Black Children and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
My upscale neighborhood didn’t protect my daughter from being a target
I always strove to give my daughter access to good schools in “safe” areas, but an experience in a public school has taught me how students of color, even in well-resourced schools and neighborhoods, can fall victim to the school-to-prison pipeline. As The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander explained in a recent interview, the school-to-prison pipeline is a metaphor that describes how children are pushed directly from schools into prison in lieu of opportunity. As a Black woman who once attended elementary school in inner-city Chicago, I learned that my daughter could also face systems that have longed deterred generations of Black children from reaching their full potential.
In 2016, my daughter and I embarked on a short walk from our apartment in Seattle to begin her fourth-grade year at a new school. We walked through Jimmy Hendrix Park, passed the local African American Museum, and arrived at her school. She was nervous; I was proud of our new journey, having two months earlier successfully moved from Illinois to Washington for a graduate degree. I was relieved that we were settled in a safe area.
Decades ago, like my daughter, I was facing my own transition in fourth grade. I learned…
