The School-to-Prison Pipeline
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 656 Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2018
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Max Eden joins Seth Barron to discuss student discipline and suspension policies, and how discipline "reform" has led to chaos in many classrooms.
In January 2014, in an attempt to reduce out-of-school suspensions, an Obama administration directive forced thousands of American schools to change their discipline policies. Proponents of the new discipline rules say that teachers and school administrators have been racially discriminatory in meting out punishments, creating a massive disparity in suspension rates between white and black students. Their claims, however, ignore the significant discrepancies in student behavior.
"We tend to see one of two things happen as suspensions drop: Schools get less safe or school administrators cheat," wrote Max Eden at National Review Online, meaning that the schools separate disruptive students in ways that don't technically count as "suspensions."
Max Eden is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm City Journal editor Brian Anderson. |
| 0:11.2 | Thanks for joining us for the 10 Blocks podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary |
| 0:16.5 | with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests. |
| 0:31.1 | Hi, I'm Seth Barron, Associate Editor of City Journal. You are listening to Ten Blocks. I'm joined by Max Eden. |
| 0:39.8 | Max is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and he's been studying how schools change the way they discipline students and what the effects of those changes have been. |
| 0:42.7 | Thanks for joining us, Max. |
| 0:43.5 | Yeah, thank you for having me, Seth. |
| 0:45.6 | So, Max, we hear a lot about the school to prison pipeline. |
| 0:49.9 | Can you describe what that is? |
| 0:51.9 | And I mean, is it the case that schools are really feeding youth into the |
| 0:55.9 | penitentiary system? Yeah. So the school to prison pipeline is a pretty clear good example of |
| 1:03.5 | academics looking at a correlation and calling it a causation. Okay. It is absolutely true that students |
| 1:09.8 | who are suspended are more likely to drop out and that students who are suspended are more likely to drop out, and that |
| 1:13.3 | students who drop out are more likely to be unemployed, be underemployed, or be incarcerated. |
| 1:19.2 | The question is, do the suspensions cause those things, or are these students who have problems |
| 1:24.7 | that you can't quite get to from conventional statistics that manifest |
| 1:28.9 | in bad behavior in suspensions and in bad later life outcomes. And whereas I think the weight of |
| 1:34.3 | the evidence is for the latter hypothesis under the Obama administration, the consensus of the academics |
| 1:39.7 | they listen to was that it's suspensions that are responsible for these long-term outcomes. |
| 1:44.0 | I see. So you're saying there are some kids who have behavioral problems who are going to cause |
| 1:49.0 | trouble whether they're in or at or school and their suspensions are not. |
| 1:55.0 | You know, the way that I put it when I testified in front of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on this is that it's as |
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