Resources

School-to-Prison Pipeline Resources

Books

• The School to Prison Pipeline: Restructuring Legal Reform (NYU Press; 2010)
  

• Discipline Policies, Successful Schools and Racial Justice (NEPC; 2011)

• View the videotaped presentation of this research at the National Press Club, October 5, 2011 in Washington, D.C.

• Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis (SPLC; 2010)
  

Legislation

• Good Discipline: Legislation for Education Reform (NEPC; 2011)

(see above), author Daniel Losen delineates legislative proposals to change harsh discipline policies at the federal and state levels.

Other Resources

• Federal Guidance Package on School Climate and Discipline: 

  On January 8, the Departments of Education and Justice released a school discipline guidance package to assist states, school districts, and schools in developing strategies to enhance school climate and ensure discipline policies and practices comply with federal law and are effective.  Schools can improve safety by making sure climates are welcoming and that responses to misbehavior are fair, non-discriminatory, and effective.  The package provides resources for creating positive, safe environments, which are essential for boosting student academic success and closing achievement gaps.

  The package consists of four components:

  • A Dear Colleague letter, describing how schools can meet their legal obligation under federal law to administer student discipline without discriminating against students on the basis of race, color, or national origin.
  • A Guiding Principles document, describing three key principles and related action steps that can help guide state and local efforts to improve school climate and school discipline.
  • A Directory of Federal School Climate and Discipline Resources, indexing technical assistance and other resources related to school climate and discipline.
  • A Compendium of School Discipline Laws and Regulations, cataloguing the laws and regulations related to school discipline in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. 

  Note: Several of these items are also available in Spanish online.  

• Breaking School Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students' Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement (Council of State Governments Justice Center, Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M; 2011)

In Texas, large numbers of children in middle and high school are being suspended and expelled—and those disciplined students are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out and become involved in the juvenile justice system. The landmark study relied on data for nearly 1 million public secondary school students in Texas—every student in the state, not just a sample of students—who were in seventh grade in the 2000, 2001 and 2002 academic years. The students were followed from the seventh through 12th grades. The study drew from more than 6 million individual student records, school campus information and juvenile justice data.

Racial Inequality in Special Education Resources

See also:

Racial Inequity in Special Education, Edited by Dan Losen and Gary Orfield, Foreword by Senator James M. Jeffords. Harvard Education Publishing Group, Copyright © 2002

ISBN 1-891792-05-9 (cloth), 1-891792-04-0 (paperback)

State Performance Plan Technical Assistance Project by Daniel Losen, offered via the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, provides three checklists that address

1. district and school resource issues;
2. system policy, procedure, and Practice issues at district, school, and classroom levels;
3. and 3) environmental factors, all designed to aid in efforts to identify possible root causes of disproportionality and to help districts develop hypotheses and action plans for more detailed explorations of racial disproportionality.