Criminalizing Urban Youth

In the chapter titled: "Critical Social Theory and the Study of Urban School Discipline", Kathleen Nolan presents the results of her study examining how dominant social forces, those in positions of financial and political power, have created a system which intentionally suppresses any potential for success of Black and Latino urban youth.  She analyzes her findings with the support of two critical theoretical frameworks.  The first is known as the theory of punishment in society.  This theory suggests that punishment for certain actions and behaviors are warranted in order to maintain social control.  These practices, however, are unfairly enforced on urban Blacks and Latinos compared to their White or wealthier counterparts.  This clearly demonstrates that those belonging to lower social class communities are disproportionately targeted as engaging in criminal behavior and classified as delinquents.   Mainstream culture supports this practice because it has been normalized or viewed as common sense. One should face consequences as a result of his/her social infractions - if you commit a crime, or conduct yourself in a way that goes against the values established by mainstream culture, you should be punished for that behavior.   As these disenfranchised youth have vast cultural and demographic differences that set them apart from the dominant, mainstream culture, their insubordinate actions are criminalized.  The larger social context for such behavior is not taken into account.  These practices are meant to control lower-class, marginalized  communities by instilling fear.The second is the theory of social reproduction.  Schools in low socioeconomic communities are engaging in disciplinary practices that closely resemble those in prisons, thus reproducing a criminalized social class.  Students are not treated as learners but rather as criminals in schools, with armed security staff who are prepared to arrest and detain for any breach of school policy. This exacerbates their chances of ending up in prison at a young age.  The opportunity for academic success in this hyper punitive environment is so limited since learning has not been a priority made available to them.  Due to poor academic performance they will most likely drop out of school, never attend college and eventually engage in criminal activity that will lead to incarceration.

This is a well written chapter that counters mainstream ideology of how punishment is applied.  Here, the author clearly delineates the social context of marginalized urban youth and how they are unjustly targeted as criminals for behaviors that would most likely be disregarded if exhibited by a White student or by one belonging to a higher social class.  The results of this study has a great potential to elevate emancipatory practices in breaking the cycle of injustice experienced in the daily lives of urban youth.

The School to Prison Pipeline

The dissertation proposal presented by Kathleen Nolan, titled "Disciplining Urban Youth:  An ethnographic study of the relationship between schools and prisons" suggests a need to disturb the structure of power that supports the school to prison pipeline sustained by our government systems.  The study will examine the relationship of dominant external forces (macro) and the lived, school and community experiences of urban youth (micro). She examines how the "zero tolerance" disciplinary policies governing NYC schools mirror those of the penal system to further project that Black and Latino youth are a problem as a result of their individual actions in order to obscure the structure of social control maintained by those in positions of power.

Purpose

The data she collects from this study will be examined through the lens of critical social theories to highlight the connection between the subjugation of economically and racially marginalized groups by policies created to maintain control over lower class population. Control over racially marginalized groups is conducted through a form of punishment or fear. Provoking fear is common practice in our justice system and the researcher's goal is to gather rich ethnographic data that supports the use of similar, punitive disciplinary actions in this school. These are common practices supported by theories of punishment derived from social theorists such as Michel Foucault and David Garland. The results can be used to highlight these disparities and recommended action to disrupt this system.

Research Questions

Dominant social forces that make the link between similar punitive and controlling practices in schools and prisons. It will also extend to the lived experiences of these students within their larger communities and examine their interactions with law enforcement to offer a complete view of the oppressive experiences students face in their daily lives.

Literature Review

A historical context is well established to describe the actions that influenced hyper-segregation of predominantly poor Black and Latino communities. Deindustrialization during the 1960's and 1970's heavily impacted working class communities, largely affecting Blacks and Latinos. This led to steep unemployment rates and subsequent eligibility for public assistance and subsidized housing. With this high influx of financial need, entire subsidized neighborhoods were now established. With these established enclaves of poor Black and Latino residents, they are strategically segregated from more privileged communities. They are economically isolated with limited financial and educational opportunities that restrict upward social mobility.

Methodology

This is an ethnographic study. It is designed to directly observe disciplinary occurrences within the school, and community. Although many conclusions can be determined from observations within the school in terms of the execution of disciplinary policies, it is also crucial to understand the types of law and order interactions students are experiencing in their surrounding communities. Similar patterns within these two settings can emerge, solidifying the argument that these punitive practices are created by structures of power and domination to control and suppress racially and economically disenfranchised communities.

Methods

The site for this ethnographical study will be a high school in the Bronx with high rates of disciplinary referrals. It was classified as "high risk" by the department of education and a contender for a zero-tolerance policy which has the capacity to summons students for typical infractions, such as disobedience toward figures of authority. Student enrollment is composed of 96% Black and Latino students with 1% classified as White. This is an ideal setting to highlight the unjust disciplinary actions imposed by this policy and how these compare to the disciplinary methods in correctional facilities. The student participants will not only be observed inside of school but also in their neighborhoods, and how their experiences with discipline and law enforcement is consistent in both settings.

Analysis

Once the ethnographical data is collected from interviews and observations, recurring themes will be identified. These recurring patterns in the data will be identified and how these connect with the specified critical theories of how structures of power intentionally suppress these marginalized communities through all facets of their daily experiences.

Prominent elements of critical social theory are consistently applied throughout each section of the dissertation proposal. The theories highlight and link with the assumption that punitive and discriminatory practices routinely target poor, Black and Latino communities. The social, economic and cultural differences of this population are not considered when developing these restrictive and punitive educational policies. The results of this study are meant to highlight these injustices and to disturb this system.

Bilingual education in the US has confronted several reform efforts in the past 50 years.  The primary purpose of offering bilingual programs was to support emergent bilingual students in their native language while scaffolding their English language acquisition.  The argument was that if students have a strong literacy foundation in their native language, this will better facilitate their academic engagement in English.  These were widely known as transitional bilingual programs.  Presently, these transitional programs that were introduced to support emergent bilinguals have been vigorously replaced by dual-language (DL) programs.  There are various models of DL, but the idea is that classrooms with equal proportions of native speakers of the two languages of instruction (normally Spanish and English) and equal proportions of instructional time in those languages, students will become fully bilingual when they exit the program.  DL programs are gaining a lot of attention and are rapidly growing across the country.  While teaching in a DL school, I have observed sharp demographic shifts of the students enrolled in our school.  They come from more privileged backgrounds.  The cause of this trend is is exactly what I'm interested in examining.  This shift could be caused by the increased awareness of the benefits of bilingual education from those parents who are more educated and/or privileged, thus seeking this type of education for their children.  Another possible cause could be how school leadership manage and promulgate the program to favor financially and politically resourceful families.  I hope the results of this study can be used to spread awareness of the disparities facing DL education and to help create policies around equal access in education.

Hurry up and Write!

I'll admit it - I'm a slow writer.  I have always been. Articulating my ideas and getting them on paper is an arduous task, added to that, I'm constantly searching for the perfect words to better express myself.  I want to assure that my writing is logical and clear to my audience.  In the past I would blame it on the fact that I was an emergent bilingual and I thought this delayed the processing and articulation of my ideas.  It's possible that to a certain extent this did in fact interfere with my writing, but throughout graduate school I attempted to get to the root of the true cause of my slow writing. I can't continue to blame it on language proficiency forever! When a professor asks me to complete an in-class writing exercise I can accurately predict that I'll be the last one to complete it or fail to complete at all.  I also tend to obsess over word choice.  As I'm writing I pause constantly to think of the best word to accurately represent what I'm trying to communicate  This, in turn, interrupts my idea flow and subsequently forces me to have to rethink of the original idea for my sentence.  This constant cycle of pausing, thinking and recalling ideas adds a lot of unnecessary time to my writing process.   

The times I feel I can easily express myself is when I write about something connected to personal experience or when I am fully knowledgeable about the topic.  In these situations I feel comfortable expressing my ideas as they are since they are so vivid and easy to articulate.   In reading The Clockworth Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel,  he offers many writing suggestions that resonated with me.  He begins by stating that "accomplishment has to do with more than just ability".  In being an inefficient writer, it is sometimes difficult for me to feel fully satisfied with my writing as a result of the frustration I endure during the process.  It's a burden, at times.  But as not being the one to finish before the deadline does not mean I don't strong writing abilities. And similarly my more organized colleagues who always submit in advance are not necessarily better writers.  

Other tips I found I could realistically apply include setting a writing routine/schedule, getting into the habit of writing multiple drafts, and creating an outline for lengthier writing pieces, such as manuscripts or dissertations. Outlining the chapters for my dissertation to include more specific subheadings will definitely alleviate much of the anticipated stress of such a daunting project that is quickly approaching. For shorter writing pieces I suppose writing a first draft without the expectation that it should be a perfect piece the first time will allow me to just focus on getting my ideas on paper as they are flowing and limiting the interrupted thinking which can add large amounts of time in the process. I applied this strategy in writing this blog post. What a relief! I initially considered and wrote about my adverse experiences as a writer and how the tips presented in the text could connect to minimize my inefficient routine.  I found that minimizing my expectation for an initial piece of perfection, I could maintain focus on simply documenting my ideas. I wrote with exponential speed.  When I returned to the draft I then slowed my pace and substituted some words for better precision and expanded on ideas for better clarity.  I hope to continue this practice on future writing.   

"Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge" by Zeus Leonardo

The author of this article presents a historical perspective of the origins of Critical Social Theory (CST) and how it has evolved within our educational realm.  It can be traced back to the work of Kant, Dewey, and Freire as the most notable influencers of the CST movement in education.  This theory relies on uncovering and critiquing the contradictions within our educational system, with a resulting utopia, or a dream for future remediation.   CST is meant to address question and critique persistent social issues, those that affect our society, not necessarily individual or personal issues.  Educators should create a classroom environment where students are encouraged to question social disparities, such as the persistence of racism and other "isms".  By fostering this practice, the goal is that students become thinkers and prepared to independently confront social injustices.   Although they might be well-equipped to pose critique, the solutions to those injustices will unlikely create must change since they are so persistent and impenetrable.  Instead of thinking that we will create change by critiquing and challenging social structures, we can have a vision that these changes are possible and can occur in the future.

Questions:

1. How can we better prepare future educators to promote CST in their classrooms?
2. In a time of focused educational standards and high expectations for standardized test results, teachers feel they don't have autonomy to go off prescribed curriculum.  How can they have the freedom to promote a classroom environment of critique and social awareness?

What has influenced me as a researcher?

As a doctoral student in education, I'm interested in investigating the following:

Why and how are dual-language (DL) programs becoming increasingly gentrified?

The main setting for exploring my research interests will be at the school where I currently

teach. I view it as a well-established dual-language (DL) program, a common sentiment

from the general community given the waiting lists for students are in the hundreds. I have

been teaching here for 15 years. When I began, the school was in its primitive stages of

implementation of dual language Spanish and Portuguese, with little sense of direction.

We had some core curriculum in place but lacked knowledge of DL pedagogy and the

necessary teaching resources to support second language acquisition. This was mainly

because the idea of DL education was in its initial stages of implementation in the state.

The most thrilling part of teaching in this program was that my Portuguese language skills
were highly valued by school administrators. I felt I served an important role and that I was
indispensable. My background with the Portuguese language was similar to that of most of
my students. We learned Portuguese because our parents viewed it as an important part
of our heritage and cultural identity. My parents were always very strict at home with
maintaining communication in Portuguese and this is how I was able to maintain and
embrace the language beyond my childhood. The fact that I was fully bilingual was
admirable and I wanted my students to have this opportunity to be bilingual, and most
importantly to embrace the language. I wanted to instill this sense of satisfaction in
my students.

I did live in Portugal as a child for a few years. This experience helped me develop my
Portuguese literacy skills. I moved back to the U.S. when I was 12 and was immediately
placed in an ESL program in one of the most disenfranchised middle schools in
Providence. I wanted to move back to Portugal badly. I cried every day for weeks.
My middle school experience as an ESL student was torture. My parents didn't understand
my struggle. Although they were very financially stable and, owners of a successful business,
they were not educated. They did not understand how the educational system in the U.S.
worked or had any idea of the struggles I was enduring. They lacked, as Bourdieu terms,
cultural capital. Their knowledge and agility to navigate the best school setting for me was
non-existent. As far as they knew I had no better choice.

This brings me back to the reason why I want to conduct this study. I have observed that
the student and parent population at this school has drastically changed through my
15-year tenure. Fifteen years ago, the students were darker and poorer compared to the
students presently enrolled. I feel that as the school and DL language education gained
popularity, parents from privileged backgrounds began seeking the program for their
children at surpassing rates compared to lower-class and uneducated families.
What caused this drastic shift? Is it because having a child in a DL program the
trendy option? Or because these families recognize the numerous benefits bilingualism
provides since they come from more educated backgrounds?

And as a result, in what ways is this affecting families who lack the understanding of the

inherent benefits DL settings can provide? This directly reminds me of my parents.

They didn't know how to best support me or of other schools that could challenge me

linguistically and academically. They lacked this important advantage whose parents

have knowledge and political power to advocate for their children. As a result of my work,

I hope to contribute additional criticism to how our social and political systems continue

to perpetuate an imbalance of enriching educational experiences for wealthy and
poor communities.