This morning, I’m giving a presentation about the school to prison pipeline at Saint Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Creve Coeur, Missouri. Due to COVID, this presentation is happening via Zoom. I like virtual handouts, even for in-person presentations, since the links are live and there is no waste of paper.

Books

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
• Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools by Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond.

Articles and Reports

Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities. Report of the Government Accountability Office, April 4, 2018.

Government Watchdog Finds Racial Bias in School Discipline. New York Times article about the GAO report, above, April 4, 2018.

Are We Closing the School Discipline Gap? Report of the Civil Rights Project, February 2015.

Missouri elementary schools have highest rate of suspending black children. St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about the Civil Rights Project, above, detailing the Missouri statistics, February 24, 2015.

Surviving School Suspensions. We Live Here podcast, with a map showing the disparity index of suspensions in the St. Louis area school districts, November 9, 2015.

Forward Through Ferguson. Report of the Ferguson Commission, September 2015 — especially the calls to action to Reform School Discipline Policies.

Let’s Break the Pipeline! An invitation to…

… Continue Learning

• Witnessing Whiteness. A ten-session program offered by the YWCA of St. Louis.
• We Stories. A program for families using the power of children’s books.
• Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group. A Kirkwood-based book club specializing in books about race in America. Contact me to get on our email list.

… Read and Share

Forward Through Ferguson has issued three reports about education in the last couple of years.

• Falling Through the Cracks: St. Louis School Discipline at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Disability includes data about suspensions showing alarming disparity in suspensions.
• Still Separate, Still Unequal: A Call to Level the Uneven Education Playing Field in St. Louis walks us through the broader picture of segregated and unequal spending on education in our region.
• The State of Education Reform: What has and hasn’t changed in St. Louis education? calls us to continue the work that has begun in many organizations and districts but is still far behind what we want to see.

… Join the Work

A Red Circle. Supporting students, teachers, and parents in Normandy, Jennings, Riverview Gardens, Ferguson-Florissant, and Hazelwood.

West County Community Action Network. Working for racial equity in Kirkwood, Parkway, Pattonville, and Rockwood.