Court-Involved Youth

(melanie hibbert)

In 2008, there were an estimated 2.11 million arrests made of persons under the age of 18 in the United States. Increasingly obvious in a generation of mass incarceration of youth, young people who become involved with the justice system often experience a plurality of consequences that result from their arrest and incarceration. These consequences include, but are not limited to, interrupted access to education, unemployment, economic hardship, and discrimination— which in turn, contribute to an increased likelihood of re-arrests and future entanglements with the justice system.

In addition to these personal consequences, there are increasing economic costs related to incarceration. According to a 2009 report by the PEW Center on the States, corrections costs have risen to over $50 billion annually and represent the second fastest growing state budget category behind Medicaid (2010). Describing the conditions of incarceration and confinement in a system “rife with institutional racism,” Bell urges juvenile justice professionals to oppose “legislative agendas that continue to demonizes young people of color” (2000, p.190). Rather than the continuation of get-tough-on-juvenile-crime tactics, Bell argues for interventions that support juvenile offenders with a focus on their strengths rather than their deficits. To this call for reform, alternative to detention programs (ATDP) for youth have gained increased attention and support in recent years.

Positioned as positive interventions, ATDs strive to decriminalize youth and focus on the rehabilitation rather than the punishment of youth. ATDs attempt to interrupt the cycle of incarceration by providing space for youth to reflect on their lives without relocating them away from their families and communities. For court involved youth, opportunities and programs that allow them to work towards understand self, coming to terms with past actions, and imagining possible futures outside of the justice system are critical.

I have been involved with an ATD program for the past year, an after-school program located in East Harlem with youth ages 12-16. While the success of this program is hard to gauge, I am confident that this program has much more positive effects than a juvenile detention center.

Here are two videos we created this past spring (password: Choices), one called "The Hugs Show" and the other based on Ground Zero. I hope this offers a dimension of ATD programs and what they do:

http://vimeo.com/24533534
http://vimeo.com/24128742

Eva Moskowitz: Questions and Answers About the Role of School Safety

For this assignment, I interviewed former City Councilwoman and head of Success Charter Network Eva Moskowitz regarding School Safety officers in NYC Public Schools. The interview is below:

1. Were you involved in the original decision to allow school safety officers to have a role in schools?

I was not an elected an official in 1998, but I supported in my campaign a merging of School Safety and the DOE. It seemed that the police department needed to be involved because school violence in 1998 was at an all time high. There were pretty low paid security agents that were not well trained. While the police department has its share of problems, there is a lack of professionalism with School Safety officers and having NYPD training and accountability would increase school safety accountability.

2. What do you think the role of school safety officers should be?

My vision is that the School Security agent should be part of school safety. However, the Principal needs to have a good relationship with school safety. In some schools security agents are barking at kids. Security agents and school community vision should be aligned. They should not be paid to show up. We have to have a shared way of speaking to kids. It is hard to have that because Safety Officers come and go and transfer in a willy-nilly way. There is not good training. We need fewer of them overall and better training. They also need to learn to talk to kids; how you would speak to someone that you are about to arrest is different than how you should talk to kids. Their role should be de-escalating and be utterly respectful of children and adolescents. It is not currently very effective. Conversely, school leadership relies on safety agent in schooling. This is an utter failure of leadership – school safety can’t create order in classroom. They have not been trained to do so.

3. Current research is showing that the presence of school safety is having a variety of negative effects on students, including the rise of criminalizing behavior that was once considered part of school administrator authority. What are the alternatives to criminalization in schools?

There are absolutely alternatives. I would argue that we have to start with a culture of order and responsibility. The school shouldn’t be as disorderly as they are and school safety isn’t equipped to address these problems. They should be a tiny part of the process but it is truly the school principal and leaders and teachers that set a tone of safety and respect. If you don’t have that you can’t achieve anything.

4. Your network of schools primarily serves high-poverty areas. These schools are similar in demographic to student populations that are targeted for school safety increases. What alternatives do you see for schools that over-rely on police presence in schools?

The alternatives require training principals and teachers. It is a difficult skill to create a sense of order. Some of our schools have sense of calm and order at a high level and it is painstakingly created. Once you have it, it has to be cultivated, and it is so much easier to teach. The lives of teachers are easier. We have to train people and it takes a lot of work. In the DOE there isn’t enough time to train teachers – there won’t be success if you don’t set people up to be successful.

Post for Wednesday, October 19th - The ugly monster that is tracking

A worthwhile article:

NYCLU Asks for Police Department to Stop Policing Schools:

http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2011/10/07/n-y-c-l-u-to-city-let-educators-handle-school-discipline/

Blog Post – October 19^th, 2011

The articles for this week focus on the notion of tracking and whether or not there is a system of inequity that is pervasive in these commonplace school practices. Instinctively, one would state yes, homogenous groupings are unfair and continue to perpetuate the cyclical system that delegates students of color into an academic career that will neither benefit or enhance society. Studies and statistics would confirm one’s instincts.

Waiting for Superman Clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMjUSQk5WH4

The Waiting for Superman clip provides a visual representation of the ultimate impact of tracking systems within classrooms. Regardless of your bias in reference to the film, the consequences of this historically flawed mechanism is dire for students in fundamentally impoverished areas. Jeannie Oakes (1985) confirms this as she states, “every study that has considered the distribution of poor and minority students among track levels in schools. In academic tracking, then, poor and minority students are most likely to be placed at the lowest levels of the schools’ sorting system” (p.201). Tracking systems beg the question, which came first; low expectations for minority students or students’ low expectations of schools? Students often attend school with a pre-conceived perception of the teachers expectations. Consequently, students who are repeatedly told, directly or indirectly, they are incompetent, will grow to believe it. Thus said students will behave in a manner that adheres to what he or she believes the teacher expects of them.

Heterogeneous grouping into homogenous reading group

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLRrhSfmdEU

Within the articles, there is a limited amount of information in regards to possible solutions for the inequities created by tracking. Adam Gamoran (1992) asserts that teachers are a fundamental key. In fact, he states, “at the secondary level, a few case studies suggest that low-track classes may serve their remedial purpose – that is, they allow students to catch up, or at least prevent them from falling further behind – under the following conditions:

- Teachers exert extra effort, compared to their efforts in other classes

- Teachers and students have opportunities for extensive oral interaction

- There is no procedure in place that assigns weak or less experienced to the lower track” (p. 197).

The clip above is provided as a suggestion for a feasible method for providing a curricular supplement to all of Gamoran’s suggestions. In fact, the aforementioned technique/clip allows for heterogeneous groupings with homogeneous internal groupings. This cultural shift creates a sentiment of equity that could motivate students to enjoy school.

Discussion Questions:

1. In your experiences, have you encountered any examples of tracking that were successful for students? What were the key elements of these systems?

2. Is there a pervasive undercurrent/rationale behind the excessive number of minority students that are present in lower tiered classes? Does this serve as a means for enforcing de facto segregation?

3. What are some practical solutions for reducing or eradicating the need for tracking?

Issues in Education

I had many points of contention with some of these readings. I generally struggle with over-generalizations, and while there obviously is a place for it in academic research, I have trouble with arguments such as that of “cultural inequality” (p. 217), which argues that cultural deficiencies lead to economic failure. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague recently who argued that the failure of our low income students and students of color is a result of “bad parenting.” Honestly, at what point will we stop to blame parents and cultures and start to look at how our school structures, cultures, and policies track students to success or failure?
This problem arose again for me in the Lareau chapter, in which Lareau argues that Black middle-class families have a particular set of values that low income Black families lack, which is passed down to the children and prepares them for academic success. While I am not denying the impact of socioeconomic status on student achievement, I think that it is short-sighted and detrimental to say that economically underprivileged families lack the “right values,” and therefore fail their students academically. To be perfectly honest, it seems to me that little Alex Williams is being trained to be spoiled, immediately gratified, and, for lack of a better term, obnoxious. Let’s take the car ride example in which he states, “I don’t want hot dogs tonight.” His mother responds that she will, “fix something else and save the hot dogs for tomorrow night.” But this is not enough for our Alex. He continues, “But I don’t want any pork chops either.” Whereas my mother’s response would have been, “Oh well. We don’t always get what we want,” Alex’s mother’s response is, “Well, Alexander, we need to eat something” (p. 249). Lareau generalizes that this “general pattern of reasoning and accommodating is common” (p. 249) in middle-class families. Not only is this not directly linked to academic achievement, but it also purports that negotiating with an 8-10 year old is an admirable value that should be replicated. If anything, it seems to reinforce the notion that those with money have a power and privilege that those without monetary wealth do not, as not every family has the option to simply forego the pork chops and hot dogs in order to accommodate Alex’s cravings.
Another issue that I had was in the comparison between the U.S. and countries such as Germany, Sweden, and Japan. While Blossfeld and Shavit do recognize the economic and educational disparities between the countries, at no point do they account for race as a factor in the educational differences and statistics between the countries. They seem to focus on class as an independent entity that can be examined separately from issues of ethnic and racial identity. While they do discuss gender within education (p. 225), they do not explore other forms of identity. The absence of such a discussion makes me question the results of the studies and reminds me of the “Did You Know 3.0” video and the recent talk about educational competition between countries. People often talk about how much better students in places such as India and China are doing in comparison to our students in the Unites States. However, they rarely discuss the fact that not all youth in China and India are even in schools. Whereas many other countries educate their youth until a certain (younger) age and then send them to work or go into higher education, our country mandates that all students attend school at least until the age of 16. There are 16 year olds in India who have already been working for years. So what and who are we really comparing when we make these comparisons?
While the statistics in the Orfield and Lee chapter on segregation were frightening, they contradict the findings in Catherine Prendergast’s book, Literacy and Racial Justice, in which she argues that Brown V. Board of Education actually harmed African Americans students’ education more than it helped. I also would have liked to see a discussion of the de facto segregation that occurs within particular schools. For example, why are the Advanced Placement and Honors classes significantly whiter and wealthier than the Special Education, Regular, and Remedial classes?
Finally, I struggled with Orfield and Lee’s recommendation that we “Explain to Americans that white children gain substantially from integrated experiences” (p. 176). While I completely agree that this is true, I have trouble with the appeal to White people to be involved in community efforts because they, too, are affected. I recently read an article describing the call to White communities to fight violence against women because it is not only a problem in communities of color (Crenshaw, 1991). I find it problematic that the only way we can appeal to a large population of our country to support and advocate for basic human rights is to prove to them that it will personally and adversely affect them if they do not. I understand this strategy, and I would not say that it is unwise to appeal to a population in this way. But it saddens me that this type of appeal is necessary.