PITTSBURGH – Using education and activism to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline is an ongoing battle that is as fierce as ever, according to speakers at the 2019 Summer Educator Forum presented by the Center for Education at the University of Pittsburgh.
In panel discussions and breakout sessions during the three-day event in July, a record 450 students, teachers, administrators, scholars, activists and experts in education, criminal justice and restorative justice shared ideas and strategies in line with this year’s theme, “Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Re-Imagining Policies, Practices, and Politics in Education Systems.”
Although the phrase school-to-prison pipeline is now a common term in government and education circles after initially being coined at a local level, many academics have come to understand the phenomenon as more like an intricate web or network of factors that work together as a system to sideline Black and Brown youth – and increasingly, girls – at early ages.
Speakers challenged attendees of the three-day event to be leaders in collaborating on ways to imagine and create healthy alternatives to suspending, expelling and incarcerating young people – and to be champions of restorative justice approaches that honor the worth, dignity and potential of all.
Organizers offered 50 panels and breakout sessions on an array of topics, ranging from “Pathways to Culturally Responsive Practices within Classroom Instruction” and “How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? The Emasculation of the Black Male Student” to “Resisting the White Savior Complex in Education” and “Mindfulness Practices to Support the Journey of Confronting Internalized Racial Superiority and Inferiority.”
Attendees tackled the topic from a range of vantage points, with other sessions devoted to community advocacy, exclusionary discipline, special education, equity for Latinx, disabled and LGBTQ students and police presence and policies in schools.
In the nine years since Michelle Alexander released The New Jim Crow, her seminal best-selling book about race and mass incarceration, “everything has changed and everything has remained the same” in terms of criminal justice, she said during a lunchtime panel.
