Use these points to educate family, friends and community members or as background for your letter-to-the-editor, episode screening, or media alert.

The national trend toward criminalizing rather than educating our children — referred to as the "school-to-prison pipeline" — is one of the most imperative civil rights challenges facing our nation today. The pipeline encompasses the growing use of zero-tolerance discipline, school-based arrests, disciplinary alternative schools and secured detention, to marginalize our most at-risk youth and deny them access to education.

• Zero tolerance policies that impose severe discipline on students without regard to individual circumstances are often a child’s entry point into the pipeline. These policies have not been shown to make schools safer or to improve school safety.
• Growing numbers of school districts are relying on law enforcement, rather than teachers and administrators, to handle minor school misconduct. This requires funding that could be more efficiently used for providing basic educational materials lacking in under-resourced schools.
• Students of color and those with special needs are disproportionately represented at every stage of the school-to-prison pipeline.
  1. African-American youth are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended, expelled or arrested for the same kind of conduct at school.
  2. African-Amercan students with disabilities are four times more likely to end up in correctional facilities.
• As suspensions and expulsions push students out of primary and secondary schools, many are finding themselves with no access to education. Others are placed in disciplinary alternative schools that are not subject to traditional educational standards of accountability.

We must demand accountability for the education of all students and work to halt the increasing prioritization of incarceration over education

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Support from the experts:

• The American Bar Association, Juvenile Justice Committee, Zero Tolerance Policy Report (Feb. 2001)
  "Zero tolerance...has redefined students as criminals, with unfortunate consequences...Unfortunately, most current [zero tolerance] policies eliminate the common sense that comes with discretion and, at great cost to society and to children and families, do little to improve school safety."