School-To-Prison Pipeline Targeted By Judges, Education Officials

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Joy Resmovits
Joy.resmovits@huffingtonpost.com

"We knew more about learning and achievement than ever before, but we didn’t have a lot of data about the opportunity gap, about what underlies achievement- gap data," Russlynn Ali, the Department of Education's assistant secretary for civil rights, told The Huffington Post. "It was very difficult to tell the equity story quantitatively."

Jakayla Ivory, a St. Louis high-school student convicted of second-degree assault, likely would have gotten two years in jail. Instead, she went to school at Jimmie Edwards' Innovative Concept Academy.

Edwards, a St. Louis Juvenile Court judge, started the public school in 2009 with the purpose of serving students who might otherwise be lost to the juvenile justice system.

"It gave her (Ivory) hope for a better life," said Edwards, who handled Ivory's case and sentencing. "She is now doing well. She learned how to play chess, when she would have been locked up."

Edwards, in his crossover role of school leader and judge, embodies a new kind of firepower that civil-rights and children's advocates want to use to combat school discipline policies that lead to dropouts and arrests for minor infractions. "There's this great move afoot by the judicial realm to get involved," he said.

Edwards was one of several hundred state judges and education officials at a conference Monday in Midtown Manhattan on school justice and the school-to-prison pipeline. Many experts say zero-tolerance policies, a holdover from the war on drugs, punish all major and minor rule infractions equally and create the pipeline effect, bringing police disproportionately into high-minority schools.

In the past, advocates generally had only anecdotal evidence about the pipeline. "We knew more about learning and achievement than ever before, but we didn’t have a lot of data about the opportunity gap, about what underlies achievement- gap data," Russlynn Ali, the Department of Education's assistant secretary for civil rights, told The Huffington Post. "It was very difficult to tell the equity story quantitatively."

When Ali began working at the department, she said, she saw its biennial survey as a tool underused since 1968. So she expanded the categories of the Civil Rights Data Collection in the 2009-2010 school year to unpack specific topics -- expulsion, retention, suspension, detention -- in 72,000 public schools, or 85 percent of U.S. schools. The survey, which costs $3 million, eventually will include all public schools nationwide.

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