Whether it's a parent or the student who have served time, schools see challenges.

Beyond helping children of incarcerated parents pay for college, a growing body of research supports helping these children throughout the K-12 system, limiting harsh discipline policies that disproportionately impact them, training teachers to recognize the underlying causes of certain behaviors and targeting the intergenerational nature of the school-to-prison pipeline.

When Jason Nance started travelling around the country for the American Bar Association as a member of a task force on reversing the school-to-prison pipeline, he was struck by the impact a suspension, expulsion or any kind of contact with the juvenile justice system can have on a child’s life. Nance is an associate professor of law and the associate director of the Center on Children and Families at the University of Florida. His time in town hall meetings, hearing from experts around the country, made him wonder why the nation spends so much money on the “back end,” funding incarceration costs, rather than investing in the “front end,” on preventative strategies within the education system.

That’s the topic of a July brief from the U.S. Department of Education. The department studied state and local expenditures on corrections and education between 1979-80 and 2012-13, finding spending on public schools doubled while spending on corrections quadrupled. The amount spent on P-12 education still dwarfs that of corrections — $534 billion to $71 billion — but looking only at how much states have increased spending per inmate or per student is illustrative.

For more of Tara Garcia Mathewson's article, please click here.