Peter Yahnke -- Just Seeds Portfolio Project

A teacher-friend recently told me a story about one of her colleagues. Her colleague is a beleaguered relatively novice educator who is teaching in an urban school in Boston. Her friend offered the following lament: “I feel like I am just babysitting these kids on their way to juvie.” I share these words not to inpugn the character of this young teacher nor to judge her. I personally know how difficult teaching is and can be. I know something about the sense of isolation that a teacher can experience once you are behind those closed doors and facing 30 elementary or high school students by yourself. I imagine that this situation is even more fraught if you are a young white woman teaching in an inner city school. My own disastrous early high school teaching experience belies the difficulty of doing this work well even when you look like the students who you are meant to educate.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the role that some teachers play in greasing the wheels of the school to prison pipeline. My respect for teaching as a profession and an avocation is unlimited. I know how critical teachers are to ensuring student success. Henry James has written that a “teacher affects eternity, he never knows where his influence ends.”

There is something deeply wrong though about assuming that the young people who have been entrusted to you are on their way to prison anyway. This sense of resignation is toxic and contributes to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are convinced as an educator that the youth who you are teaching won’t be successful, well then they won’t be. This attitude has disastrous consequences for students and our society as a whole. These young people are labeled as uneducable and therefore pushed out of school. They are consigned to a type of social death.

So I have been thinking a lot over the past few years about the importance of teaching about prisons in our schools of education. I think that every teacher should understand what the school to prison pipeline looks like and how they can actively participate in dismantling that pipeline. I want to make sure that teachers see themselves as part of the SOLUTION to abolishing prisons rather than being resigned to “babysitting kids on their way to juvie.”