For years I’ve been hearing about the school-to-prison pipeline as if it were some type of mystical folklore, a metaphor for a Black child’s inevitable life’s journey, or a cliché depicting the racist school system. Folklore, metaphors, and cliches are always taken lightly. Something to shake one’s head at and say, “how terrible!” or “too bad” or “no surprise,” as a person goes about their daily business, coming home to watch the nightly news – another gang shooting, another conviction, another prisoner.

Please take this seriously. The school-to-prison pipeline is very real. It has been said that prison planners, private prison corporations, and officials of the industrial prison complex use third- grade reading scores to determine future prison construction. With the influences of social media, the “me” generation of parents with little time or no interest in parenting, and with other societal changes, third-grade reading scores are no longer the barometer; now, kindergarten and first-grade behavior is being looked at to gauge the number of prison beds and prison guards that will be needed for building future prisons.

There is no doubt that early reading is the key. There have been reported instances of children who begin to read as early as three years old, but these children are blessed with parents who care enough and can afford to take time to participate in their children’s lives. For the most part, parents don’t or can’t teach their children to read. Indeed, today’s parents are not readers themselves. They depend on the schools to endow their children with literary skills, and while there were teachers in the past who were passionate about instilling in a child a love for books and the written word, today, except for rare and wonderful teachers, most are too involved in discipline or trying to make the best of under-resourced, overpopulated classrooms to become involved in a child’s learning habits. Now there’s texting and social media sites, such as Twitter at 147 characters per tweet, so children are not encouraged nor inclined to read anything greater than a page in length.

Another factor is the lack of incentives within the schools. Art and music have been taken out of many urban schools. The various clubs (Chess club, drama club, and the like), as well as sports and cheerleading squads, are no longer in the schools. Years ago, former CPS CEO Paul Vallas introduced Special Enrollment Schools. which took the best and brightest students out of the neighborhood schools, along with needed resources and top teachers, resulting in poor attendance. Back in the day, truant officers would come to the home after two or three absences. Truant officers no longer exist.

Then there are the zero-tolerance practices. By the time a child is in high school, she can be expelled for the smallest infraction, with nowhere to go. Or they can voluntarily drop out of school. These students are apt to hang out with other dropouts – and together they continue their journey through the pipeline.

Psychologist Carl Bell once said that a child’s mind isn’t fully developed until he or she reaches the age of twenty-five. So now you have children thrust into an adult world 10 years before their minds are ready to deal with that world.

Now they are out of school, and they only think of the future in terms of how they can get money to make it through the week. Without a high school diploma, the future looks very bleak in a world where most decent-paying jobs seek applicants with college degrees at a minimum. The high school dropout will have a much harder time finding meaningful employment in a future ruled by AI and other technological advances.