"Stop-and-Frisk" for Caregivers: Teachers, Good Intentions, and Refusing to Be Complicit in Our Prison Nation

• In Event: WITHDRAWN. Carceral State Education: Violence, Trauma, and Resistance

Abstract

Purpose and theoretical frameworks: Many progressive teachers and communities are actively work to shrink the footprint of policing in hallways and communities, excavate the ongoing practices and policies that reproduce heterogendered white supremacy in schools, and to build non-punitive, or restorative, responses to harm in classrooms. However, what is too often erased in these movements, and associated bodies of research, are the key way the profession of teaching facilitates forms of racialized and heterogendered surveillance and criminalization. Teachers are mandated reporters who are required by law to report suspected young people that they have reason to believe experience neglect and abuse. While on paper this charge looks neutral, this paper offers a preliminary investigation detailing why teachers might rethink their roles and raise questions about mandated reporting laws.

Methods & Data Sources: This investigation into the impact of mandated reporting laws and the profession of teaching is a multidisciplinary project. This work relies on archival and historical sources that trace the history of the establishment of these laws, in particular as they overlap with anti-poverty, feminist and racial justice movements. A second key source is government and advocacy organization reports that summarizes the financial investments in child protective services (CPS) – foster care, case management, the demographic (who is reported, by whom, why, and what is the outcome) and, most crucially, how these systems impact on families, particularly families of color.

Results: Far from a neutral system, CPS disproportionately regulates poor families of color, and the life outcomes of the young people within CPS are dismal. For example, a long list of blue ribbon commissions and reports, spanning decades, demonstrate that African Americans are grotesquely over-represented in foster care, and children in foster care have some of the worst life outcomes. Linking CPS to our criminal justice system helps us recognize these forms of child protection as coercive and punitive and illustrates places for resistance.

Scholarly significance: Very little research looks critically at how child protective services overlap with education, yet governmental reports consistently illustrate that teachers constitute one of the key professions referring children, particularly non-white and poor, to child protective services. Research also illustrates that suspected neglect, a vague category that is often synonymous with poverty, is a key rationale offered for referral.

Author

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University