Can a court injunction help improve education in juvenile halls?

Posted on Mar 16, 2008 12:14:00 PM by Youth Outlook

This week’s news of a crackdown on juvenile halls means that the 10,000 plus incarcerated youth in California will begin to receive better access to services such as health care and education.

On Wednesday a San Francisco Superior Court judge signed a court order requiring juvenile halls across the state to meet state minimum standards of care for inmates, or face being shut down.

The ruling stems from a 2006 lawsuit filed by Candace Waters, a Sacramento woman whose son was a juvenile hall inmate.

Waters’ attorneys said investigations had found severe overcrowding at some juvenile halls, with some youths forced to sleep on the floor. Some inmates are kept in isolation cells 23 hours a day and others are beaten by guards, the lawyers said. Investigations also have found juvenile halls with inadequate education programs and little mental health care, they said.

In the past, when juvenile halls have not met minimum standards of care, nothing happened—the institutions weren’t held accountable.

“This is a tremendous victory”, says, one of Waters’ lawyers, Daniel Swerdin. “There is a court order staying you can no longer neglect [these inmates], and that this is a serious problem…. Juvenile hall is supposed to be a safe and secure home-like environment, and this injunction will help the system move toward that.”

It has yet to be seen whether enforcing existing “minimum standards” can really do much to improve this system that houses and schools some of our society’s most traumatized and neglected young people. But at the very least, the injunction will ensure that young people get access to school, face less classroom overcrowding, and receive the legal standard when it comes to curriculum content. It remains unclear, however, how exactly this would impact the quality of education inside juvenile hall classrooms.

The Beat Within has been publishing the writings by juvenile hall inmates for 12 years now.

Recently New America Media published a number of these pieces on the juvenile hall school system. Most of them deal with what appears to be a culture of low expectations:

Education in here is a joke… We had to take tests for the county and the first problem on the math section was one plus one. I mean, come on! I may be in jail, but I’m not stupid, and forcing people to stoop to that level of education makes ‘em feel stupid. (The second problem was 158 minus eight.) It honestly made me mad, like I was wasting my time “in jail.” Now that’s a hard thing to do. We read at like fourth grade level, and the science we learn I could get from my nephew. I’m about to graduate high school in the outs, but in here it’s like I fell five years back.
-Young Kon

Attending school in the hall is nothing like going to school on the outs. Classes in here are way too easy because the system probably assumes that every single person that is locked up in the juvenile justice system doesn’t go to school and that we’re all behind. The mandatory school here makes me feel really low because the teachers just give us the answers along with the assignments. On the outs, teachers would make me read and help me understand the assignments and have me do the assignments on my own. The so-called “learning centers” in here shouldn’t even be named that because they don’t teach anything that challenges the mind. To make schools better for the detainees, I think everybody should take assessments to see where we are on every subject and get individual work.
-Baby C

On the other hand, for young people who haven’t been to school for years, Attending school regularly in juvenile hall is a welcome change:

I’ve learned a lot in the hall, things I probably wouldn’t have learned on the outs. Not because the hall’s schools are better, but because on the outs I took school as a joke, and I hardly went. In here, you have to go to school everyday and if you get kicked out of a class you may receive room time or may even have to spend the whole day in your room. Since I’ve been in juvie, I’ve started to like school in a way…
-Marcus

I got to the hall thinking I wouldn’t have to go to school. Since I hadn’t been going much on the outside, I assumed it would be the same in the hall. But within the first week I realized that school was mandatory in there. It was either school or stay in your room the whole day, so I choose school. Once I got adjusted to waking up at 6:30 a.m. and actually going to school, I came to the realization that I really enjoyed it. I especially liked the teachers. They didn’t judge us because we were in juvenile hall or because we were “hardened criminals,” nor did they judge us by color or race. They judged us only by how serious we took our education, and by the effort we put into our work. If we did well, they only pushed us harder. If we did badly, they let us know we could do it, but never stopped pushing us. -Victor

What these pieces make clear is that juvenile hall schools have the potential to challenge and inspire these kids, many of whom who are in a state of reflection and yearn for real life change. Enforcing existing minimum standards won’t get us there, but it’s an important first step.

– Carolyn Goossen

The Fight For Quality Education Blows Out with Obama Speech

The Fight For Quality Education Blows Out with Obama Speech
03/24/2008

Last week’s speech by Obama on U.S race relations was unprecedented in that it finally asked the American public to acknowledge that it is in fact naïve to ignore issues of race and class because they are still present in the United States.

However, I believe the biggest success of his speech may be that he brought to life one of the biggest casualties of institutional racism – the disparity of today’s education system. During his 37minute speech Obama mentioned ideas relating to the need for equal and better education six times.

During this time he successfully revealed failed education policy established during the civil rights era when he pointed to the current reality of segregated schools,“Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap.”

Obama left no citizen free from the accountability of our failed schools when he said, “It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.”

And continued by arguing that we have a collective responsibility to make schools better,“Not just with words, but with deeds by investing in our schools and our communities… by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.”

With his speech Obama brought to light an issue that ethnic communities have been fighting for years- education equity. Not nearly as publicized as Obama’s speech is this resurgent movement by students, educators, activists, and communities to elevate the issue of education justice. This is a movement that is on the rise in California.

Groups such as Teachers 4 Social Justice have helped create this movement by organizing teachers and community-based educators in the Bay area for the last eight years. Together this group of teachers meets outside of school hours, tackling issues such as multiculturalism in school, techniques for creating empowering learning environments, and more equitable access to resources in an effort to create caring learning environments for all students.

Just this month conferences, celebrations, and rallies were held to honor “BLOW OUT,” a Chicano student movement that took place in Los Angeles of March of 1968 where thousands of Chicano students, tired of suffering educational injustices, decided to walkout of their classrooms in protest and to demand changes to their educational plight.

A re-enactment of the walkouts took place in East Los Angeles where students gathered to bring attention to the fact that the school dropout rate is higher today than 40 years ago.

Sal Castro a school teacher who helped lead the famous student walkouts in 1968 was present at the re-enactment and told EGP NEWS that the student movement is not over and now, with the CA state budget cuts on the horizon, it is a good time to become active again.

_“The movement is alive and well, I am a great believer in education, education is critical and it’s really criminal what they are doing with the cutbacks,”_ he said.

Castro is right, the movement is alive and growing with new groups like Right To Learn who are organizing as we speak against the proposed budget cuts which will take $4.4 billion dollars from California’s public schools. Right To Learn leaders have called a day of action for FRIDAY, APRIL 18th and predict that 10,000 Students will organize rallies across California. Lucky for us their action will be broadcast online, providing a “virtual demonstration” for all to see.