This week’s blog topic centers on how key players in the school community impact the school to prison pipeline. I wanted to reflect on this topic because I am interested in better understanding the extent to which I, as a teacher, am complicit in the complex systems that underlie the pipeline.
Having worked exclusively in urban public and charter schools, I have encountered many children who have been in and out of the prison system. I have taught some students before they became court-involved, and others after they were marked by the system—both physically and socio-emotionally.
One especially vivid memory I have from my first year teaching in southwest Baltimore is of a student, Andre, who all my students said had killed someone when he was 14. He was added to my roster in the third quarter of the school year, and when I called his name during attendance my class erupted in chattering. They knew him from the neighborhood, that he was a Blood, that he had stabbed someone, that he had done his time, that he was out on some sort of parole, that he was “crazy.”
Of course, I naively believed my kids’ reports of Andre even before he showed up in my class; and by the time he did arrive, 4 days after he was expected, after 4 days of nervous anticipation, I was actually fearful of him. I’m not exactly sure what it was—maybe it was because he told me off immediately when I approached him, or maybe it was because he was surly and belligerent to his peers too, or maybe it was because of what I saw when I looked at him—he had a red bandana wrapped around his fist, 2 teardrops tattooed on his cheekbone and a tattoo of fanged teeth on his neck. He looked exactly how I thought he would, in all my naïve and ungenerous wonderings of what a student like Andre would be like. All my kids seemed in awe of him too, and they never protested (to him) when he walked in late and knocked them in the backs of their heads.
He operated in isolation, partially self-imposed but possibly also because his peers feared him. I saw him as a threat to the fragile classroom community I had worked so hard to forge that year. He came to class only on Thursdays, when he met his parole officer after school. I found myself dreading Thursdays, and ultimately feeling relieved when he quit coming to school altogether.
Remembering Andre and realizing the guilt I feel now when thinking about my lack of compassion for him brings up many questions for me, questions I imagine that some teachers reflecting on their role in the school to prison pipeline may be considering:
- What has my attitude and behavior towards court-involved students been?
- What assumptions have I applied to them?
- How often operated out of fear or disapproval?
- Have I made adequate attempts to understand why my students have become court-involved?
- To what extent have my responses to their behavior or academics influenced their life trajectories and court-involvement?
- By adhering to my school’s discipline policies, am I performing a disservice to my children?
- Should I feel guilty for taking advantage of my school’s exclusionary discipline tactics, like suspensions and classroom send-outs?
- Having taught in and upheld a “no excuses” disciplinary model, am I morally culpable for our school’s student attrition rates? Particularly when the students who have left my school have become court-involved?
- How are teachers expected to consistently negotiate the complexities of maintaining enough order to effectively facilitate learning while also allowing students all the freedom and flexibility they need to express themselves?
In seeking some insight to these questions, I came across this article in Philosophy of Education (1993). Entitled “Power Goes to School: Teachers, Students, and Discipline,” author John F. Covaleskie presents an analysis of power in schools through a Foucauldian lens. He focuses specifically on the dynamic between teachers and students, and offers an interesting logic to the problem of student resistance and poor curriculum:
A culture of accountability from administrators, school boards, state authorities, etc. à teachers’ recognition of being subjects of sovereign power à teachers dumbing down academic material and decreasing passion for subject matter in order to meet the demands of accountability systems (like high-stakes testing) à teachers’ presentation of boring and unengaging material, with a focus more on management and control than on curricular virtuosity à students’ perceptions of teachers as agents of sovereign power rather than subjects of a broader sovereign system à student resistance
I thought this excerpt from the article was a particularly compelling way of summing up the argument: “While Foucault uses schools as one of the paradigmatic disciplinary institutions, he ignores the extent to which they are also among the last strongholds of sovereign power. From one perspective teachers are themselves subject to the web of disciplinary power; it is nonetheless true that the teacher, as seen by the student, wields power in its sovereign form. A tenth-grade social studies teacher, no less than the Sheriff of Nottingham, is a visible and identifiable representative of power. As such, and from the students’ point of view, teachers exercise power intermittently, over specific parts of the students’ lives, and from positions of great visibility. As Willis describes in Learning to Labor,19 and as Foucault would predict, the school becomes a site of resistance and outright rebellion precisely because it is a site of sovereign power. As the teachers act to impose control overtly on the students, the students can see that they are being forced to act in ways they would rather not. It therefore seems logical for the students to resist and/or rebel, and they act logically.
The complexity of this interaction of forms of power is suggested by the fact that the very resistance of the youths Willis studies serves to fit them into the niches that the disciplinary society has prepared for the children of the working class. The paradox is that their very resistance to the sovereign power wielded by their teachers places them (and their teachers) ever more firmly in the grip of the disciplinary power that neither students nor teachers stop to perceive, as busy as they are fulfilling their roles within the paradigms of sovereignty. Resisting (and exercising) the sovereignty that belongs to the teacher blinds all even more surely to the disciplinary power that operates on all concerned. It is the sleight of hand by which disciplinary power diverts attention from its exercise.”
This argument suggests that neither teachers nor students are ultimately responsible for the trajectories their respective positions take on; rather, it is the broader system of sovereign power that should be held responsible for the culture of resistance and disengagement that exists in schools. Teachers are only behaving as they are required to by the authorities, and it is only natural for students to resist those who attempt to overtly control them.
While I find this point of view interesting, it does not assuage my personal feelings of guilt and wrongdoing when considering Andre. While certainly guilt may not be a productive emotion in prompting authentic change, it does prompt reflection for me, and it fuels a desire to better understand how I as an individual have played a role in Andre’s decision to stop coming to school.
No good teacher would be relieved at a student’s absence from class—right? Even if that student’s absence meant that the lesson would go smoothly and that everyone else would feel comfortable—right? I think these questions are difficult, and for me, they remain unanswered for now.
What are you all thinking about these questions? Do you feel complicit in the pipeline, having exercised power and control over your students? Do you see students' resistance as a natural part of the school power dynamic? Does this mean that schools, as they are currently structured, are fated to send some students to jail?
- Sarba Aguda
