“It’s for Bad Kids”: Alternative Schools and the Carceral Continuum

• In Event: Carcerality and Education: A Qualitative Focus of Alternative Learning Environments and Racial/Ethnic Minoritized Students

Abstract

Alternative schools play a key role when it comes to school removal. Annually, more than 800,000 students (Kho & Rabovsky, 2022) attend some version of an alternative school in the United States. These are often young people who for one reason or another have been pushed out of traditional public schools and referred to an alternative school setting. Alternative schools can vary tremendously whether in size, focus, approach, and curriculum which contributes to an already confusing educational landscape that youth and families must navigate. Yet, it is well documented that alternative schools often fall short of meeting the academic and socioemotional needs of some of our highest needs students (Hadderman, 2002). As such, for this paper, I center the experiences of incarcerated students who prior to their detainment attended alternative schools to learn with and from their experiences navigating an often-forgotten educational setting that is all too familiar to system-impacted youth.

Methods & Research Questions

Drawing on youth interview data from a three-year critical ethnographic study conducted in a Midwest juvenile detention center, this paper explores how incarcerated students make sense of and describe their schooling experiences in alternative schools. This study attends to young people’s journeying to and through multiple educational institutions including public schools, alternative schools, and the juvenile court school, with a specific interest in understanding the role of alternative schools within their educational trajectories. To do so, this paper examines a subset of interviews with youth, all of whom identified as Black and/or of Mexican origin, who prior to their arrest were attending alternative schools. The following two research questions guide the analysis:

1) How do incarcerated students describe their schooling experiences in alternative schools?
a. Based on their understanding, why were they pushed out of their public schools and sent to an alternative school?
2) How did their experiences in alternative school influence their decisions pertaining to formal education?

Findings

Findings demonstrate that while most youth and their families were told by school personnel that attending an alternative school would more adequately meet their Individualized Educational Plans (IEP) needs and provide more opportunities for individualized learning and credit recovery, once enrolled most students did not receive the necessary support needed to thrive academically. Instead, youth were met with increased surveillance and criminalization. Youth described highly surveilled schools and classrooms equipped with metal detectors and handheld wands, daily body searches, constant police presence, and excessive use of force via restraints. A few youths described attending an alternative school located directly behind a police station such that police encounters were commonplace. To make matters worse, students were adamant that they were “not learning” due to poor teaching and learning conditions. Youth described very little to no direct instruction or collaborative learning, and instead hours of rudimentary online learning. Most youth made it clear that attending alternative schools negatively impacted their sense of self and relationship to formal education, so much so that many eventually stopped attending school altogether.

Authors

• Julissa O. Muñiz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Armando Lizarraga, University of Texas at Austin