Writing A New Revised Op Ed Essay

(a) This study examines out-of-school suspensions in the 9th grade and their effect on high school and post-secondary outcomes. This analyses also examines demographic disparities in school suspensions, their relationship to poverty and their contribution to high school graduation and post-secondary attainment gaps.

The School to Prison Pipeline was chosen as a topic because it is relevant, controversial and dramatically affecting the nation’s youth. The school to prison pipeline proposes youth to choose between an education and jail, though the decision has often already been decided for them. A child should never be pushed away from education for any reason. School is the one place society depends on to guarantee that youth discover world of knowledge, their identity and a safe haven away from home. This issue is no secret as it is very obvious to see in almost any school district that the pipeline is an ongoing practice. The author takes an interest in this topic being a strong advocate of academics. The author disapproves of the pipeline effect as it shows detrimental damages to educational systems and young children across the nation. From the earliest school age to the last, youth are being stripped of their educational privileges due to an unfair system.

These claims have been well documented. However, the connection to the graduation gap may be clearer with an answer of how other factors such as financial and other family problems brought about by poverty affect them. The rest of the book provides possible solutions to questions of invisibility such as respecting and valuing black students. Another solution is removing remedial programs for challenging curricula and supports that are appropriate.

1. In the article, The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Rhetoric or Reality, by Aaron Kupchik, he discusses youth introduction to the juvenile justice system. The article argues that schools do in fact shape a child’s interaction with the system and it has to do with the school’s discipline, which Kupchik describes using “the school-to-prison pipeline” metaphor. The article delves into the unhealthy changes which schools have implemented to their discipline that promote the pipeline. He concludes by proposing strategies for reform that address the issue head on.

The achievement gap is defined as the disparity between the performance groups of students, especially groups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, ability and socio-economic status. The achievement gap can be observed through a variety of measures including standardized test scores, grade point averages, drop out rates, college enrollment and completion rates. The Black-White achievement gap is a critical issue in modern society’s education system. Although data surrounding the issue clearly indicates that the racial performance gap exists in areas of standardized tests, graduation rates, dropout rates, and enrollment in continuing education, the causative reasons for the gap are ambiguous—therefore presenting a significant challenge in

Out of school suspensions (OSS) are often enforced with the assumption that students receiving the suspension are less likely to repeat the problem behavior in the future. However, this has been proven to be false. Suspending a student for engaging in a certain behavior does not in fact serve as a deterrent from the behavior but as a deterrent from attending school instead. In actuality, receiving just a single suspension can increase the probability of a student experiencing academic failure, school dropout, and involvement in the juvenile justice system. Knowing this, some educators still believe that for many students, suspension can serve as an effective lesson. One of the greatest concerns that educators and administrators face is the matter of classroom management. It is part of their job to ensure a safe, productive and supportive classroom allowing students to learn and grow to their greatest potential. Though there are several strategies gauged towards managing a classroom, the most severe offences often lead to either in or out of school suspension. Some of the largest concerns faced with out of school suspensions is that they are often ineptly applied, used unfairly against students of color and seemingly ineffective at producing better behavior. Also known as exclusionary discipline, the majority of offenses that led to OSS have not been centered around violence but instead emphasised issues of classroom insubordination and defiance. In some rather extreme cases

“Tomorrow 's future is in the hands of the youth of today” is not a particularly new sentiment. But what is new, what has become a pressing question, is what is to become of the future if our youth are behind bars instead of in schools? Youth today are being pushed into the criminal justice system at an alarming rate. This issue is known as the school to prison pipeline ─ the rapid rate at which children are pushed out of schools and into the criminal justice system. The school to prison pipeline is a term that came into use by activists in the late 1970’s and has gained recognition throughout the years as the issue became more prominent in the 1990’s. Some activists view policies meant to “correct” misbehaviors, especially in regards to Zero Tolerance policies and the policing of schools, as a major contributor to the pipeline. Others believe that the funding of schools and the education standards are to blame for the rapid increase of youth incarcerations. While the school to prison pipeline affects every student, African American students, both male and female, are more often the victim of discrimination in education. The school to prison pipeline must end, and the trend must be reversed.

The “achievement gap” in education refers to the disparity in academic performance between groups of students. The achievement gap is shown in grades, standardized-test scores, course selection, dropout rates, among other success measures. It’s most often used to describe the troubling performance gaps between African-American and latino students, towards the lower end of the performance scale, compared to their white peers, and the similar academic differences between students from low-income families and those who are privileged. In the past decade, scholars and policy makers began focusing their attention on other achievement gaps, such as those based on sex, English language and learning disabilities.

In the article, The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Rhetoric or Reality, by Aaron Kupchik, he discusses how youth are introduced to the juvenile justice system. The article argues that schools do in fact shape a child’s interaction with the system and it has to do with the school’s discipline, which Kupchik describes using a “the school-to-prison pipeline” metaphor. The article delves into the unhealthy changes that have been implemented to school’s discipline which promote the pipeline. He concludes by proposing strategies for reform that address the issue head on.

The school-to-prison pipeline in the United States is a figure of speech used to describe the increasing patterns of interaction students have with the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems as a consequence of procedures used by many school systems. A specific procedure would be the zero tolerance policies and the use of officers in schools. Currently in today’s American schools many children of color are being unfairly judged and treated by the public school systems zero tolerance policies. Zero tolerance policies have been implemented in schools in the last 20 years that include inserting school resource officers in schools and cracking down on all behavior that any authority figure may deem as a form of bad behavior. The policy is based upon deterring future misbehavior and is central to the philosophy of zero tolerance, and the effect of any punishment on future behavior is what defines effective punishment (Skinner, 1953). Zero tolerance policies causes the school environment to feel more like a prison and ultimately leads to black and Latinos being judged and guided to the prison system. A zero-tolerance policy orders predetermined penalties or punishments for specific wrongdoings.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline presents the intersection of a K-12 educational system and a juvenile system, which too often fails to serve our nations at risk youth. For most students, the pipeline begins with inadequate resources in public schools. Overcrowded classrooms, a lack of qualified teachers, and insufficient funding for "extras" such as counselors, special education services, even textbooks, lock students into second-rate educational environments. This failure to meet educational needs increases disengagement and dropouts, increasing the risk of later court involvement (Bennett-Haron, Fasching-Varner, Martin, & Mitchell 2014). Even worse, schools may actually encourage dropouts in response to pressures from test-based accountability regimes such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which create incentives to push out low-performing students to boost overall test scores (Cramer, Gonzales, & Lafont-Pellegrini 2014). Lacking resources, facing incentives to push out low-performing students, and responding to a handful of highly-publicized school shootings, schools have embraced zero-tolerance policies that automatically impose severe punishment regardless of circumstances. Under these policies, students have been expelled for bringing nail clippers or scissors to school (Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson 2005). Rates of suspension have increased dramatically in recent years from 1.7 million in 1998 to 3.1 million in 2010

The ever-growing problem that is occurring in public schools around the country is the school to prison pipeline epidemic. The school to prison pipeline is a term used to describe how students are being pushed out of public school and into the criminal justice system. This epidemic is a result of the education system’s zero tolerance policy that enforces harsh punishments for misbehaving students. Although its goal was to eliminate misbehavior, studies have shown that the increased disciplinary actions have resulted in a modified school environment, police in school

As detailed by the American Civil Liberties Union (2013), the circumstances and policies contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline include: 1) failing public schools, in which inadequate resources in public schools create second-rate educational environments, thus decreasing engagement and increase dropout, 2) zero tolerance and other school ‘discipline’ policies impose unnecessarily harsh punishments, which leave students unsupervised and more likely to fall behind in school work, and which most dramatically impact children of color, 3) high-stakes testing creates a less engaging student environment and creates incentives for schools to push out low preforming students, 4) disciplinary alternative education programs for suspended or expelled students lack accountability, quality services, and leave students struggling to return to their regular schools, and 5) despite decreased resources, there has been an increased reliance on police who increase school-based arrests.

This mean that school-to-prison pipeline schools have an environment where the majority of the students cannot pursue an education freely without worrying about being criminalized by police officers for minor offence. This is also known as “feeder schools” since the schools are feeding the prison students. The school-to-prison pipeline is split into two parts: path 1 and path 2. Pathway 1 is that “suspensions and expulsions [put] students at risk of becoming incarcerated because they remove [them] from the positive influences of schools while increasing the opportunities for students to encounter negative influences” (Krezmien, Leone, and Wilson 2014). Pathway 2 illustrates that if students are referred to law enforcement or the judicial system, they will be criminalized instead of treated as a student (Krezmien, Leone, and Wilson 2014). Therefore, school-to-prison pipeline is an inefficient system to implement in any schools to provide a learning and progressive environment since it contradicts the schools’ morals, values, and

In recent years, public schools have been accused of participating in the school to prison pipeline. The school to prison pipeline refers to the growing incarceration of youths, resulting from the zero tolerance policies implemented in schools. Therefore, I decided to do my research based on the school to prison pipeline to understand what these accusations mean and their consequences. My research will be divided into three main categories; what is it and how the pipeline became common practice, how it affects the United States, and some solutions to the problem. So far, my claim is that the public schools unintentionally started to connect more students with the judicial system because of growing concern over crime. But when it became known