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(uptempo jazzy music) - Welcome to another edition of "In Another Opinion", a public information program, where our discussions are focused on the communities of color in the state of Rhode Island.

I'm your host Peter Wells.

My guest today is Mark Warren, professor at University of Massachusetts Boston, and author of a new book, "Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline".

Mark, welcome to the show.

- Oh, thank you for having me.

- Oh, it's our pleasure.

This subject is one that's been kicked around so much, and quite frankly, often misunderstood.

What does, if you say a definition, what is the definition of school-to-pipeline, school-to-prison pipeline, I should say.

- So the school-to-prison pipeline is referring to the phenomenon where a lot of young people, particularly Black and Brown youth, end up moving from school into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

And the way that happens is through what we call harsh and zero tolerance school discipline practices.

So suspending and expelling students for oftentimes very minor kinds of misbehavior.

That's why we call the book "Willful Defiance".

Hundreds of thousands of students are suspended every year for something called willful defiance or disrupting school.

That could mean having your hat on inappropriately, or refusing to take your hat off, could mean questioning the teacher about why history books that you're assigned in school were published in Texas.

So challenging authority in any way, hundreds of thousand students end up getting suspended.

So when students are suspended and expelled, particularly at a young age, then they're often out of school on the street, and interfacing with police officers and ending up, rightly or wrongly as we know, being arrested and ending up in the juvenile criminal justice systems.

It also refers to those kinds of zero tolerance discipline practices, and also to policing practices right in schools.

So a lot of young people have their first contact with police, and are actually referred and often arrested right in school.

So a quarter of a million students every year are referred to a law enforcement right from school.

- [Peter] A quarter of a million.

- Yeah, and about 60,000 are arrested in school.

And many, there's been various studies of this.

There's a study in North Carolina, majority of young people in the juvenile justice detention centers report that their first contact with police was actually in school.

So this is the kind of school-to-prison pipeline, and it affects an enormous number of students every year.

So we have 3 million students being suspended every year.

- It's unbelievable.

- Yeah.

And I'll give you one other really shocking statistic.

75% of black students in Texas are suspended at some point in their secondary school experience.

- This is throughout the statewide.

- Yeah, statewide, yeah.

- Wow.

- And Black students, particularly Black boys, are the highest numbers of being, or highest proportion of being suspended.

But Black girls are also disproportionately suspended as well, at rates actually higher than Black, so Black boys are three times more likely to be suspended as White boys.

Black girls are six times more likely to be suspended as White girls, and similar ideas for police referrals.

- And speaking to Texas, then I've got to ask you the other question.

What about the Latino population in Texas being very large?

- Yeah, so that 75% yeah, 75% of Black students.

For Latino students it's lower, but it's still disproportionate.

So we're whereas Black students generally are three times more likely, Latino students are more like two to two and a half more times likely than White students.

So it affects Latino students as well, and Latino boys.

So that's why I sort of talk about Black and Brown young people in particular, but Native students are also suspended at higher rates too.

And you know, if you are suspended from school, you are much more likely to, well drop out.

We don't really like to use the term drop out, but fail to graduate high school.

And I'm giving you a lot of statistics right now.

But I think people need to know the extent of this.

If you are a Black man without a high school degree, you at some point in your life, two-thirds of those Black men without a high school degree will end up in prison at some point in their lives.

Two-thirds.

- That's amazing.

- Well over a majority.

So the consequences are very extreme.

- That's true, you know I have to tell you, my mom was an educator, and dad being a minister, he had his PhD in theology, but he was big on education.

But the interesting thing is that both of them, and of course times were different.

But they challenged my brother and I both to challenge the teachers, to ask the questions.

Not to accept just what you're being told without seeing some sort of backup and research or something that supports that position.

So then in those days we didn't have this, I guess.

- [Mark] No, we did not.

- So when did this phenomenon start to occur in the school systems?

- It really started in the late '80s and mainly through the '90s.

So I think people know, you may know a lot about the rise of mass incarceration, what Michelle Alexander called the new Jim Crow, where we ended up by the early 2000s with 6 million people in prison in this country.

It was the same process that was going on in terms of three strikes that you're out, zero tolerance in the community, then got transferred over to school.

And the term zero tolerance actually comes out of the so-called war on drugs.

So schools started to adopt the same kind of zero tolerance policies that were happening in the community.

And so it really emerged through the '90s.

The same with policing.

Probably at the time that you were in school, there were no armed police officers in schools.

- [Peter] Oh, no.

- In the entire country in the 1970s, there was only 100 police officers in all the schools.

By the early 2000s there were 16,000, and the number's only gone up since then.

So it was about policing, having police in schools and then zero tolerance suspensions.

And I actually trace in the book, well this is really more of a book about the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

And I actually trace into mid 1990s African-American organizers and parents in the Mississippi Delta, the heart of the old slave system, were some of the first to really identify this.

And they were out in the community and they were seeing all these young African-American boys and some girls on the street during school hours, and started to ask them, "Well, what are you doing?

Why aren't you in school?"

And they would say, "Well you know, I was late to school and they suspended me," or, "I talked back to the teacher and they suspended me," and it turned out a lot of them were being referred to these juvenile courts and then ended up in the juvenile detention system.

These so-called training schools, which were really basically horrible youth prisons where young people were being abused.

So it was really the 1990s, and they called it the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track at that time.

- Mark you know, when I'm thinking back when we didn't have police officers or school officers or whatever one might want to call them, in our schools in New York City, when I was growing up as a youngster in the elementary schools.

And throughout the public schools, there were chaplains in the schools, and every denomination was covered.

There was a rabbi, there was a priest and there was a Protestant minister.

And if requested, and imam.

Now, they had an office in the school, and they would rotate and they would be available to work with students that were having difficulty adjusting or behavior problems, but not police.

And I might also add that back in the day, so to speak, it wasn't uncommon for parents to discipline their children.

Behavior issues weren't probably as rampant as they might be today.

And I don't know what to contribute that to, other than the fact that discipline by parents has kinda gone away to some degree.

The new concept of, I don't know, I guess positive reinforcement rather than disciplining a child may or, may be a good thing.

I'm not a social, you know.

- Well I think that, I hear what you're saying, but I would counter a little bit that there isn't really a lot of evidence that there's that much of a higher level of student misbehavior, or even violence levels in schools.

Actually, people have studied this.

- [Peter] So why police then?

- Well, so the argument is, you know, if we looked at the arc of what happened, we had the civil rights movement in the '60s, led to school desegregation, led to the expansion of a lot of social services, antipoverty programs and actually education, particularly for Black children, really improved in the '70s and into the '80s.

And so we understand the school-to-prison pipeline as part of that backlash against the progress of the civil rights movement, and we track it to, even as these antipoverty programs were being put in place, there was a reaction to the urban uprisings of the '60s and into the '70s and a rapid increase in policing.

So even a lot of the bills that we're familiar with in the '60s that created the community action programs, also expanded policing.

And the war on drugs then expanded policing, and then Bill Clinton's crime bill provided funds for police in schools.

So there was really a bipartisan, if you will, move at the federal government, I think in reaction to the gains of the civil rights movement to bring in this new, that's why I link it to the new Jim Crow.

And there's this understanding of, why did we have such a huge increase in criminalization and incarceration in this country.

- But Mark, who was responsible for making the decision?

You're a professor of public policy, who was responsible for making the decision that, I know you can't point to one person, but the system decided, but we need policemen in the schools.

What was the impetus of that?

Was it, the school shootings that were taking place were taking place by people from the outside, not from inside the schools.

- Yeah, and also they were primarily in Whiter communities- - Well true, yeah.

- And suburban communities, but the increase in police that happened in response to that happened in a poor urban, Black and Latino schools.

That's where we ended up with a big increase with policing, even though that's not where the shootings were.

Well you know, these laws were passed at the federal government level, and then in the '90s, they started to be passed by state governments.

- Well, what were the laws that were initially passed, that it allowed for police officers and in schools or- - Funded them.

- Oh funding, okay.

- It provided the funding to hire police officers to go into schools.

And then the state laws provided for easier suspensions and expulsions.

And even enshrined, the words zero tolerance were enshrined into state laws.

And so many school districts were either required or encouraged to adopt policies that called for zero tolerance school discipline policies, as well as, and you know we, I don't know if you're familiar with the federal 1033 program.

- Refresh my memory.

- That's a program that provides excess military equipment to local police departments for free.

Well, that equipment can also go to school police.

And in Los Angeles, the school police took a tank and semi-automatic weapons as part of the 1033 program.

And there was actually an organizing campaign, again, this is what I really focus on, and we'll talk a little bit more about.

There was an organizing campaign by the Labor Community Strategy Center, a group of high school students, to demand that the LA school police return the tank and semi-automatic weapons and issue an apology.

I mean, what is the mentality?

I think when you're seeing it from the outside, you say what could possibly be the mentality where a school police department thinks that it has to have a tank.

- [Peter] Exactly.

- [Mark] And somehow, but that's the reality that we're facing out there.

- My question would also go, who are they protecting?

- Yeah, who are they protecting, you know?

So that's back to the argument that, well this maybe, this is really a reaction to the gains of the civil rights movement, to the assertion of Black power in many cities, we're gonna control that by rapidly expanding our policing and our criminal justice systems, and that's going to work as a counterweight to these other gains.

And I don't think there's any other way to understand it.

And you know, and it filters down at many levels.

And so then you have the individual teacher in a classroom who you know, a majority of whom are White, majority of whom are coming from outside the communities in which they're teaching, raised up in this country in a racialized system, bringing stereotypes, bringing prejudices with them, and then interpreting the behaviors of Black boys, for example, to be threatening, or bad behavior requiring discipline and control.

So I often say, you know, the same kind of behavior, speaking up, asking questions, that a White boy might do in a suburb, well that boy's precocious, that boy's inquisitive, he's got some spunk and some spirit.

Well if a Black boy does it in school- - It's disruptive.

- He's disruptive.

You know, he needs to be disciplined, he needs to be suspended.

- Total attitude shift.

- Yeah, and so it it's on a macro level, structural level of what's going on, but then it filters down into the micro level.

You know, I traveled around and I heard, you know, we've been talking more about statistics, but I heard a lot of the stories of what's happened to young people and their parents in the system.

You know, I was in Virginia, outside of Richmond, Virginia, and I went to meet with a group called Advocates for Equity in School and I Vote for Me.

And I got there that night and we were supposed to meet the next morning.

They said, "Well we can't meet with you because we just got a call from an African-American woman parent," her son in middle school, he's on an IEP, which is a individualized education plan for a student with special needs.

And that plan says that he can go outside to blow off steam onto the school grounds if he needs to, to calm himself down and then come back in the class.

He's outside one day, and the security officer comes up and assaults him and grabs him by the belt, drags him through the mud, back into the school, and then they send them home.

They don't suspend him because they don't want a record of it, but he's sent home.

So the mother comes in the next day, I went to the meeting and it was just, array of school personnel officers in front of her.

And they had a video of what happened, they refused to show it to her.

Stonewalled the whole meeting while she was trying to say, "Well, how can this be acceptable?

You know, he's supposed to be on IEP."

At one point, one of the system superintendents stands up and says, "Well you know, I think we have to end this meeting because some of us actually have to work."

And of course the mother had taken time off from her job.

Yet again, we have the racial stereotypes that she's, you know, welfare, whatever.

- So Mark, how do we counter this?

How do we disrupt this pipeline?

- Yeah, well that's what I talk a lot about in the book, which is how parents and young people in communities have in fact organized to change these school discipline policies and reduce these suspensions, now- - What kinds of things have you seen or report in the book?

- So this again, back to the sort of mid '90s, when this first started.

But starting in the early 2000s organizing groups like in Los Angeles is a good example, led campaigns to end zero tolerance, to take it out of the policy so that you can't suspend students for zero tolerance or willful defiance.

So by 2012, they were able to get the school committee, school board in Los Angeles to eliminate that.

So there are no more suspensions, well there haven't been, for willful defiance in Los Angeles.

And as a result, the number of out-of-school suspensions has dropped dramatically.

It was 75,000 a year at the time, and it's now down to 4,000 out-of-school suspensions.

So it's an enormous change, right?

- [Peter] Yes, it's an enormous drop.

- Through the work of these parent organizing groups like, well CADRE, the group I mentioned, the Labor Community Strategy Center.

They had a large coalition called the Brothers Sons Selves coalition of young people, often many boys of color who organize it.

So they change policies to eliminate willful defiance and different codes for suspensions to make it much harder, and then to advocate for what is often called restorative or transformative justice alternatives.

So instead of suspending students, you try to provide support for students, and also you try to transform the whole culture of relationships at the school, to make schools probably a little bit more like they might've been in your day, which is more connected to community, more welcoming of students and family, more based on human relations rather than discipline and control.

So restorative justice has its roots in, really in Native traditions and indigenous traditions, but has been kinda transformed and developed into a practice where, I mean, I don't wanna only talk about student misbehavior, but let's say there was a fight.

So in the past, automatic suspensions.

If you're in a fight, you're automatic, that was part of the whole- - Both though, right?

- Both, yeah.

And it doesn't matter who's the aggressor, right?

'Cause there have been cases where, for example, you know gay students, LGBTQ, may be harassed and harassed and harassed, and they finally fight back.

Well they're suspended, zero tolerance.

That's how zero tolerance is working, and it's not solving anything either, right?

'Cause you're just suspending the students, pushing them out of school.

Then eventually they come back, well what's changed?

- Or they don't come back.

- Or they don't come back, or they end up in even the juvenile justice system.

But if they do come back, nothing necessarily has changed.

So in restorative justice you create circles, people talk about the harm that's been committed, the responsibilities that they have.

You try to get at the root causes of these things, through restorative practices.

- Well our legislature looked at it here, a couple years ago here in Rhode Island, and there was a big push for restorative justice to be used here in Rhode Island, and in more specifically, in the Providence school system.

I can't speak for the rest of the state.

But it wasn't accepted warmly.

A lot of people felt restorative justice was just a nice way of slapping someone on the hand and letting them go, rather than actually treating or dealing with the problem, if there was a behavior problem.

Now you know, you and I both have just talked about some of the things that were called behavior issues that were probably just normal everyday interactions with humans.

- Right, teenagers.

- Yeah, and teenagers.

And that was my other question.

Your book focuses on middle school, or well at least the concept of tracking this- - Well, I think middle and high school, it would be fair to say, yeah secondary school, but yes.

- But why not elementary school?

- Well no- - 'Cause it starts there.

- Yeah, it focuses more on, it focuses on secondary school in the sense that the young people who are doing the organizing to change these policies tend to be secondary school students, but the- - Okay, so the student organization, okay.

- Yeah, the student organizing.

But the policies, no the policies that I discuss in the book also go into elementary school and willful defines and zero tolerance is also happening in our elementary schools.

In fact, it starts in preschool.

There are 50,000 preschool students suspended every year.

- Preschool, I was suspended from preschool.

- You were?

- I was.

I will tell you, it was a young young girl in my, we were, I was probably four years old.

And we had milk and cookies and she took the last cookie and then didn't eat it.

And I told her what my father used to tell me, "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.

You took that and then you didn't, you ended up throwing it away."

I was suspended, it was a little White girl.

I was the only Black kid in this preschool.

It was The Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City.

And my parents had to come in and apologize to her parents.

I had to apologize to be let back into the school.

So I guess I did experience some of this then, yet didn't realize that it was happening.

- So it's not an entirely new phenomenon.

(Peter laughing) but the numbers have really gone up.

And in fact, the book starts with the story of Zakiya Sakara-Jabar, who she went to, she was outside of Dayton, Ohio, and she went back to college and tried to get her degree, put her son Amir in pre-K. And she started getting call after call from the, "He's not transitioning, he's arguing with other students."

She's saying, "Well, this is normal three-year-old behavior, right?

Don't you deal with this?"

And he in fact was suspended and expelled.

She had to leave college, and then before she left, she went to the college library and she did a search for Black boys in education, and she found that that her experience, 'cause this, her experience was not unusual and not unique, but see, that's part of the problem, right?

That a lot of parents and a lot of young people are made to believe, "Well, you're the problem.

You're at fault for this."

- Until you mentioned just now the suspension of preschool, I had not thought about that incident that I went through as part of this same thing.

And I just never even thought about it.

- And now, you maybe had college-educated professional parents who maybe, I'm not saying it was right What happened to you or the fact they had to apologize, but maybe they had some more resources to help you rebound from that experience.

But a lot of families don't have that, and it starts them on a road.

And those kids get labeled early on, and those labels are passed down through elementary school and children are suspended.

I think the figures are about 25% of Black secondary school students are suspended every year.

And in elementary school, it's a little under 10%, but there's still a lot every year.

So you add up six years, right?

So you know, something on the order of a third to maybe 40% of Black children are suspended at some point in elementary school.

So that's an enormous number.

- So let me ask you this.

'cause we're getting close to time, believing it not.

But I wanted to, what advice would you give to the community here, the parents, to address and organize this problem?

- Yeah well, I think that people have to get together, that individually you're not in a strong position.

I mean, obviously you have to advocate and learn how to advocate for your child if you're a parent, and if you're a community member, support those parents.

But I think the change really occurs when people get together and work collectively.

And I know there's organizations in Providence, like the Providence Student Union, for example.

Young people in this case who have been organizing to remove police from schools, right?

So there is this huge movement in schools.

- [Peter] There is a movement for this, right.

- And this is a national movement.

That's the other thing, that people need to understand that what's happening in Providence is not unique to Providence.

This is, the school-to-prison pipeline is national, and the movement to end the school-to-prison pipeline is a national movement.

It has deep roots in places like Providence, but it's banded together nationally.

And so I think that parents need to start, and community members need to start to educate themselves, work together, advocate for changes in policy to either remove police from school, look for alternatives like restorative justice, and as you say, we want the authentic implementation of restorative justice.

We're looking for deep change in schools, not fly by, superficial restorative justice, which may not work that well if it really is superficial.

So I think these are some of the things that people need to know, and they need to know that it's not an issue of bad parents or bad children.

It's a systemic problem that really has to change.

- You know, well you'd think that the larger community would understand the impact that this has long-term on the economics of a community, which is the economics of the city or the town, and IE the state.

So it's, I just don't understand why we just haven't figured out that these social issues, you know, collectively collectively figured out that these social issues and the longterm impact of those issues affects the quality of life, even of those who aren't effected, Because of the impact economically.

- Yeah, it is, I think it's a question for our whole society.

I mean, I really end the book "Willful Defiance" talking about the responsibilities of all Americans to address this situation.

- [Peter] Yes, exactly.

- It really affects everybody, and we all have a responsibility to work on these issues.

It's not just, it may be a movement that's gonna be led in the Black community or in the Latino community, but it's not restricted to that.

And people aren't gonna win changes on their own.

They need a multiracial, they need allies around to say not only this is not right, it's also as you say, undermining, not just our economics, but our democracy.

- Mark, I'm gonna have to cut you off unfortunately, because we're running out of time.

But your comments today, I suggest everyone get a copy of the "Willful Defiance".

Can that on Amazon, I imagine, or whatever?

- [Mark] Yes, it can be purchased on Amazon or any of your favorite- - Bookstores.

- Booksellers.

And we have a website, if you were to just Google "Willful Defiance", you can get a lot more information as well.

- [Peter] Okay, very good, thank you Mark.

- [Mark] Yeah, hank you so much.

- We have run out of time and I, but I wanna thank today's guest, Mark Warren, and you the viewers for tuning into another edition of "In Another Opinion".

A special thanks to PBS for making this program possible.

I'm your host, Peter Wells.

Give us your opinion on Facebook, "In Another Opinion", and have a great day.

(gentle jazzy music) - [Announcer] Someone gave, someone donated, someone left a legacy.

Generations of generous someones have helped shape Rhode Island into this amazing place we call home.

How do you thank them?

By leaving your own legacy.

We can help.