Rasheena Fountain, ZORA by Medium
I always strove to give my daughter access to good schools in “safe” areas, but an experience in a public school has taught me how students of color, even in well-resourced schools and neighborhoods, can fall victim to the school-to-prison pipeline. As The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander explained in a recent interview, the school-to-prison pipeline is a metaphor that describes how children are pushed directly from schools into prison in lieu of opportunity. As a Black woman who once attended elementary school in inner-city Chicago, I learned that my daughter could also face systems that have longed deterred generations of Black children from reaching their full potential.
