Teaching the Hard to Reach: Working with Juvenile Offenders

This post first appeared on Beacon Broadside (9/10/10). David Chura, a writer and educator, worked with at-risk youth for many years and shares the voices of young people that he met as a teacher in a New York prison in his new book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. We highly recommend David’s excellent blog, Kids in the System, and are so grateful to him for letting CfJJ share his post.

Over any teacher’s career—in my case, 26 years of teaching high school English to at-risk teenagers, the last 10 of those years in an adult county jail—you get asked lots of questions. Some about the topic you’re teaching; others, well, it’s hard to know where they come from. But there’s one question I heard a lot, most frequently from my jail students, “Why don’t you teach in a real school?”

This usually happened when a lesson went well and a kid really got what we were talking about. “That was a good lesson, Mr. C.  You should teach in a real school instead of here.” That last part was typical of incarcerated kids. Instead of taking credit for understanding some new idea, the student was quick to give it to me.

I knew where the “real school” remark came from. My students were mostly poor youth of color; many bereft of families. The education they received in their home districts was pretty bogus, and they knew it. Minimal supplies. School buildings as dilapidated as the warehouses (called “public housing”) they lived in. The curriculum dummied down because “they can’t handle the real thing.” For these locked up kids a “real school” was one they weren’t in.

They knew my take on the “real school” remark. My classroom was a real school; they were real students doing real learning; and I expected them to act that way. I confess, I wasn’t always polite about it. It made me mad—at them; at the educational system; at society; at myself. And it made me sad because within that comment was their bone-deep belief that they were worthless.

Student Arrested for Stealing Cafeteria Chicken Nuggets

Written by Te-Ping Chen, the following was originally posted on Change.org’s Criminal Justice Blog (7/21/10)

When a 15-year-old Wisconsin student was handcuffed and hauled to jail after an assistant school principal accused him of stealing $2.60 cafeteria chicken nuggets, outrage erupted. Local media outlets had a field day with the ludicrous story (charges against the teen were eventually dropped).

But if the case of the “Great Chicken Nugget Heist” had particularly absurd parameters, unfortunately, such events are far more common than most of us might like to think. We’ve written here before about the 12-year-old girl that New York cops handcuffed in her Queens classroom for doodling on a desk. (“I love my friends Abby and Faith,” the perpetrator had written before drawing a smiley face, in green Magic Marker.) And the list goes on. Right now, there are more cops patrolling the halls of New York City schools than there are monitoring Washington, DC. Or Las Vegas. Or any other number of large cities across the nation.

A January report by the Advancement Project finds that with the possible exception of actual prisoners, public schools students are the most policed population in the country. Every year, tens of thousands of students across the country are disciplined by police officers for mild infractions ranging from temper tantrums to “violations of codes of conduct.” Since the 1980s, suspensions, student arrests and expulsions have spiked.

DYS Youth Reflects on His Educational Experiences

In response to a CommonWealth Magazine article on education in the Department of Youth Services (DYS), a young man who has spent time in DYS reflects on his educational experiences in the system:

“Honestly speaking as a man who has actually lived it, D.Y.S has a lot of reconstruction to do, especially in the education department. Funds have to be being either misused or the state simply needs to boost funding. My first experience of school in D.Y.S was how the hell I am in class with a grown man! And why are we doing word searches? I was fourteen and it was my first time locked up. I was in for a month because of violation of probation. From the first day on, school in there was always disrespectful to my intellect. The teachers had a wild range of ages in their classes so they kept work easy enough for everyone to get.

“Over all, I’ve probably lost a little more than two years of my life to D.Y.S. I’ve been shipped to many different settings such as facilities in metro area, northeastern, and western Mass. And through my journey, I’ve matured a great deal, and it finally hit me that the facilities in the more suburban settings make the facilities in poorer settings look like the bottom of the refrigerator. I always found it funny that the suburban D.Y.S always had better schools curriculums, better teachers, cleaner kept facilities, more helpful clinicians. I learned more there than I have ever learned in school. It was just that I need supplies, encouragement to do the right thing, and that little extra push to help create a better mindset that changed my life.”

Zero tolerance in schools

Zero tolerance policies in schools are in the news again with a February 18 CNN report about a 12-year-old girl removed in shackles from a New York City public school for drawing on her desk.

The report includes other examples that demonstrate that, in the words of one person quoted in the article,  “There is zero intelligence when you start applying zero tolerance across the board…”

Girl’s arrest for doodling raises concerns about
zero tolerance

By Stephanie Chen, CNN

February 18, 2010 10:22 a.m. EST

(CNN) — There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.

Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct. . . .

Read the full article.