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Article Review Assignment Instructions
Follow the instructions outlined below for each assigned Article Review. The following assigned Article Reviews should be completed for the cooresponding module: week. The article can be found on the Article Review: Assessments and Assignments Assignment page, Article Review: Validity and Reliability Assignment, or Article Review: Culturally Responsive
Include three sections, with the following headings:
Article Summary
This section should:
Be written in third person. Your writing should be academic and professional.
Demonstrate an analysis of the author’s thesis.
Provide a thorough summary of the author’s main points written in a concise and scholarly manner that is 1 page in length.
This section should:
Articulate your reaction to the article, explaining why you agree or disagree with the article.Personal Reflection
This section should:
Be written in first person and reflect on how to apply article content to your students and professional practice within your own present or future practice.
The Classroom
to Prison Pipeline
By Linda Christensen
From Rethinking Schools
The school-to-prison pipeline
starts in the classroom. I know.
During 4th-period English, I came
dangerously close to becoming
the teacher who pushes students
out of class into the halls, into the
arms of the school dean, and into
the streets. I understand the thin
line teachers tread between creating safe classrooms and creating
push-out zones.
It started harmlessly. Last September, I returned as a volunteer to
the school where I taught for more
than two decades to co-teach junior English with a fabulous teacher, Dianne Leahy. Forty students
are stuffed into our classroom. The
district instituted a new schedule
to save money, so we only see
our students every other day for
90 minutes. A few weeks into the
school year, and I was still confusing Ana and Maria and Deven and
Terrell. It took so long to settle the
students down that Dianne and
I were exasperated by how little
real work students completed.
We battled competition with cell
phones and side talking, as well
as frequent interruptions due to
students strolling into and out of
the classroom or plugging in their
cell phones or iPods. In addition
to the lack of forward movement
on reading and writing during the
day, students did not complete
their homework.
We tried to build relationships.
Dianne found out what sports kids
played, who danced, who loved
skateboarding. I watched her kneel
in front of kids as she passed out
folders with a word of praise or a
question that demonstrated she
cared about them as individuals.
I followed her lead, attempting to
connect names to faces and faces
to aspirations.
While out on a hike after a particularly frustrating day, I remembered a former student, Sekou,
who returned from Morehouse College with a story about a ritual that
he participated in during the early
Linda Christensen is director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark
College, and an editor of Rethinking Schools. Condensed, with permission,
from Rethinking Schools, 26 (Winter 2011-2012). Read the article in its entirety
at www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/26_02/26_02_christensen.shtml.
38
www.eddigest.com
The Classroom to Prison Pipeline
days of his freshman year. I thought
Dianne and I needed a ritual to help
students remember that the classroom is a sacred place of learning.
Eager to create community out of
the chaos, I prepared a document
for students to sign that promised
they would complete their work,
refrain from using cell phones, and
participate fully by respectfully
listening to others. Now, even as
I write this list, it doesn’t sound
too farfetched. My huge mistake
was asking them to sign the paper—and to participate in a ritual
where we walked back into the
classroom saying, “I am a scholar.”
Avoid Losing the Class
I brought the document to class
and distributed it to students.
They accepted the first bullet—do
your work—but when we got to
cell phones, Sierra said, “I’m not
signing. I text during class, and it
doesn’t interfere with my work.”
Her voice brought a flood of others. Melanie said, “I’m not signing. I
already do my work.” Vince agreed.
Then Jasmine said, “I only pledge
with God.” Kevin gave her a high
five, and several others wadded
up the paper. I’m not sure if it was
Jason or Victor who said, “Let’s all
not sign. What can they do? They
can’t kick all of us out of class.”
I had a moment of pure panic.
Ten minutes into a 90-minute period, and I had a revolt on my
hands. Part of me was horrified
as I watched the class coalesce
into one angry swarm. This is the
point at which my 30-plus years in
the classroom helped me weather
the moment. I could have sent
Victor, Sierra, and others to the
dean’s office with referrals for
insubordination, beginning an outof-control relationship that would
teeter between their defiance and
my desire to control the classroom. When the class chaos tips a
teacher to institute measures that
tighten the reins by moving defiant
students out of class and sending
them to the disciplinarian (which
moves them one step closer to the
streets), she’s lost the class.
As classroom teachers we wield
an enormous amount of power to
control students’ destiny. Dianne
and I are determined to keep all of
these students in junior English,
but it is conceivable that a teacher
with 40 students might want to cut
a few, especially those who resist.
Because we have taught for many
years, we know we will win most
students over, but this experience
made me wonder about the new
teacher down the hall who doesn’t
have that history.
The tide turned when one of
the football players said, “I want
to play Grant on Friday night, so
I’m signing.” A number of other
students followed suit. They even
walked out of the classroom and
returned saying, “I am a scholar.”
They didn’t go through the arch
of hands I had in envisioned, nor
did they say it like they believed
April 2012
39
THE EDUCATION DIGEST
it, but we did make it through the
class, although students looked at
me like I was a rattlesnake.
This incredibly misguided move
on my part reminded me that
students need to be engaged in
meaningful curriculum and to
develop relationships with their
teachers and each other. There is
no shortcut to making that happen.
Although I might believe that they
are brilliant, in that moment I was
a white woman in a community of
color taking away students’ perceived rights and treating them disrespectfully. And although both Dianne and I returned to this school
because we love the kids it houses,
the students didn’t have any history with us that would ease the
slide into the new year.
The night of my fiasco, I looked
back over the students’ records.
Two of the 40 had passed the state
reading and writing test given the
previous year—tests they now
need to graduate. Only 15 are on
schedule to get their diploma on
time; the others have failed two
or more classes. These students
were primed to revolt. They carry
failure like a dirty rag behind them,
and our opening acts had been all
about rigor and improving their
skills, not about developing a relationship that valued them and
made them feel competent.
In these days of record unemployment, when parents are losing jobs, and few have resources
for college, we need to create a
40
curriculum that demonstrates an
interest and understanding of our
students’ heritage by studying
their history or literature or language or statistics that touch on
their lives. The curriculum needs
to acknowledge that their lives are
important and worth studying. The
fact that they come to school when
they’ve experienced so much failure and when the future seems so
bleak is in itself a heroic act.
We hadn’t created a curriculum
that made them feel successful,
significant, or curious. And a curriculum must do that, especially in
marginalized communities. Class
work needs to be about big, important ideas and connected to
their lives.
Curriculum and the Pipeline
Partially, fear of students failing
to pass the tests fueled our opening days. We created an alternative
reading sample out of Sherman
Alexie’s excellent essay, “Why
the Best Kids Books Are Written
in Blood” (Fall 2011, Rethinking
Schools), so we could ascertain
students’ reading ability. But students didn’t engage, and because
we wanted a clean read of their
abilities, we hadn’t primed the
pump enough to excite them about
reading the essay—a warm-up for
our first book of the year.
In our defense, we chose that
first book, Sherman Alexie’s screenplay Smoke Signals, to create links
to students’ lives as well as curios-
www.eddigest.com
The Classroom to Prison Pipeline
ity. In the beginning, they weren’t
connecting to it. That changed
when we started discussing the
alcoholism and the father/son relationship in the book. Terrell talked
about how Arnold, the father, was
an alcoholic jerk. His frank assessment broke the ice. Others jumped
in. They hated it when Arnold hit
Victor, his son, just because he
dropped his father’s beer.
The Turning Point
Although the discussion was
short and some students still side
talked, the class talk marked the
first movement toward compelling work. But the turning point
came when we asked students
to write a forgiveness poem. In
this lesson, students read Lucille
Clifton’s “forgiving my father” and
two student samples—one by a
student who forgives her mother
for moving so much and creating
disruptions in her life, and one by
a student who doesn’t forgive his
father’s absence from his life. Our
students actually stopped talking
and listened to the poems. Then
we said, “Write a list of who you
want to forgive or not forgive. Then
choose one to write about. If you
don’t want to write about your life,
you can write a poem from Victor’s
point of view in the book.”
Students wrote, silently, mostly.
They wrote in the classroom, on
the stairs in the hallway, sprawled
out against the lockers in front of
our class. They wrote furiously. At
times, they crept close to a friend
and handed their paper over. At
the end of the period, students
shared their poems. Students cried
together as they shared their poetry, written to absent fathers, to
dead grandparents, to themselves.
That was a Thursday. The following Monday, they returned to class
and wanted to share more. Trevon
caught me in the hall, “Are we going to share our poems in class? I
want to hear everyone’s.”
Although Dianne and I still struggle, that poem cracked the class.
But that’s what curriculum that puts
students’ lives at the center does.
It tells students that they matter,
that the pain and the joy in their
lives can be part of the curriculum.
The school-to-prison pipeline
doesn’t just begin with cops in
the hallways and zero tolerance
discipline policies. It begins when
we fail to create a curriculum and
a pedagogy that connects with
students, that takes them seriously
as intellectuals, that lets students
know we care about them, that
gives them the chance to channel
their pain and defiance in productive ways. Making sure that we
opt out of the classroom-to-prison
pipeline will look and feel different
in every subject and with every
group of students. But the classroom will share certain features: It
will take the time to build relationships, and it will say, “You matter.
Your culture matters. You belong
here.” n
April 2012
41
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
