Illiteracy and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The School-to-Prison Pipeline, as described in the American School Board Journal (2007), asserts that “what happens in schools – or fails to happen – determines, in large part, whether young people enter the criminal justice system.”  Students of color and low socioeconomic status are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system and this is in large part due to the education they have received.  In fact, many prisons plan for their future populations by looking at 3^rd grade reading standardized test scores.  If children do not know how to read by 3^rd grade, they are put at a disadvantage and continually go on “losing streaks” within the educational system.  Most commonly the students who do not receive adequate literacy education are those students of color or low socioeconomic status and it is these students who need the most assistance.  As written by Winn and Behizadeh (2011), “Low-quality literacy education is a key component of the school-to-prison pipeline.” 

Winn and Behizadeh (2011) argue that one of the contributions to declining literacy and the school-to-prison pipeline is the declining in academic rigor.  As the authors (2011) state, “To achieve academic rigor in literacy, students need a literacy education that is social, contextualized, and values multiple literacies.”  Currently, many of our under-performing schools are preparing students to take tests, but are not teaching students to understand and contextualize what they are learning.  Students in these schools are not receiving quality literacy education and this is negatively impacting their futures.

Winn and Behizadeh (2011) argue that our educational system needs to move towards seeing literacy as a civil right.  The authors (2011) state, “Education is a civil right, especially learning to read and write critically, for students to both interrogate written texts and disseminate their own writings.”  The authors later quote Fecho and Skinner (2008) when they state, “If literacy is a civil right, we need a literacy that gets beyond the rote skill and drill of phonics, decoding, and comprehension.”  All students need to receive quality literacy education that goes beyond merely preparing students for a test.  Reading and writing skills are essential for students to succeed in a society and educators need to help all students read and write critically.  In order to help students that are being disproportionately affected b y the school-to-prison pipeline, we need to re-imagine how we teach literacy in some of our most underserved schools.  Literacy is not something that can only be taught for a test; literacy, reading and writing, is something that must continually be emphasized and seen as a right for all students.

8. “Are schools responsible for the prison pipeline?”. (2007). American School Board Journal, 194(4), pp. 19.

9.  Winn, M.T. & Behizadeh, N.  (2011). “The right to be literate: Literacy, education, and the school-to-prison pipeline”.  Review of research in education, 35 (1), pp. 147-173.