School-to-prison pipeline interventions

The pipeline is the set of practices by which schools transfer children, especially Black and brown children, especially children with disabilities, out of the educational system and into systems of surveillance, juvenile justice, and eventually adult incarceration. The most direct mechanisms are exclusionary discipline (suspension, expulsion), school-based arrest, and referrals to juvenile court for behaviors that thirty years ago would have produced a phone call home. Indirect mechanisms include the loss of instructional time that follows suspension, the academic disengagement that follows the loss of instructional time, and the dropout that follows the disengagement. None of these mechanisms are the school's stated goal. All of them are the school's observable output, in aggregate, year after year.

Black students are suspended at roughly three to four times the rate of white students in the same school for the same offenses, with most of the gap driven by subjective infractions — defiance, disrespect, disruption — rather than objective infractions like fighting or contraband. The gap is largest in the earliest grades, before the children themselves can plausibly be said to have constructed identities the school is responding to. The conclusion researchers have drawn, with increasing confidence over twenty years, is that the discipline gap is primarily a perception gap on the adult side, not a behavior gap on the student side. Skiba's body of work is the most cited and most replicated source on this point. The implication is uncomfortable but clear: changing student behavior cannot close the gap, because the gap is not produced by the students.

The 1990s introduced zero-tolerance policies into American schools, originally framed around weapons and drugs and rapidly extended to a wide range of behaviors. The policies removed teacher and administrator discretion in favor of automatic consequences. The unintended consequence — predictable, and predicted at the time — was that students were suspended for trivial infractions and lost weeks of instruction over offenses that previously would have produced a corrective conversation. Districts that have rolled back zero-tolerance language have generally seen suspension rates fall without corresponding increases in serious behavioral incidents. The policy was producing the harm it claimed to prevent.

The placement of police officers in schools accelerated after Columbine and accelerated again after federal funding streams subsidized SRO programs. The empirical record on SROs is mixed at best: schools with SROs tend to have higher arrest rates for the same behaviors, with disproportionate impact on Black students and students with disabilities. The presence of an officer changes the disciplinary toolkit available to the adult in the room — a behavior that previously would have been handled by a teacher or counselor becomes a behavior that can be referred to law enforcement. Some districts have responded by removing SROs entirely; others by redefining their role to exclude routine discipline; others by replacing them with social workers and counselors. The replacement approach is the most evidence-supported and the least politically common.

Students with disabilities, particularly those with emotional and behavioral conditions, are suspended and arrested at rates far above their share of the population. This is despite federal law that requires consideration of whether a behavior is a manifestation of the disability before exclusionary discipline can be applied. The manifestation determination, in practice, is often a paper exercise. A child whose behaviors are textbook expressions of his diagnosis is suspended for those behaviors, lost instructional time, and progresses through the pipeline at higher speed. Schools that take the IDEA seriously, that provide actual behavioral supports rather than reactive consequences, see this trajectory bend. Most schools do not.

Restorative practices — circles, harm conferences, community accountability conversations — substitute relational repair for exclusion. Done well, they produce lower suspension rates, higher school connectedness, and modestly improved academic outcomes. Done poorly, they produce a parallel discipline track that the same students get cycled through repeatedly without the practice ever becoming part of the school's actual culture. The difference between well and poorly is mostly time and training. Schools that invest two or three years in implementation, with coaching and protected planning time, get the gains. Schools that adopt the language without the practice get the appearance of reform and the same outcomes.

A parallel intervention frame is trauma-informed practice. The premise is that many of the behaviors that produce disciplinary referral are responses to trauma — chronic stress, violence exposure, household disruption, food insecurity — and that responding to those behaviors with punishment compounds the trauma rather than addressing it. Trauma-informed schools train teachers to recognize trauma responses, build classroom routines that produce predictability, and respond to dysregulation with co-regulation rather than consequence. The intervention is not soft; it is technically demanding and emotionally taxing for teachers. The evidence base is growing and is promising. Craig, Perry, and van der Kolk's work has shaped the practical implementation.

Monique Morris's Pushout documented the specific pathway by which Black girls are removed from schools, often for behaviors — wearing one's hair a certain way, talking back to a teacher, defending oneself from a peer's harassment — that the school codes as defiance and the girl experiences as survival. The girls' pipeline is less visible than the boys' pipeline because the absolute numbers are smaller and the dominant cultural script for school-to-prison features boys. But it exists, and it has its own contours, and any intervention plan that ignores it is incomplete. Morris's work also makes clear that the criminalization of Black girlhood does not end at suspension; it includes the broader sexualization and adultification of Black girls by school staff, which shapes how their behaviors are read in the first place.

A student suspended once in ninth grade is significantly more likely to drop out than an otherwise similar student who is not suspended. Two suspensions raises the probability further. The relationship is not solely causal — suspension correlates with other risk factors — but the suspension itself contributes, independent of those factors. The mechanism is partly the loss of instructional time, partly the social signal that the school does not want the student there, and partly the practical reality that catching up after a suspension is hard and the school usually provides no support for doing so. Reducing suspension reduces dropout, with downstream effects on the entire pipeline.

A growing set of districts — Minneapolis, Oakland, Denver, Portland — have ended or substantially reduced their contracts with police agencies for in-school officers. The decisions were driven in part by the 2020 protests and in part by years of organizing by parents, students, and educators. Early evidence from these districts does not show the predicted spike in serious incidents. It does show reductions in arrests and in racial disparities in disciplinary contact. The longer-term outcomes will take years to measure. The political pattern is that police are reintroduced when there is a high-profile incident, regardless of whether the incident would have been prevented by police presence.

Interventions that have scaled successfully share certain features: they are written into district policy, not left to school discretion; they include funding for staff and training, not just policy language; they include data reporting requirements that make disparities visible; and they include parent and community governance roles. Interventions that have not scaled tend to be charismatic — one principal or one teacher transforming one school — and to evaporate when that person leaves. The collective parenthood frame favors the former, because the former survives turnover and the latter does not.

State and federal policy can require what individual districts will not voluntarily do. State legislation banning suspension for K–3 students has been passed in several states and has reduced early suspensions sharply with no documented harm. Federal civil rights data collection has made disparities visible at the district level, enabling parents and advocates to bring local pressure. These tools are imperfect and partial. They are also the levers most likely to produce simultaneous movement across many districts, rather than the slow district-by-district fight.

A parent at the collective scale, on this issue, has at minimum four moves. First, learn the suspension and arrest data for the district, disaggregated by race, disability, and grade. Second, ask the school board publicly whether the district contracts with a police agency for in-school officers, what the contract permits, and what the alternatives have been considered. Third, ask whether the discipline code permits suspension for subjective offenses like defiance and disrespect, and whether suspension is permitted in K–3. Fourth, vote, and persuade other parents to vote, in school board elections, which are the lowest-turnout elections in American democracy and the elections in which these decisions are actually made. The pipeline runs through school board votes that are often won by margins of a few hundred ballots. The collective parental scale operates at exactly that resolution.

Morris, Monique W. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. New York: The New Press, 2016.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Rev. ed. New York: The New Press, 2012.

Skiba, Russell J., Mariella I. Arredondo, and Natasha T. Williams. "More than a Metaphor: The Contribution of Exclusionary Discipline to a School-to-Prison Pipeline." Equity & Excellence in Education 47, no. 4 (2014): 546–564.

Skiba, Russell J., Robert H. Horner, Choong-Geun Chung, M. Karega Rausch, Seth L. May, and Tary Tobin. "Race Is Not Neutral: A National Investigation of African American and Latino Disproportionality in School Discipline." School Psychology Review 40, no. 1 (2011): 85–107.

Morgan, Dominique. Becoming Each Other's Harvest: A Black Queer Theology of Liberation. New York: Routledge, 2023.

Zehr, Howard. The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Rev. ed. New York: Good Books, 2015.

Craig, Susan E. Reaching and Teaching Children Who Hurt: Strategies for Your Classroom. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing, 2008.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.

Perry, Bruce D., and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Losen, Daniel J., ed. Closing the School Discipline Gap: Equitable Remedies for Excessive Exclusion. New York: Teachers College Press, 2015.

Fabelo, Tony, Michael D. Thompson, Martha Plotkin, Dottie Carmichael, Miner P. Marchbanks III, and Eric A. Booth. Breaking Schools' Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students' Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement. New York: Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2011.

American Civil Liberties Union. Cops and No Counselors: How the Lack of School Mental Health Staff Is Harming Students. New York: ACLU, 2019.