receive in-school suspension. You could be sentenced with out of school short-term or long-term suspension, or you could be expelled.

Maggie: Discipline doesn’t just lie within the purview of the school administration though, upon suspension or expulsion a student can be referred directly to a juvenile detention center and prosecuted depending on the severity of their crime. This is often perceived as the crux of the problem—the relationship between school administration and the juvenile court system.

This is where the metaphor of a pipeline comes in handy again. Rarely is it the case where one student one time breaks a rule that lands them in jail. In reality, it is a series of events, of pushes and pulls in and out of the classroom, that lead principals and teachers to recommend a student leave the school permanently and face criminal prosecution.

In the past two decades, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in adult and juvenile incarceration rates and imprisonment. One source found that between 1987 and 2007, the US prison population had tripled, totaling roughly 2.3 million people behind bars. As we mentioned earlier, that led to 1 in every 100 Americans detained in a jail or prison. Don’t forget the racial disparities in that stat either: 1 in 106 whites are in custody, while 1 in only 15 African Americans and 1 in 36 Hispanic-Americans are behind bars.

Scott: This “tough on crime” mentality permeated our schools throughout the 90s, meanwhile incidents like the Columbine shooting was used by administrators and politicians to justify a national crackdown in the public school system. What started out as a zero-tolerance policy against guns in schools turned into zero-tolerance of violence, weapons, gangs, drugs, truancy and tardiness. Some sources even cited zero-tolerance policies on vague infractions such as “insubordination.”

The definition of a zero-tolerance policy is one that “mandates predetermined consequences for rule infractions, regardless of the circumstance.” Basically, no second chances. Theoretically, these policies are designed to create safe schools and safe classroom cultures. They also provide protection for teachers by setting up a seemingly-objective protocol for how to deal with “disruptions” in the classroom.

Between 1974 and 2006 the rate at which US students were suspended and expelled from school nearly doubled from 3.7% of students in 1974 to 7.1% of students in 2006. After one school district in New York adopted a zero-tolerance policy, they documented suspensions of 4-10 year olds increasing by 76%.

Maggie: In some instances, we’ve read that students were suspended for butter knives in their lunchboxes, nail files in their backpacks or aspirin in their pockets. Examples like these show exactly how zero-tolerance policies, which were intended to create an objective, fair and safe environment, can and have become subjective, tedious and unnecessarily punitive.

Scott: So we’re at a point now where the tough-on-crime policies that grew out of the 90’s are still in place, despite the fact that our prisons are literally getting crowded with youth and adults alike. Punishment is still the go-to method for dealing with unruly students, despite research from the 80s showing that youth develop and respond better to nurturing than punishment. Studies also show young folks have a great capacity to change their behavior through rehabilitation.

Sending them to prison is potentially the worst solution, because most prisons lack any resources directed towards recovery, and youth have a greater tendency to commit crimes once they have visited Juvi. Also, once a young person has gone to juvi, they are likely to commit more serious crimes upon leaving. Youth criminality has historically been blamed on poor communities or dysfunctional homes, factors that people see as ruinous to children. However, studies of developmental psychology actually show this to be an incomplete indicator of criminality and that the mental development of a youth is affected by all mentors in her or his life, including teacher, peers, or even police. If one is labeled a trouble-maker early on by a figure as influential as a teacher, one will be disposed to believe that they are indeed trouble makers.

Maggie: Activist and scholar Angela Davis describes over-incarceration as “a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent” and in many respects, the same principles apply to adults attempting to manage their classrooms.

During our research we touched based with a youth-led non-profit called Seattle Young People’s Project. They are currently working on a campaign asking, amongst other things, for the Seattle Public School System to release more data on “informal” types of school punishment, such as in-school suspension and detention. When we asked the middle and high school experts about contributing factors to the school to prison pipeline, they told us that teachers who knew how to simply, “pull a student aside and tell them what they did wrong,” were few and far between. The much more common approach was to send a disruptive student out of the class. This included, to a certain degree, a feeling of public shame for the student’s misbehavior.

As the Crime & Community report lies out, “instead of recognizing the distinct attributes of youth, including angst, impressionability, and general confusion, prosecutors [and teachers] will treat juveniles like they were grown-up hardened criminals.”

Without over-simplifying a hugely complex social problem, we really believe a few simple things could help alleviate Washington’s opportunity gap. Students of color are pushed out of the classroom, suspended and truant at rates far exceeding those of their white peers. It is then a logical conclusion that the very students who are kicked out and barred from learning perform would perform worse on tests through the K-12 school system. These gaps in reading scores and test scores are one direct consequence of schools over dependence on zero-tolerance policies and discipline.

Research also tells us that environmental factors like community and home life are not as impactful as people often estimate. We know there are schools and teachers out there already turning the opportunity gap around. Later in our podcast series we’ll go into much further detail about the practices that are helping ease the disparities in sentencing and academic achievement. With honest and transparent work around humanizing the discipline process, learning communities all over have already made progress.

Scott: Well – we hoped you all enjoyed this segment on the opportunity gap and the school to prison pipeline. Any follow up questions can be posted as comments on the Our American Generation or Soapbox blogs, and one of us will find an answer for you. In this segment we laid down the context of the opportunity gap, but we were not able to dive in all the way to complicated questions about how race and class become tangled into all this and about exactly how much student potential we are losing.  That will be the task for the next two segments, The Price of Inequity, and From Pupil to Prisoner: The New Jim Crow. Make sure to check back in every week this month for a new segment and start getting excited for the full zine that will follow this series! That’s all we’ve got for now; from OAG and LEV, we love ya’ll, and we’ll see you next week!

Editors note: LEV intern Elliot Helmbrecht, with the help of Nikolas Raisis, Samantha Maloof, Eric Hopson and Lauren Brown bring to you a series of blog posts on the growth of the for-profit university industry.

With the job market constantly in flux, more Americans are applying to colleges in hopes that a degree on their resume will give them an added boost in an interview. Those students are also banking on the idea that more education will result in higher wages. And while study after study prove this to be true. Some colleges are proving to be riskier for the applicants.

You have all witnessed the daytime commercials for (mostly) online universities that are targeted towards the busy, full-time office professional, or the single mom, or the intrepid 20-something. Schools such as the University of Phoenix or Kaplan University may now be sounding familiar. Colleges such as these are only the Goliath’s out there representing a new breed of higher education: for-profit universities.

Based on the notion that college should be available to everyone who wishes to go to school, for-profit universities began gaining momentum in the 1990’s. The stock market was creating insane profits for the financial and housing sectors during this period. The idea was put forth that it could do the same for education. Danny Weil over at truthout.org wrote a poignant piece detailing the neoliberal history and downright criminal actions taken by many for-profit colleges.

While their marketing teams would like you to believe that they are recruiting a certain demographic, their student populations paint a different picture. Recently, for-profit colleges have come under scrutiny for actively appealing to applicants who must rely heavily on federal aid (FAFSA) and consistently have trouble paying it back to the government. The Washington Post reported on the Government of Accountability’s findings that 15 for-profit schools were actively encouraging their applicants to lie on their financial aid applications.

The point, however, is not that certain populations are incapable of pursuing a college education or less deserving of one. An argument can be made that those left out of public and private universities are more deserving of a higher education degree. But the idea that the current crop of for-profit colleges is the best option for these students is completely false. They search out high-risk applicants, mire them in debt, and often leave them without a degree. For-profit colleges have sparked an exciting point that more Americans want to pursue a degree and we need to have an outlet for them. But we need to set them up for success, not failure.

Kevin Van
School: University Preparatory Academy
Favorite Subject: Mathematics

Why you are interning at LEV: Beyond the fact that is looks good on resumes, and to receive work experience, LEV’s mission to help the students of Washington State is truly admirable. For me, it is easy to say that the organization gives 100% of its energy and effort to supporting education. Having siblings that go to school in Washington State, it makes me happy to know that there is a group of people that will help support, and improve the education they are receiving. I am proud to be called an LEV intern.

What does the future hold: In my future, I see a male individual successful at something in his life and is living happily in a house with his family somewhere where it is not raining constantly (AKA not Seattle).

In my Spare Time… : I enjoy taking short naps, reading manga (Japanese graphic novels), watching anime (animated Japanese graphic novels), hanging out with my friends, and playing video games. I am a typical male teenager.

In kindergarten… : When I was in kindergarten,  I wanted to become a pimp (did not know what it meant back then). When I realized what it was, I felt very embarrassed.

Favorite T.V. show: Majority of the time, I don’t watch T.V. shows and would rather watch Japanese graphic novels animations. However when I do,  I enjoy watching criminal investigations like CSI, medical investigations such as Bones or E.R., musical shows such as Glee, or cooking competitions. I also like the business side of chefs, like Iron Chef or Ace of Cakes.

Favorite Quote: “Smiles make the World go Round”

Patricia Flores Pérez

School: Blanchet High School
Academic interest/ Future career aspirations : chemical engineer, interpreter for the UN, physicist, or National Geographic photographer
Favorite subject: Calculus

Why you are interning at LEV: I am interning at LEV to gain experience working for a non-profit and I hope to learn more about what can be done to better the education system.  I am excited to actually get to work on improving the system. Also, I am interested in learning about campaigning.

What does the future hold? After senior year, college applications, and college, I want to travel all over the world, meet lots of people, and eat all kinds of different foods.

In my spare time… I do water aerobics, photography, learn Arabic, improv, play and watch soccer  and am learning to drive

In kindergarten…?! I wanted to be a crocodile hunter.

Favorite TV Show: Novelas from Mexico and Project Runway.

Favorite Quote: “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”   – Dr. Seuss

Travis Fox
School: Skyline High School
Favorite Subject: American History

Why you are interning at LEV: I strongly believe that the public education system in our country and in our state is flawed, and that it is failing an entire generation of students. I chose to intern at LEV because I wanted to contribute to the effort of reforming the public education system. Also, I wanted to learn firsthand about the operations of an advocacy organization.

What does the future hold? I plan to finish my senior year at Skyline and finish the process of obtaining an IB Diploma. After I graduate next spring, I plan to study Political Science with the ultimate goal of obtaining a law degree and working in politics.

In my spare time… I work in a pizzeria, swim competitively, and enjoy spending time with my friends and my younger brother.

In kindergarten…?! I got angry with my parents when they confiscated To Kill A Mockingbird from me.

Favorite TV Show: The West Wing, Entourage, 30 Rock, and How I Met Your Mother

Favorite Quote: “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” –Mark Twain

This year, 22,000 students who qualify for the Washington State Need Grants won’t get any financial aide due to budget cuts. To learn more about the State of the State Need Grant, watch this video and check out our Faces campaign.

We have all been hearing that Washington has some budget problems we have to resolve. With a 4+ billion dollar deficit, funding to schools is going to decrease, again.

What does that actually look like at your high school? Here is one example of a policy called RIFing (Reduction In Force, or a layoff) that forces highschools to lay off teachers as soon as the end of THIS SCHOOL YEAR.

Adding insult to injury is the process in which teachers are selected to be laid off. In the teaching profession, when there is a lay off the teachers with the least amount of time spent in the classroom are always kicked out first.

This doesn’t make sense. A teacher could win awards, be loved by everyone and get the best out of their students and then still be laid off because they were the newest teacher in the building.

Watch this video and tell us what you think.

Washington is admitting less of you this year. We keep hearing that Washington State is in a budget crisis and here is one tangible result of not having as much dough as we need.

As WA is faced with the challenge of balancing a budget that’s 4.6 billion in the hole, legislators are talking about cutting money from our public universities. This means schools have to do magic tricks to fix their finances, and in this instance, UW is opting to admit more out of state students who will pay the extra cash for their slot. When students from out of state are admitted to UW, they pay almost 3 times as much tuition as in-state students.  Check here for the full Seattle Times article

Think this is bad? Projections are showing that our budget crisis is only getting worse, which would indicate even more cuts to state universities. Unless students and the public speak up and out against the decisions the under-fund higher education in WA!

Want to take action? Send your photo to League of Education Voters(me) ASAP. We’re asking you to hold up a sign and fill in the blank: “I want to ______ in Washington.”

Below is an example of Lisa, a current student at the Evans School of Public Policy. Under the governor’s proposed cuts, UW will most likely eliminate this ENTIRE graduate program. She might look happy in this picture, but believe me, SHE ISN’T.