Fostering Cultures of Achievement in Urban Schools How to Work toward the Abolition of the Schools-to-Prisons Pipeline

• Published in: Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex p. 203
• Main Author: Garrett Albert Duncan
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: University of Illinois Press 10.12.2010
• Subjects: Academic communities; African American culture; African American studies; African Americans; American minorities; American studies; Anthropology; Applied sciences; Behavioral sciences; Children; Civil engineering; Economic disciplines; Economics; Education; Educational institutions; Educational personnel; Educators; Employment; Engineering; Ethnic groups; Ethnography; Ethnology; Formal education; High school students; History instruction; History of the Americas; Human populations; Humanities instruction; Infrastructure; Labor economics; North American history; Occupations; Pedagogy; Personality psychology; Persons; Pipelines; Population studies; Prejudices; Psychological attitudes; Psychology; Racism; Schools; Secondary school students; Social sciences; Students; Teachers; United States history; Urban schools
• ISBN: 9780252035821; 0252035828

In this chapter I highlight educational reform efforts that show tremendous promise for abolishing the schools-to-prisons pipeline in the United States. I illustrate how parents, teachers, and administrators foster cultures of achievement that promote academic excellence and civic engagement among underserved urban students, thus offering them more promising futures. Such accomplishments are triply remarkable, for they counteract a generation’s worth of disastrous zero-tolerance policies, they resist longstanding historical forces that doom poor children to second-class educations, and they counteract the legacies of racism that have turned our schools into race-making machines. Before presenting a case study of such empowering urban