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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 9:03 pm
Time: 9:03 pm
Results for education (connecticut)
1 results foundAuthor: McCarger, Laura Title: Invisible Students: The Role of Alternative and Adult Education in the Connecticut School-to-Prison Pipeline Summary: There are thousands of young people across the state of Connecticut pursuing their education outside of traditional high schools. Some have left high school by choice; others have been counseled, coerced, or otherwise forced to leave. This report examines the systematic removal of struggling and vulnerable students from traditional high school. It finds that furtive practices employed by school districts across the state flout the due process and procedural protections promised to students by state law and, in the worst instances, effectually eradicate students’ constitutionally granted right to education. Nationwide, nearly 1.2 million teens – more than one third of all high school students – drop out of high school every year. Until recently, this devastating reality remained one of our nation’s best-kept secrets. Recent efforts on the part of students, parents, activists, advocates and education reformers across the country have led states to report graduation and dropout rates more accurately and to develop new pathways to help youth on the margins get back on track to graduation. While this progress is laudable, there remains another troubling truth we must confront: students rarely “drop out” of school simply because they do not desire to finish; in fact, for many students who stop short of finishing, leaving high school is not really a choice at all. A growing body of research, informed by a decade’s worth of analysis of what has come to known as the school-to-prison pipeline, explores and documents how many of our nation’s most vulnerable and struggling students do not chose to leave school, but are in effect pushed out. The school-to-prison pipeline refers to laws, policies and practices that remove students from places of learning and place them on a path towards prison. There are actually two pipelines. One is overt and well documented. A plethora of research, both statewide and nationally, has documented how factors such as zero tolerance school discipline; suspensions and expulsions; school-based arrests; increasingly prison-like school environments; criminalization of everyday student behaviors; pressures created by high stakes tests; and budgets that prioritize incarceration over education, work in concert to place many of our struggling students on a conveyer belt into the justice system. There is also a “secret pipeline” which has not received adequate attention nor been thoroughly investigated. The secret pipeline refers to the mechanisms and strategies employed by school districts to remove students who present academic and behavioral challenges while circumventing due process and skirting accountability and responsibility for the educational outcomes of those students. Once funneled into this secret pipeline, some students never return to school. Those that attempt to finish often find themselves in alternative or adult education programs which are often ill equipped to meet students’ needs, yield startlingly low completion rates, and risk accelerating rather than curbing the flow of young people into the justice system. Gaps and loopholes in data collection and reporting mechanisms sustain the secret pipeline by rendering the experiences and outcomes of these students largely invisible. Using Connecticut as a case study, this report explores the pressures propelling the secret pipeline, documents the “de facto discipline” practices that place students on it, examines the educational experiences and outcomes of students that land in alternative and adult education programs, and advances recommendations for reform. Details: Connecticut: A Better Way Foundation; Connecticut Pushout Research and Organizing Project, 2011. 88p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed February 12, 2012 at http://www.hartfordinfo.org/issues/wsd/Education/InvisibleStudents.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.hartfordinfo.org/issues/wsd/Education/InvisibleStudents.pdf Shelf Number: 124109 Keywords: Due ProcessEducation (Connecticut)Education and CrimeJuvenile Offenders |