From Detention to Detention Center: America’s School-to-Prison Pipeline

One out of every four African American boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime. Black children are five times as likely to be incarcerated as white youth, and the overall racial disparity between black and white students in custody has increased by 22 percent since 2001. One of the starkest narratives of the American education system is the gradual transition from detention in school years to detention centers in adulthood. Unfortunately, this school-to-prison pipeline narrative is as prevalent as it is discouraging; for tens of thousands of school districts in the United States, educational disenfranchisement is an institutionalized norm. And it stems from the way public schools are funded.

Nationally, school funding is sourced overwhelmingly from the local property tax, which is a real estate-based tax that generates revenue from land value. Thus, the wealthiest districts with the highest property values ultimately generate the most revenue for school funding. It explains why school districts that serve large populations of poor students have historically received the short end of the stick in terms of school resources, like qualified teachers, advanced courses, and guidance counselors. This trend has grown to an unprecedented scale; in fact, in more than half of the states, the poorest school districts don’t receive adequate funding to address their students’ needs. In Illinois, for example, the poorest districts received 22 percent less in state and local funding than the wealthiest.

But this shortchanger of educational financing seems to exclusively target black students. That’s because communities in predominantly white areas tend to be wealthier; school districts’ funding depends on the value of the local property and the ability of residents to pay higher taxes, and so predominantly white school districts are significantly better funded. In fact, in 2016, overwhelmingly white school districts received $23 billion more in funding than their nonwhite counterparts despite serving roughly the same number of students.

Unsurprisingly, these funding disparities have a profound effect on academic proficiency. Nationally, on one end, the majority of the wealthiest districts have at least a 95 percent graduation rate, while on the other end, only two of the 10 poorest districts have graduation rates higher than 75 percent. In some states, literacy rates have even been found to differ between these districts by up to 32 percent. Unfortunately, when students are less academically proficient, incarceration rates rise.

Schools that serve disproportionately high populations of academically unsuccessful students take more punitive and in most cases, violent disciplinary action; in such schools, juvenile incarceration rates have tripled. In addition, those incarcerated students are 41 percent more likely to be incarcerated again by adulthood. Here, the school-to-prison pipeline finally becomes clear: a systematic educational discrepancy directly leads to disproportionate black populations in prison. It becomes clear that stratified wealth disparities across the country fuel an equally inconsistent criminal justice system. It becomes clear that it isn’t the students to blame—it’s the lackluster educational policy that disenfranchises students before they can even begin to read that should be held responsible.

However, existing efforts have consistently failed to solve the problem. In New York City, local legislators enacted a new “Fair Student Funding” formula back in 2007 as a way to send more money to schools with the neediest students. Its primary provision dictates that schools receive extra money for students who are poor, struggling academically, disabled, or learning English. But another provision effectively does the opposite: the formula also rewards certain selective schools like Stuyvesant High School or the Bronx High School of Science under the premise that high-achieving students need extra attention to reach their full potential. More than a dozen elite high schools get about $1000 extra per student through the formula. Overall, since 2012, these schools have garnered over $100 million more in revenue than other schools. But it’s well known that these schools tend to enroll relatively small shares of black and Hispanic students; in fact, just this year, Stuyvesant High School had a record low of a mere seven black students enrolled in their freshman class out of 895 seats. Elite schools like Stuyvesant High School or the Bronx High School of Science are no exception to the longstanding propagation of racial disparity.

States like Indiana and Michigan, on the other hand, have taken steps to reform education funding. The solution lies in more state-level oversight: while states have yet to completely eliminate the use of property taxes for revenue, some have reduced their reliance on them. In Indiana and Michigan, the state governments took on substantially larger roles in distributing the property tax revenue to schools, shifting local district oversight to that of the state. This means that the state sets the tax rates, ceilings, or floors for local school districts. As a result, the distribution of funding across districts, regardless of wealth or demographic, became relatively more equitable. The U.S. federal government should follow suit; by mandating state-level oversight across the country in districts like Texas’s San Perlita, where the median household income is less than a third of the national average, or New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School, where only one percent of its freshman class is black. Only then can education begin to go hand in hand with equity.

But any movement to enact change in the system ends with the national spotlight. It ends with students, teachers, and legislators alike understanding that the racial disparities in education, our criminal justice system, and society as a whole has its roots in institutionalized funding discrepancies. It ends when the pen trumps the penitentiary.