Building a National Educational Justice Movement: Community Organizing to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Collective Action to Unsettle and Dismantle Educational Inequities

Abstract

This paper analyzes the recent emergence of national educational justice movements, drawing from a study of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Data come from fieldwork in four localities and in national movement venues, involving in-depth interviews, observation of movement activities, and review of documentary evidence. Previous scholarship on community organizing for education reform has examined it almost entirely as a local phenomenon, while scholarship on national movements shows how they are typically dominated by professional advocates and focused on inside-the-beltway politics. Drawing on findings from this study, I develop a new model for how national educational justice movements can be built in ways that support local organizing campaigns, lifting up and spreading victories across the country.

Author

• Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts - Boston