Last week, the High School Matters blog published comments by Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education Deb Delisle on the impact of “zero tolerance” school discipline on the school to prison pipeline.
The school-to-prison pipeline is a national trend in which students are pushed out of school and into the juvenile justice system. Research indicates that the pipeline is an unintended consequence of increasingly harsh school discipline policies such as “zero tolerance.” Additionally, schools increasingly rely on law enforcement to handle minor disciplinary issues previously administered internally. This creates the initial link between the classroom and the criminal justice system. Harsh discipline policies often disproportionally affect minority students and students with disabilities.
Family homelessness is an increasingly prevalent problem that detracts from a student’s ability to develop and learn the skills needed to graduate high school. One in 45 children, or 1.6 million children, are homeless in the U.S. every year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness (The National Center). Family homeless may be caused by a variety of factors, including lack of affordable housing, domestic violence, poverty, decreasing government supports, the challenges of raising children alone, or lack of social supports.
Upward Bound (UB), a federal TRIO Program that provides support to educationally and financially disadvantaged high school students to increase secondary graduation and enrollment in and graduation from postsecondary institutions, is one of the oldest and biggest federal programs geared towards this purpose.