(skip this header)

Sunday, April 26, 2015

stamfordadvocate.com Businesses

« Back to Article

Wendy Lecker: Parallels between drug and education policy

Published 4:35 pm, Saturday, October 20, 2012
Larger | Smaller
Email This
Page 1 of 1

Punishment is ineffective, so America just does more of it. That is one of the messages of Eugene Jarecki's new film, "The House I Live In." While this documentary examines America's "war on drugs," it provides profound lessons about our education policy.

Over the past 40 years, America has criminalized what is essentially a health issue: drug abuse. Over a trillion dollars has been spent, largely on interdiction and imprisonment. Our strategy has been an abject failure. As television producer David Simon notes in the movie, America jails more people than any other country. Yet drugs now are purer and more available than ever. "It would be one thing if it were draconian and it worked. But it is draconian and it doesn't work."

Harsh mandatory minimum sentences result in long prison terms for mostly petty offenders. A federal judge noted that of the 2,600 people he has sentenced for drug offenses, two or three have been kingpins. "We are incarcerating poor people who are drug addicts," he concludes. These predetermined sentences undermine a judge's authority by usurping judicial discretion. One judge remarks that if a defendant saved a grandmother from a burning building the day before the sentence, he could not consider it. However, possessing one tenth of an ounce less of a drug would change the sentence.

The drug war has a disproportionate impact on people of color, as evidenced by the illogical disparity in sentencing between crack, a diluted form of cocaine, and powder cocaine. Crack is misperceived as an "African-American" drug. Although African Americans are only 13 percent of crack users, they account for 90 percent of crack arrests. Historically, there has been a 100-to-one disparity in the sentencing of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine offenses, leading to lengthy incarcerations for primarily African Americans. After years of outcry from law enforcement officials, judges and experts, the disparity was reduced to the still-indefensible 18 to one.

Despite incontrovertible evidence of its failure, political and financial motives impede reversal of drug policy. Reconsidering sentencing means a politician is "soft on crime." There is also pressure from the huge prison industry that thrives on incarceration. One in eight state employees works for a corrections agency. A prison generates jobs providing food, phone, laundry and other services. The prison industrial complex feeds on a steady stream of poor defendants.

The parallels between the war on drugs and education reform are remarkable.

Education policy is increasingly defined by futile testing and punishing of our most vulnerable. Decades of evidence link learning gaps to poverty, and to inadequate resources in poor schools. Yet rather than providing schools with sufficient learning resources and children with services to mitigate the turbulence in their lives, politicians oversimplify the cause of educational disparities and focus blame exclusively on schools and teachers.

Punitive sanctions have the largest impact in poor and minority communities. A multi-year analysis found that states with increasing minority populations adopt more punitive accountability systems; and heavily minority districts are more likely to experience harsh sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Law than mostly majority districts. The new NCLB "waivers" follow this same failed approach, with arbitrary rating systems that punish poorer and more ethnically diverse districts while rewarding homogeneous affluent districts.

Educational policy that overemphasizes high-stakes testing robs teachers and administrators of professional discretion. They cannot design their own lessons or assessments, as tests and curricula are handed down from a central authority. They cannot tailor teaching to individual students or recognize their different strengths because everyone must pass the same test.

Ten years of NLCB testing, costing billions of tax dollars, have not raised achievement. However, political and profit motives mandate the continuation of these failed educational policies. Politicians cannot question "accountability" lest they be labeled "defenders of the status quo." Furthermore, they accede to the pressure of profiteers in the testing, textbook, tutoring and charter school industries, who thrive when public schools "fail."

The education industrial complex, with the blessing of politicians on both sides of the political aisle, continues to feed on children, exacerbating the inequities in our society. Our neediest children suffer through a stressful and intellectually empty testing regimen that will not prepare them for higher education or life.

After trillions of wasted dollars, thousands of devastated communities and millions of ruined lives, America is waking up to the failure of the war on drugs. How many generations of children are we willing to sacrifice before we end the catastrophic war on our public schools?
