Education Law and Policy Briefs Journal

Vengeful Equity: Gendering the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Hollie Mackey — 2022-10-03

The ‘school-to prison pipeline’ problem has typically been framed as predominantly affecting boys since punitive school discipline practices become firmly entrenched in U.S. public schools beginning in the 1990’s. Since then, the experiences of girls and gender non-conforming students has largely been overlooked. Girls and gender non-conforming students represent an increasing number of students suspended from schools annually and the number of juvenile justice involved girls has increased. This policy brief presents context to the problem and suggests a gendered analysis of aggression and violence is warranted to identify differences in the ways girls’ and gender non-conforming students’ behaviors are perceived and punished in schools utilizing intersectionality as an analytic tool of critical praxis to provide researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners recommendations for future empirical study and practical approaches to correct policy and practice that perpetuate gender bias and social inequality. Improved policy and practice that address inequitable application of school discipline decision-making and juvenile justice decisions can have a direct effect on girls’ and gender non-conforming students’ academic success and decrease the number of women incarcerated across the United States.

Opportunity outside the City: Understanding and Promoting Equity in Rural Schools

Douglas Gagnon — 2023-02-21

Recent times have not always been kind to rural places. A persistent decline in
manufacturing and agricultural sectors has hallowed out the economic base of many rural towns,
leaving diminished prospects and casting a cloud of poverty over large swaths of the rural
landscape. A divergent recovery from the Great Recession, during which gains were made but
not evenly so across place or economic strata, has in some ways obscured this fact. The reality is
that politics, power, and populations increasingly reside in metropolitan centers, and many rural
dwellers are at risk of being left behind in tomorrow’s society. Few things could underscore this
point more than our nation’s recent election, an unprecedented event in which working class
voters made clear that concerns about limited opportunity outside the city must be taken
seriously.
But in many ways, these voters have been sold a bill of goods. Those who yearn for a
return to the good old days, where 20th Century jobs will allow 21st Century rural communities to
prosper, are likely to remain yearning: returns to education are now higher than ever, while the
industries that used to support rural areas are forecasted to decline over the next decade. The
true chance for rural places to thrive once again lies more in innovation and adaptation than it
does in a revisiting old stomping grounds. Standing at the nexus of rural children and their
opportunities for future success lies public education.

Districts of Innovation: A Policy Brief of the Latest Effort to Re/Empower Local Control of Texas Public Schools

Lynn Hemmer — 2023-02-21

Local school boards have long been considered “a key
mechanism in the mutually dependent relationship
between education and democracy” (Resnick & Bryant,
2008, pg. 2), so much so that local control of public
schools is valued by over half of Americans who believe
that control authority should rest with locally-elected
school boards (Bushaw & Calderon, 2016). Yet, through
decades of standards, accountability and test-reforms
championed as a means for schools to achieve equity
and improve student and teacher performance, local
school boards gradually yielded policy-making discretion
to federal and state legislatures, businesses, and
bureaucracies (Erickson, 2014; Fusarelli, 2009;
Hadderman, 1988).