Armand Fusco:

Last week’s Part 6 looked at the various issues involved with the School to Prison Pipeline (SPP– a term coined early in the early twenty-first century to refer to the policies and practices that directly and indirectly push students out of school and on a pathway to prison resulting from an academic condition of can’t read, can’t learn); and you likely viewed your situation as hopeless especially with six strikes against you, one of which was that you were born into an impoverished neighborhood. As a result, by law you were forced to attend a failing school where you were held in bondage because you had no real option to leave until you could drop out; it’s a sordid condition that you did not create; it was forced on you. It should be against the law, and it may be, but it has not been challenged in the courts.

By any standard of justice, any court action should decide that it’s unconstitutional. School miseducation and educational malpractice should not be forced upon you by lawful means that propelled you unknowingly to get in line for the School to Prison Pipeline; again, something over which you had no control. Therefore, it would not be surprising that you must have felt like no one cared about your plight, but that’s not true because there are advocates who care and they are sincere in wanting to end this tragedy of schooling. Sadly, caring and sincerity does not lead to successful results unless the core problem has been identified; this, as you will see, is something that not a single one done.

The fact is that the School-to-Prison Pipeline “has been a crucial concern of parents, educators, ministers, civil rights activists, lawyers and youth advocates for a number of years.” It started to become a major concern of the research literature and the general public starting around the start of the 21st century. It was due in large part (as will be seen shortly) to the spiraling statistics and the negative impact on children of color like yourself. Some advocates have defined the problem as “a systematic way of syphoning children out of public schools and funneling them into the juvenile and criminal justice system.” In addition, a number of civil rights lawyers regard the SPP as a critical civil rights issue.