Race, Class, and Punishment

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him. - Booker T. Washington

Introduction

Why This Unit Matters

On the first day of each school year I receive a piece of paper, folded in half and stapled for “privacy” in my mailbox. On this piece of paper are the list of all of the students enrolled in my classes who have committed an offense. I recognize that the school has obligations and Ed Code stipulates that I be provided with this information.¹ However, I hesitate to open it. I don’t want to be prejudiced against any of my students- I want my first impression to be of their conduct and interaction in my class. So I delay looking at that list of acronyms I can barely interpret and go about the business of teaching with an open heart. I wonder how many of my colleague’s first impression of their student is tainted by this introduction or if they are able to overlook the telltale bulge of an ankle monitor. I wonder if our juvenile justice system understands what Booker T. Washington understood, that we cannot rise as individuals or communities or as a country if we are stooped over holding others down. I wonder if there is any group more deserving of empathy and a second chance than juveniles. I wonder if these teenagers are receiving therapy, services, rehabilitation, and any other services necessary to help them make better choices in the future.

Juvenile Justice as a Lens

The United States is a world leader in incarceration rates with one in every 115 adults in prison or jail in 2015 and a disproportionate number of those are people of color.² Our citizens are not more predisposed towards criminal conduct than other countries, but after the War on Drugs and “tough on crime” eras, longer sentencing became de rigueur and the massive growth of 222% between 1980 and 2010 primarily due to increasing sentencing and reduced opportunities for parole.³ As a result of the tough-on-crime era, the United States became the world leader in incarceration rates. How can we begin to address such systemic issues rooted in a fractious history? Perhaps beginning with the next generation with the understanding fact that, “people tend to age out of crime. Research shows that crime starts to peak in mid-to-late-teenage years and begins to decline when individuals are in their mid-20s.”⁴ The implications are clear to me. If recidivism rates decline with age, then would it not benefit our society more to provide job training, substance abuse treatment, and prevent the myriad causes known to contribute to youth choosing delinquency?

The truth is that an overwhelming number of teens in the juvenile justice system did not receive appropriate services to provide them with the resources they needed to succeed. Once in the system, more than ever, we owe it to them to offer them the special education services, emotional support, and job training they need to be successfully rehabilitated and avoid recidivism. It is not my assertion that anyone under a certain age get a “pass” on their choices, (because they were exactly that, choices) however I hope we can find the compassion in our hearts and the facts related to the topic to justify giving them a second chance. “A line has to be drawn somewhere to define a reasonable boundary that serves to protect children and youth due to their immaturity, yet holds them accountable for their actions and respects their integrity as human beings on the pathway to adulthood.”⁵

How this Unit Will Effect Change

In my opinion, the best way to make progress as a country is to engage a majority of our population in the democratic process. Sadly, only 28% of registered voters in Santa Clara County voted in the June 2018 election. Hence, I hope that in having my students look at issues related to juvenile justice, they will become more educated future voters who are also possessed of stronger analytic ability to discern the rhetorical strategies employed by politicians and the media. Effective use of rhetoric will also be a tool for self-advocacy my students can employ while simultaneously inserting a civic component into my curriculum.⁶ Furthermore, I hope that as a result of the curricular unit, my students will become compassionate stewards of our democracy. I hope to really educate my students about rhetorical appeals while encouraging them to become critical consumers of information and thereby fuller participants in our democracy.

I want these students to become engaged members of what could be a potentially powerful voting block because their voices need to be heard. I want my students to feel motivated to participate in their community and to engage in the beauty of being an American with the liberty to cast a vote. As Paul Butler stated in the forward to Youth Justice In America, “It’s up to you to make sure that the country lives up to its highest ideals.”⁷ I want my students to take ownership of the content and feel empowered to consider how justice in the 21^st century might evolve and be different from our present archaic system.⁸

If “90 percent of American prisoners are in state and local jails,” then it follows that it is profoundly important that we consider local and state measures, propositions, and elected officials in light of their impact upon our judicial system.⁹ Hence, a focus on political engagement on a local level is necessary. Policy change is necessary, but a change in the hearts and minds of our citizens about how we approach justice in our country is a shift our youth are open-minded enough to embrace. Furthermore, I’m concerned that adolescents who have been part of the juvenile justice system or even just suspended while in school are less likely to become involved in their community by volunteering or being politically engaged by voting as adults.¹⁰

School Setting

In the midst of the affluence of Silicon Valley, Oak Grove High School serves a population of students who are not the offspring of wealthy Google employees. These are the disenfranchised youth who worry loved ones might be swept up in ICE raids. These are the socioeconomically disadvantaged youth whose families struggle to survive in one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation. These are the students who come from communities of color where opportunities are rare and the realities of their daily life involves prejudice, discrimination, and oppression. So many of my students feel disenfranchised, vulnerable, and have even become apathetic in regards to our democracy.

Our school serves approximately 1,800 students who come from working class families that are struggling to survive in an increasingly exclusive housing market.¹¹ The economic and social struggle of our students and their families is apparent when you consider that over 57% of our students are socioeconomically disadvantaged and 14% of our population qualifying for Special Education services. Our school is a thriving multi-cultural environment and racially diverse, comprised of over 55% Hispanic, 23% Asian, 9% Caucasian and 6% African American.

While I feel my particular campus has many caring adults who form connections with our students and strive to make our school a safe and nurturing environment, there are still harsh systemic realities. Fewer and fewer teachers (or police officers for that matter) can afford to live in the community in which we teach, so the race and class of the staff doesn’t reflect that of our students. If they can’t see themselves in us, it makes achieving buy-in more difficult. In addition, poverty is a harsh reality amongst my students and some students rely almost exclusively on school meals. In fact, Oak Grove High School is the first high school in Santa Clara County to have a Second Harvest Food Bank distribution center on our campus. We have an outstanding social worker on our campus who is dedicated to offering the personal and social support necessary to create an environment where our students can be academically successful, but our students are still vulnerable to systemic realities because of their race, poverty, and special education status.¹²

Classroom Setting

I posit that education is the civil rights issue of our generation, and therefore believe that my students deserve the best content, strategies, engagement, and pedagogy I can offer.¹³ The classroom content for my college prep seniors will focus on rhetoric as a lens through which we will explore many genres of texts. Students will read, analyze, and discuss each text with an eye to developing the critical thinking skills that will allow them to understand the art of persuasion. Why should we be especially compassionate when it comes to juveniles committing crimes? How can we create a system that focuses on rehabilitation as opposed to punishment?

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by systemic ills, but a classroom teacher has tremendous influence in altering potentially negative outcomes. to support what author Victor Rios calls a shift from a ‘culture of control to a culture of care’, in which educators and other adults seek to nurture our youth.¹⁴ Teachers can easily become engaged in a process of telling “war stories” with colleagues that position us in opposition to our students.¹⁵ My hope is that we teach resilience and grit instead of teaching to the test. My hope is that we use trauma informed teaching practices to avoid feeding the school to prison pipeline. My hope is that we create warm, welcoming culturally inclusive environments that nurture our most at-risk populations.

My six-week curricular unit uses the topic of juvenile justice to familiarize my students with the art of rhetorical analysis using a high interest topic. Students will focus on using strategies during prereading such as previewing the text in a formulaic manner and making predictions, annotating and creating a descriptive outline during reading, and thinking, reflecting and writing summaries as post-reading activities. Focusing on connotative and denotative meanings of words and how an author’s style might influence a reader are key elements for students to explicitly practice. Students will ultimately always be brought back to the question of how each author’s rhetorical choices in the form of logos, ethos, pathos, and kairos impact the reader. Carefully crafted questions, more than lectures, will help my students develop their voice and a framework in which they might view our juvenile justice system. In order to facilitate a safe space, sentence starters such as “I wonder” and, “I heard you say” and, “I value” will be written on the whiteboard for the duration of the unit. Establishing my classroom as a place where we talk about issues that matter in a sensitive and real manner will create connections with my students as well as between them. It is my hope that English will not be a class that they associate with merely grammar, paragraph structure, vocabulary, and reading, but rather that these skills inherently are developed as a byproduct of a strong curriculum unit that is relevant and connected to the real world.