# SCHOOLS 2 PRISONS: THE OPPORTUNITY GAP

## INTRO:

Hello lovely digital listeners. Introducing Schools to Prisons, a collaborative research project between Our American Generation and the League of Education Voters. This project is about highlighting the concerning link between our nation’s prisons and public education systems; a link that turns struggling students into juvenile delinquents. Between us we have two non-profits: one a youth-driven social justice think tank, the other, a statewide advocacy organization aimed at fixing Washington’s public school system. Together these groups are exploring the role of race and wealth in our public school system, and how different demographics usually end up with different outcomes. Did you know that black male students are 3 times as likely to be suspended than white male students? Why do Latino students consistently perform worse on standardized tests when we know they are just as smart? These are some of the questions this series hopes to answer. We began this project in hopes of building off OAG’s Crime and Community zine. We started simply by looking at the data we already knew existed. There is research out there on what many refer to as “the achievement gap.” In a nutshell, since No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002, schools nationwide have been required to release their test scores and graduation rates broken down by race and economic status. Now that this data is required, we have a powerful tool for measuring public school success rates by race and by income. When folks in the US started to observe this new data, a disturbing trend was revealed, one that many already knew from experience—that our country’s public school system is serving students of color and low income students worse than white or higher income students. It’s important to note that many studying this topic refer to it as the “achievement gap” but for the purpose of our research here we are referring to it as an “opportunity gap” for several reasons. Mainly we aim to move away from a discussion that is focused on an individual student’s achievement on a test or a grade and more towards a discussion that looks at how our schools systematically deny students opportunities for success. This redefinition also helps remind us that there are large, societal implications for disparities in educational attainment. It’s not just a matter of missed income for an individual that doesn’t graduate from high school, it’s the general welfare and prosperity of our entire nation that suffers. In this first podcast of the three-part series, we’ll introduce you to the issue of Washington’s opportunity gap. We’ve been working together, researching and interviewing for several months now, trying to answer some questions that are at the heart of this issue. What is the Opportunity Gap? What is the school to prison pipeline? What causes these phenomena? In short, the opportunity gap is the gap in academic performance between white students and students of color, and also between wealthy students and poor students. The school to prison pipeline is the trend of school’s pushing their “bad kids” out -- and into the juvenile justice system. But before we get to these larger questions, let us explain why we were even asking them. LEV and OAG started work together after some awesome reporting done by a previous research team at OAG. In that report, titled Crime & Community, youth researchers outlined current problems within our criminal justice system. Those problems are two-fold: for one, the entire prison system is overcrowded, with 1 in every 100 Americans detained in a jail or prison at this moment. The second problem is