By Kenneth J. Cooper
Only eight states publicly report the race and ethnicity of juveniles transferred to adult courts for criminal prosecution, the Justice Department has found, and it’s no wonder that more states don’t. Those that do are sending disproportionate numbers of African-American or Hispanic teenagers to face the possibility of the most serious punishment that a juvenile offender can face—getting locked up in a state prison alongside hardened adult criminals.

Today, the Council of State Governments released a new report that helps to raise awareness about the importance of dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.  Entitled Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement, the report is the most in-depth of its kind, examining the academic, disciplinary, and juvenile court records of nearly a million Texas secondary school students.  Sadly, it confirms the national trend that LDF has observed in its Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline initiative:  educational inequity, excessive reliance upon harsh disciplinary practices, and extreme racial disparities in both.

By George E. Curry
“Collectively, the pathway data show that more than 51 percent of Hispanic males, 45 percent of African American males, 42 percent of Native American males and 33 percent of Asian American males ages 15-24 will end up unemployed, incarcerated or dead.”

By: Jonathan Shihadeh
The “school to prison pipeline” symposium was held at the Wayne State Law School on March 25. The event focused on a process that is used by some public schools to expel minority students by reprimanding them harshly for minor offences

By TaRessa Stovall
“Some senators proudly put their thumbs down, and with each thumb down I felt like my heart was a tighter knot. All I could think was, ‘can I continue to live like this?’”

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Despite an unusual state law requiring judges to consider racial disparity when deciding whether to try juveniles as adults, Missouri prosecutes a disproportionate number of black youth accused of serious crimes in regular courts, where they can be sentenced to prison alongside hardened criminals.

By Matt Cregor & Damon Hewitt
Our nation’s school discipline rates have reached all-time highs. As suspension, expulsion and school-based arrests rates grow, racial disparities in discipline continue to widen.

By Lee A. Daniels
Mark Twain would be pleased, wouldn’t he?

The heated reaction to the publishing of a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” changed to “slave” continues unabated in the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
Tracking in public schools began innocently enough in the 1920s in this country, an era when many high school students took jobs right after graduating and relatively few went to college. Education experts and school officials reasoned it was more practical to establish different curricula, or “tracks” that would prepare students for their likely future. But in the decades since, including those since the Brown decision, tracking too often morphed from scholastic sorting to racial discrimination.

By John Payton Related links Counterpoint:Banning Menthol Cigarettes Will Create a Huge Illegal, Contraband Market Lorillard’s Orwellian Assertion: Slavery Is Freedom Before we can analyze whether banning menthol as a tobacco flavor would lead to a market in contraband menthol cigarettes we must first clarify our terminology. Contraband market: That term is today used to [...]