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Chapter 8 Fostering Cultures of achievement in urban schools: how to Work toward the abolition of the schools-to-Prisons Pipeline Garrett Albert Duncan 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 school reform efforts , I address the broader role of race-making institutions in the United States; this examination is of paramount importance, for no analysis of the schools-to-prisons pipeline is complete without examining the intertwined histories of public schooling, labor, and the variegated legacies of racism in North America. I should note as well that I believe that the schools-to-prisons pipeline is largely the unintended result of contemporary educational policies and practices, including those produced by people with good intentions. Indeed , the race-making processes described herein, and the morally indefensible social conduit that leads so many of our poor children to prison, is supported not so much by active and conscious racism as by widespread societal indifference to the race- and class-based disparities that persist in our public schools. While unintended results and indifference have played large roles in shaping the schools-to-prisons pipeline, the historical record also shows how the U.S. federal government has repeatedly used its power over educational policies, labor practices, and the political process to aid white elites and the white middle class—such uneven and race-based efforts have, in effect, thwarted the 204 struggles of people of color to enjoy the full benefits of American citizenship. Each pivotal epoch over the course of U.S. history offered ample occasions for redirecting our course toward achieving a more just and perfect union, yet the record repeatedly shows that promises were customarily broken, opportunities were readily squandered, and the episodic gains made by people of color were typically short-lived. In this sense, the schools-to-prison pipeline amounts to the culmination of centuries of unintended consequences, indifference, and unequal federal action—it is the contemporary manifestation of racism and among the most brutal examples of race-making in America.1 The idea that the actions of decent people with good intentions may result in harmful outcomes in the schooling of historically marginalized student populations is not a radical concept in the field of education. This notion inheres in concepts such as “the hidden curriculum” and, more recently, “collateral damage.” The hidden curriculum refers to how schools tacitly— and even unintentionally—transmit to students the norms, values, and skill sets that reproduce inequalities and racial prejudice in the larger society. Collateral damage refers to the injurious effects—largely unintended—of ill-conceived educational reform policies meant to hold schools accountable for the education of their students and to eliminate social disparities in academic attainment. These theories suggests that in the realm of education, as in society as a whole, race-making and racism are incredibly complicated patterns with deep histories. W. E. B. DuBois alluded to these intricate processes in 1968, when he paused to reflect on the meaning of his work during the later stages of his life: “not simply knowledge, not simply direct repression of evil, will reform the world. In long . . . the actions of [women and] men which are due not to a lack of knowledge nor to evil intent, must be changed by influencing folkways, habits, customs, and subconscious deeds.” Working to build cultures of achievement in our urban schools is one way to contribute to the hard work of changing these race-based “folkways, habits, customs, and subconscious deeds.” Indeed, I argue that shutting down the schools-to-prisons pipeline stands as part of a new civil-rights movement, as part of the long effort to end racism in the United States.2 race-Making and the legacies of slavery The “folkways, habits, customs, and subconscious deeds” noted by DuBois have not always been a part of the nation’s moral fabric; rather, they emerged over centuries while advancing certain social, economic, and...

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