School, Not Jail: How Educators Can Disrupt School Pushout and Mass Incarceration

This important volume examines how and why increasing numbers of students, disproportionately youth of color, are being taken from our schools and put into our prisons. Williamson and Appleman, along with a collection of scholars, teacher educators, K-12 teachers, an administrator, and an incarcerated student, offer their perspectives on how schooling can be restructured to disrupt this flow and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. They present clearly articulated strategies on curriculum, pedagogy, and disciplinary practices that can help redirect our collective efforts away from carceral practices. By considering chapters from prison educators and an essay by a currently incarcerated student (the end of the pipeline), readers will plainly see the disciplinary and curricular issues that need to be addressed in our schools. The text includes examples of meaningful ways to engage students that could be incorporated into a variety of classrooms, from social studies to science to English language arts.

Book Features:

• Instructive cautionary tales with specific pedagogical and policy suggestions.
• Alternatives to discipline in schools, such as restorative justice and positive behavioral support.
• Insights to help educators consider the trajectory of their students, as well as suggestions for making the curriculum both relevant and sustaining.
• Directly addresses the ways in which an understanding of the mechanisms of the school-to-prison pipeline can be woven into teacher preparation.

Peter Williamson is an associate professor at Stanford University and faculty director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) for secondary teachers. Deborah Appleman is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of educational studies at Carleton College and author of Critical Encounters in Secondary English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, Third Edition.