The Slippery Slope: Using DisCrit to Examine Student Pushout Into the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• In Event: 31.064 - Disabling Race and Racing Disability: Developing DisCrit

Abstract

1. Objectives
The objectives of this paper are to capture how youth are shaped and positioned in schools and made ready to enter the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The term school-to-prison pipeline highlights the complex network of relations that naturalize the movement of youth of color from schools and communities into under-or unemployment and permanent detention. This paper highlights the linkages between racialization and pathologization that play out in the construction and maintenance of the school-to-prison pipeline.

2. Theoretical framework
We take as our theoretical grounding the growing scholarship within Disability Studies in Education (DSE), which views disability from socio-cultural and historical perspectives and not through medicalized lenses. In particular, we use the framework of DisCrit (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013) to show that pathologization, racialization and criminalization are all social processes and not entities inherent in specific people. Similarly, CRT shows how these processes of criminalization are also produced socially by labeling certain kids, mostly boys of color, as dangerous and in need or containment or expulsion.

3. Methods/modes of inquiry
This is a theoretically grounded paper, drawing on both formal and informal research. The formal research is drawn from a doctoral study conducted in 2010-2013, comprised of participant observations and interviews with principals, general education teachers, and special education teachers in an urban elementary school in New York State. Additional data was analyzed through autoethnographic methods.

4. Data sources & evidence
Sources include our life experience as two special educators within various settings (from high school, higher education, and correctional facilities for youth), as well as formal research (explained above), which include participant observation and interviews conducted by the first author.

5. Results and conclusions
One conclusion put forth in this paper indicates that the use of subjective discipline practices in schools, even those that are supposedly evidence-based, such as school-wide positive behavior supports, continues a deficit-based assessment of students of color when they do not respond to specific behavioral interventions established, although not consistently implemented, in schools. These students, unresponsive to the prescriptions provided, were labeled as “repeat offenders” in the monthly behavioral data. The term “offenders,” a label given to those who have committed a crime, provides the justification for the students’ segregation with in the school setting through self-contained placements or outside of the school through continued suspensions and expulsions.

6. Significance of the study
While the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline have been theorized in various fields and activist arenas (such as critical race theory, ethnic studies, feminist of color critiques of the prison, critical criminology, and more), the purpose of this paper is to focus on the ways that special education designation and placements, and therefore dis/ability, are one of the core structures underpinning the school-to-prison pipeline, a structure which has been under-theorized in current understandings of the school-to-prison pipeline.

References
Annamma, S., Connor, D., & Ferri, B. (2013). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. Race Ethnicity & Education, 16(1), 1-31.

Authors

• Deanna Adams, Syracuse University

• Nirmala Erevelles, The University of Alabama