Pushout (20 page)

“What does suspension look like in here?” I asked.

“You just got no free rec. Free rec is when you, like, come out at nighttime . . . you don't got none of that. You don't . . . really, you don't get to do nothing. You got to eat all your meals in your room.”

No recreation, eating in isolation—“suspension” seemed akin to a form of solitary confinement.

For Malaika, who struggled with managing her triggers to fight, school in the punitive environment of juvenile hall was particularly challenging.

“Well, I don't like [this teacher],” she said. “She don't need to be here because it seem like she don't want to be here. And it seem like she miserable and don't got no life, and just come here to, you know, torture us . . . Like you could just sit in the hallway . . . She don't even know the work. She teach [the subject], but she don't know how to do it. Like, she'll teach one student one way, and then teach the other student this way. Then we all just be confused. Then she don't even be knowing the answer. Some of the kids be correcting her. Like, ‘Why did you get the job and why did
you volunteer to do that subject if you don't even know how to do it?' And then, for [the other subject], it's like basically, she don't teach. All she do is give us a packet in the book. The packet goes with the book, so it's like, the packet comes out of the workbook, you know? So, all you got to do is just look in there, it's going to tell you the answer . . . we're not really learning anything. She's not even going over it with us. We're just doing the work and put it in our folder. She don't even check the work. Like, she shouldn't be no teacher. . . . If you ask her a question, she's going to get mad 'cause
she
don't know [the answer]! 'Cause she don't know it, she's going to get mad and take it out on us. I be getting hecka irritated. One time she sent me out of class because I didn't know the answer. And she was going to send me out of class! I'm like, how is you going to send me out of class 'cause I don't know the answer? That's stupid.”

Teachers in juvenile hall face the tall order of managing girls with significant histories of school absence and failure, which are compounded by their histories of trauma and abuse. I have never met a teacher who actually “didn't care” about the education of girls in juvenile hall, but many teachers that I have encountered over the years have admitted to feeling overwhelmed and often emotionally unprepared or insufficiently trained to deal with the myriad issues that prevent them from forming meaningful relationships—even if temporary—with the girls they educate in juvenile hall.

Where Credit Is Due

“I mean, I know they still want us to get our credits and stuff while we're in here,” Portia said. “But I think it's just, like, a waste because somebody do something, the whole group got to suffer for it, which means we all got to go to our rooms. . . . It's structured. Like military structured. . . . It feels like it's a waste of my time for me to be here and try to get my credits, if I'm not going to get them correctly. I feel like if you're going to go to school here, then
you should get the same amount of credits you get in a regular school. 'Cause these little one, two, five credits . . . I mean, it's helpful, but it don't really do nothing.”

For Portia, credit recovery was an important motivator for her attendance and participation in the juvenile court school. However, she was aware of the mismatch between what she was doing in the classrooms, and what might actually prove to be useful in the long-run. The No Child Left Behind Act (2001) required all schools, including juvenile court schools, to report “adequate yearly progress” (AYP). The aim was to monitor and evaluate student progress with respect to achievement, accrual of school credits, readiness to transfer to a “regular program or other education program,” completion of secondary school or employment, and, as appropriate, postsecondary education or job training efforts.
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One study by the Juvenile Justice Enhancement Program found that as many as nineteen states were not including juvenile court schools in their AYP reports.
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This is an issue that many educators understand as problematic, yet feel powerless to address.

I asked a school district official about the credit alignment process and how to facilitate a more seamless process for children in detention. I was specifically interested in how system leaders might better respond to the nature of educating youth in detention—the short stays versus the long stays, reconciling the student's ability versus the design of the curriculum, and other considerations. Other professionals in the department had observed the problem and devised unofficial strategies, such as using smaller increments for the credit accrual process that prevent youth from losing credits if they stayed less than a week in custody. I offered these suggestions and other ideas to engage school board members in a conversation on this topic.

After listening to me talk for several moments, the administrator smugly looked at me and said, “If you can figure that out, then you'll get a major award.”

I'm certain he meant it as a joke, but credit recovery is a serious concern for girls who have a history of particularly contentious relationships with school. The uncertainty with which a number of the young women I spoke to approached the topic of credit accrual and recovery left little question that the inconsistent manner for earning and tracking student credits undermines their trust in the juvenile court educational system.

Additionally, the transient nature of the population in confinement, combined with local (district) variances in the credit accrual processes, was confusing for the majority of girls. As Stacy shared, “My mama tried to get . . . credits, but she couldn't do it. . . . I'm going to have my mama come up here, try again and see if she can switch my credits back to my school. I have some credits . . . I think.”

Stacy was uncertain. Of this I was sure.

Well Enough to Learn

When I met Portia, she was struggling to maintain her sanity among other girls who were also impacted by mental illness. Nationwide, 81 percent of girls in the juvenile justice system suffer from a mental health disorder.
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In California, the percentage of youth with a mental health disorder ranges between 40 and 70 percent.
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“Other girls' attitudes [make it hard for me],” she said. At that moment, we could hear other inmates banging on their cell doors. The clanks and bangs echoed loudly through the unit.

“Like that,” she continued, referencing the banging. “Everybody's different. I mean, you're put in a place with a bunch of girls you don't know and it's hard for you guys to all fit together without wanting to kill each other . . . so I mean, like me, if I'm feeling sad, I hide my feelings. I cover it by being goofy. I do that to the other girls to make them laugh, but they're not used to how my personality is, so then they get upset about it. But then I have to tell them, ‘I'm not doing it to make you mad. This is the way I am.'
And they be like, ‘Okay' . . . and then they get used to it. Like one of the girls, she reminds me so much of my sister . . . She talks back to me on purpose, [and] that's just our relationship. I call her by my little sister's name, so it's like, that's just me and her . . . So we could be in class and just talk to each other like, acting like we're having an argument. And the teacher think we're having an argument, but we're laughing at each other.”

In my experience, children in carceral settings will create family structures in order to normalize what can be an otherwise dehumanizing experience. Youth who are peers in age might appropriate a family structure by calling another inmate their “mother” or “sister” to help normalize the living space and to provide familial supports for each other that may not otherwise exist. When teachers are not aware of these relationships, or when they respond to them with discipline, they undermine these relationships and instead perpetrate a hyperpunitive learning environment. A more productive and effective approach might be to facilitate collaborative learning spaces where girls are encouraged to explore their relationships with each other along with why they reenact “arguments” as a way to demonstrate familial bonds.

Like Black girls who are high achievers, many of those in trouble with the law understand the value of a quality education, even if it has never been offered to them. In my conversations with detained Black girls, they understood that education was an important part of their time in juvenile hall. However, most did not consider their juvenile court school to be a model learning environment. In general, they agreed with youth nationwide who view the quality of correctional education as “poor,” inadequate by state standards.
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As described in earlier chapters, schools' punitive response to girls' truancy, experience with bullying, and learning disabilities reinforces relationships that further marginalize girls who are struggling to survive. For girls who live in poverty and who have
a history of contact with the criminal legal system, schools reproduce dominant ideas of power and privilege in ways that push them away from school and toward other environments that increase their risk of confinement. Historically, this vulnerability is further increased when teachers, administrators, and institutional policies project low expectations onto Black girls who have been labeled as delinquent.
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Notwithstanding their status as “juvenile delinquents” with significant histories of victimization, these girls know that an education is their best chance for a good job—that it is their “passport to the future,” as Malcolm X stated.
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Girls in confinement know that the juvenile court school provides a special opportunity to reconnect them with school. Still, too often the poor quality of instruction, combined with racial isolation, a punitive climate, and an inability to successfully match their district school credit with the credits they earned while in detention, has left them at a loss and further pushed out of school. These tangible, symbolic, verbal, and nonverbal cues communicate just how tenuous their rehabilitative status really is. For some girls—like Mia in the Bay Area, who found her family's conflicting messages about how she should behave in school confusing—all they have to rely on is self-motivation to attend school and perform well; being treated as expendable serves to reinforce her understanding of education as an optional activity, and school as a place that she could (and in her mind perhaps should) live without.

The majority of the girls I have spoken with over the years have reported a lack of confidence in the teaching ability and/or commitment of at least one instructor in their juvenile court school. Almost half of them have perceived that a teacher in their juvenile court school had routinely refused to answer their specific questions about the material they were learning.

When girls have not been actively in school prior to their incarceration, they express concern about the perceived skill set of their
instructor having an impact on their future. As Janis once said to me, “I don't even know my credits. They [juvenile court school] don't be helping me out with nothing. . . . I know I really want to go to college, though. But I don't want to go far, because I don't want to be away from home. Like, I get homesick.”

Janis was another runner. She ran away from home and group homes and even cut off her electronic ankle monitor because it made her feel enslaved. So, I found her statement about being “homesick” very interesting.

“You run away, but you get homesick?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Janis said. “I really get homesick. . . . I don't know. . . .”

She chuckled and then continued, “I just get homesick. I don't want to go far, but . . . I want to have a good education. I know for sure I'm going to go to college for four years.”

Her statement piqued my interest. Detained African American girls have been found to express a desire to continue their education after their period of incarceration.
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Previous research also found that while detained Black girls often have experienced depression and trauma, they demonstrate more self-efficacy and lower levels of delinquency than their male counterparts—all of which has an impact on whether Janis's interest in going to college actually materializes. To this point, Bonita Veysey wrote:

Girls with histories of physical and sexual abuse are extremely vulnerable to trauma reactions, and typical justice and treatment procedures, such as a pat down by a male officer, can be re-traumatizing and trigger trauma responses. . . . Girls who meet the criteria for conduct disorder, for example, have a higher risk than their male counterparts for developing more severe psychopathology. . . . Similarly, the long-term prognosis for girls with antisocial behavior who fail to receive treatment is dismal. For example, more than half of the girls committed to state training schools reported attempting suicide, and of these, 64 percent had attempted more than once.
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Research has also found that having greater levels of family and community involvement may increase student academic potential.
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Allowing girls to explore their experiences and conditions in the context of their learning environment would give them space to reconsider the value of education. What these young women learn and whom they are learning with, therefore, are just as important as the fact that they are learning.

“Do you know what you want to study in college? Do you know what interests you?” I asked Janis.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Have you ever talked to a counselor . . . like a college placement counselor or anything . . . who could help talk to you about how to get to a community college or get you on the road to a four year college?”