White Teachers’ Role in Sustaining the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Recommendations for Teacher Education

Educational scholarship has called attention to the disproportionate ways Black males are disciplined in schools, which has become the catalyst to their entry into the school-to-prison pipeline through which they are funneled from K-12 classrooms into the criminal justice system. Since the majority of teachers are White, it may be insightful to examine the role that they play in the process and how teachers also influence White children’s perceptions of Black boys. Drawing from Lortie’s (1975/2002) notion of the apprenticeship of observation in teaching, I contend that White children learn how to dehumanize Black male students, particularly as they observe how their White teachers disproportionately target them for minor and subjective school disciplinary infractions. Recommendations are provided for teacher education to prepare teachers to dismantle disproportionate and unfair ways that Black boys are disciplined. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.