The school-to-prison pipeline refers to a system in which school-discipline practices—from suspensions to corporal punishment to disturbing-school laws—push children out of education and into the criminal-justice system.

It’s a pipeline with which disadvantaged kids and families of color are particularly familiar. Black children, for example, comprised just 16 percent of the country’s student population in the 2011-12 school year yet roughly a third of those suspended at least once or expelled (and nearly half of the preschoolers who were suspended). They were also disproportionately referred to law enforcement or subject to school-based arrests. The problem, of course isn’t limited to black children—or to, as stereotypes might suggest, boys: In equally insidious yet perhaps more invisible ways, it also afflicts girls, Native Americans and Latinos, and students who identify as LGBT or have special-needs. Earlier this year, an American Bar Association task force called the school-to-prison pipeline one of the “nation’s most formidable challenges.”

[For more of this story, written by Alia Wong, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/ed...om-the-field/511589/]