The School to Prison Pipeline by Okilwa Nathern;Khalifa Muhammad;Briscoe Felecia;

Author:Okilwa, Nathern;Khalifa, Muhammad;Briscoe, Felecia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

IMPLICATIONS

Prevailing social arrangements and patterns of culture within schools remain largely socially oppressive for the working class in the United Kingdom. In the case of white working-class students, this neglect often appears invisible (Gillborn & Kirton, 2000). Garner (2012) reminds us that whiteness “is a position of relative privilege, albeit highly uneven, contingent and situational” (p. 446). Within this case study, whiteness was interwoven with deficit discourses and the practices of teachers in powerful ways which contributed to failing to break the cycle of poverty and potential criminality. According to Winn and Behizadeh (2011, p. 163) “Disrupting and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline requires research and action challenging the connections between schools and prisons and illuminating the school practices that halt the movement of students to prisons.” Dismantling the prison pipeline involves educators contending with their own deficit discourses. Solomona, Portelli, Daniel, and Campbell (2005, p. 149) assert that if educators are not forced to evaluate how their personal attitudes, social positioning, and racial ascription inform their interactions with students, the teaching profession will continue to poorly service students from disadvantaged backgrounds. A few educators I encountered in this study recognized the classist and racist language evidence when discussing white working-class disengagement and behavior. Thus, I argue, that my research supports a consideration that the normative practices embedded in the “soft structures” contribute heavily to the school-to-prison pipeline. Furthermore, given how raising white working-class aspiration is very much on the government radar in the United Kingdom (Select Committee on Education, 2014), it is interesting to note that none of the institutions which participated in the study had any strategy in place for the raising of aspirations, although many had quite robust behavior management systems in place.

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