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All forcibly displaced and stateless populations are considered vulnerable and typically face protection concerns en route to, and when they arrive in , host communities, whether in cities, camps , or other settings. In addition to the inherent insecurity and danger that is associated with displacement, a breakdown of support systems and community structures, a lack of services, and the sudden absence of basic supplies and resources puts displaced populations in risky situations. PRM recognizes that displaced populations are not all the same, and that certain factors and characteristics can expose beneficiaries to additional violence, exploitation, and abuse. This is why we encourage our partners to assess protection needs, demonstrate accountability to affected populations, take a community-based approach to protection, and design programs that take into account particular and shared vulnerabilities.

Most importantly, PRM stresses the need to make extra efforts and invest additional resources to ensure that particularly at-risk populations are present in, engaged in, participating in, and contributing to humanitarian programming and the way the international community responds to emergencies. PRM also works on diplomatic advocacy that focuses on the specific situation s and experiences of these populations in crisis .

Women and Girls

Fifty percent of refugee populations consist of women and girls with their own unique needs and characteristics. Women and girls are often considered a highly at-risk population because of the high levels of violence, sexual exploitation , and abuse perpetrated against them. They are also often sidelined and forgotten in the design of emergency responses. PRM addresses women and girls' unique circumstances through the requirement of a gender analysis and the existence of a high quality organizational code of conduct on the part of partners , as well as significant global and regional funding for gender-based violence programming.

Children and Youth

M ore than half of the world's refugee population are children (below the age of 18), and many will spend their entire childhoods in countries of asylum. These children face heightened risks for abuse, violence, exploitation, and separation from their caregivers. PRM addresses the unique needs of displaced and stateless children and youth through global and regional humanitarian assistance programs that focus on child protection, family reunification, education, and birth registration . Learn More"

In many parts of the world, LGBQTI+ persons face discrimination due to their sexual orientation or gender identity and, in many countries, consensual same-sex acts are criminalized. These individuals may be targeted, harassed, hurt, or even killed in their home countries or country of refuge. PRM works with partners to train staff on issues specific to displaced LGBTQI+ populations, fund LGBTQI+ protection, and ensure that LGBTQI+ refugees resettled in the United States receive appropriate services and support.

Elderly and Persons W ith Disabilities

Certain populations require specialized services and responses to meet their individual needs. Elderly refugees and internally displace d persons (IDPs), as well as displaced persons with disabilities, in particular, often face challenges and obstacles to physically accessing or seeking out services and support. PRM supports UNHCR, ICRC, and other international organization and NGO policies, tools, and guidance to involve the elderly, persons with disabilities, and their caregivers in program planning and implementation in order to better meet their humanitarian needs. PRM has adopted the guiding principles outlined in the Women's Refugee Commission's Resource Kit for Fieldworkers on Disabilities Among Refugees and Conflict-Affected Populations, and encourages its partners to integrate protection and assistance for persons with disabilities into multisectoral humanitarian programs and to develop additional targeted programs to address the specific needs of refugees and other persons of concern with disabilities.

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At-Risk Populations - United States Department of State

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All forcibly displaced and stateless populations are considered vulnerable and typically face protection concerns en route to, and when they arrive in, host communities, whether in cities, camps, or other settings. In addition to the inherent insecurity and danger that is associated with displacement, a breakdown of support systems and community structures, a lack of services, and the sudden absence of [...]

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The Trevor Project | For Young LGBTQ Lives

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The Trevor Project provides 24/7 crisis support services to LGBTQ young people. Text, chat, or call anytime to reach a trained counselor. Free and confidential.

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trans and queer youth uniting for racial and gender justice

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Parenting during COVID

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Predictors of Disclosure of Maternal HIV Status by Caregiversto their Children in an Inner-City Community in the United States

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Sociodemographic Characteristics and Inadequate Usual Sources of Healthcare in a National Sample of US Refugees

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I’ve Always Wanted a Gay Family Member!: StraightAlly Girls and Gender Inequality in a High SchoolGay-Straight Alliance

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Pre-service Teachers' Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding School-Based Bullying

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A Gay Immigrant Student's Perspective: Unspeakable Acts in the Language Class

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Using the Teaching and Guidance Policy Essentials Checklist to Develop Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Behavior Guidance Policies

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Dual Identification: Trajectories to English Proficiency for English Learners with Autism SpectrumDisorder

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An event meant to be a career-builder for women and nonbinary tech workers turned into yet another symbol of the industry's gender imbalance after self-identifying men showed up in droves.

The Grace Hopper Celebration takes the name of a pioneering computer scientist and bills itself the world's largest annual gathering of women and nonbinary tech workers.

Tickets for the four-day event, which took place in Orlando, Fla., last week, ranged in price from $649 to $1,298, and included a coveted chance to meet one-on-one with sponsors such as Apple, Amazon, Salesforce and Google.

With some 30,000 annual attendees, that career expo was already a competitive space, according to past participants. But this year, access was even more limited by what the organizers described as "an increase in participation of self-identifying males."

Videos posted to social media showed scenes of men flocking around recruiters, running into event venues and cutting in front of women to get an interview slot. Footage showed a sea of people, hundreds deep, waiting in line for a chance to enter the career expo.

As one poster put it, "the Kens had taken over Barbieland."

Several conference-goers told NPR there was a 40/60 ratio of men to women, especially at the career expo.

"From what I'd heard, I was expecting maybe half a percent to 1% of the attendees would male," said Morgan Young, a computer science student at the University of Nevada, Reno who also creates content for early-career tech workers on social media.

"I heard it was like the Coachella of tech for women. It's supposed to be fun and collaborative," she told NPR in an interview this week. "But the vibe was so different. You could feel the cutthroatness in the air."

Some of the attendees had lied about their gender identity on their conference registrations, said Cullen White, the chief impact officer with AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that organizes the conference.

"Judging by the stacks and stacks of resumes you're passing out, you did so because you thought you could come here and take up space to try and get jobs," White said during the conference's plenary address. "So let me be perfectly clear: Stop. Right now. Stop."

Bo Young Lee, AnitaB.org's president, said in a video post that the shift in demographics had robbed the conference of the joyous and supportive atmosphere that had previously helped women grow.

"We tried to create a safe space. And this week, we saw the outside world creep in," she said. "I can't guarantee you that we'll have solutions tomorrow. But I can promise you that we'll be working on solutions, and we won't do it in a bubble."

Earlier in the week, the organization addressed calls to ban men from the conference by saying that "male allyship is necessary" to work toward overall inclusivity and also that federal law prohibited discrimination based on gender.

NPR reached out to AnitaB.org for additional comment but had not received a response by the time this article was published.

Some of the attendees said they felt like the organizers had prioritized profit over people, registering more attendees than they had the capacity to handle, then subjecting women and nonbinary workers to a familiar feeling of needing to compete with men.

"You're basically paying hundreds to do the same thing that you're experiencing in the industry, trying desperately to get your resume everywhere," said Agnes Lu, a master's student in computer science at Northeastern University. "It feels like we were tricked."

Tech jobs were once a safe bet for workers looking for stable, lucrative careers. But an industrywide wave of layoffs earlier this year left hundreds of thousands of workers suddenly without a job.

Women were disproportionately affected by those cuts, making up 69.2% of all tech layoffs, according to The Women Tech Network. And that's on top of the industry's ongoing gender imbalance. Women hold just 26% of jobs across all STEM occupations and even less - 24% - in computer fields, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

The pressure is even higher for the industry's international workers, who are at risk of losing their visa if they fail to find employment quickly.

"We're set with a timer of like 90 days," said Anusha Das, an international graduate student studying information systems at Northeastern. "There's competition. The job market is bad. There's no grace for us, really."

Das said she missed most of the other workshops and panels at the conference just to stand in hour-long lines to secure a two-minute interview with recruiters.

In one of those lines, she said sheheard a group of men casually using misogynistic slurs in her native language, Hindi. In another, she watched a group of men splinter off to make a new line, effectively cutting the other people who'd been waiting patiently.

But she said she also didn't regret these long waits - in fact, they made for some of the best experiences of the conference.

"I would talk to other girls while I was waiting in line and they were hyping me up, telling me not to be nervous," she said. "The best things about the conference were the stuff that's not actually advertised."

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'You could feel the cutthroatness': Droves of men took over this women's tech fair

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Organizers of the Grace Hopper Celebration said some men lied about their gender to gain access to a space designed to help women and nonbinary tech workers meet with hiring managers.

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A controversial mural depicting what some are calling a lynching has been modified at an elementary school in Tennessee.

South Cumberland Elementary School and Cumberland County personnel altered the mural Monday after the painting was called racist in a social media post on Friday.

The original mural depicted a man wearing what appears to be a blue basketball uniform strung from a tree by the straps of his jersey, while another man dressed in a red uniform stands nearby holding the Confederate battle flag. A larger Confederate flag was painted on another wall.

The mural was supposed to illustrate a school rivalry, where the men in blue and red represent North Cumberland Elementary and South Cumberland Elementary, respectively.

But concerned citizens took issue with the Confederate flag and lynching imagery being on the walls of an elementary school.

David Clark, a member of the group Shelbyville Loves, an organization that formed as a response to white supremacy in Shelbyville, Tenn., says when a friend sent him pictures of the elementary school mural he knew he had to do something.

Clark says he reached out to members of the school board in early December and "didn't hear anything from them." Around Christmas break, he decided to reach out to the superintendent directly.

"I got a response from her in five minutes," he says.

Clark says the superintendent told him that they were looking into solutions for the mural and that it would be dealt with in February, once the original artist was available to make changes to it.

"But February came and went," he says, "and I decided to shine a light on it."

Clark posted about the Confederate mural on Facebook, and the response was instantaneous, he says. Within 24 hours, the post had garnered 500 likes and about 200 shares. Soon after, the Confederate flags in the mural at South Cumberland Elementary were painted over, as were the straps suspending the man from the tree. The larger Confederate flag was replaced with a mural saying "Dread the Red," and the smaller was replaced with a simple "SCE" flag.

"Concerns regarding graphics in our gymnasium have been dealt with by removing the rebel flags painted on the wall, and by modifying the mural on the wall as well," said a statement from school principal Darrell Threet.

Director of Schools Janet Graham told the Crossville Chronicle that she had received emails applauding the modifications. Graham could not be reached immediately for response.

But some are not as happy with the changes, calling them unnecessary.

"It was meant to represent South Elementary beating North Elementary and 'hanging them out to dry.' I know because I watched it get painted on the wall," one commenter wrote on Facebook.

But Clark says that the changes were necessary to keep the racist imagery "out of public places where kids can see it and show it as being accepted."

"I really hate that people are upset, but I couldn't bear to see that up any longer than necessary," Clark says of the mural, which he calls racist. "There are kids in all these elementary schools that don't need to see that. The people that innocently allow it to go on, we can't have that."

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Elementary School Mural That Seemed To Depict A Lynching Has Been Changed

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The painting was intended to portray a school rivalry, but critics say the mural was racist.

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confederate flag and monuments controversy

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Tennessee school removes Confederate flag, lynching murals | CNN

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A painting of a Confederate flag and a mural depicting a lynching have been removed from the walls of a Tennessee school gymnasium.

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Gloria’s Powerful Speech from Barbie Movie 2023 that resonates with every woman

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Gloria’s Powerful Speech from Barbie Movie 2023 that resonates with every woman | Gloria's monologue

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Some of these additions and subtractions (for the total population and three age groups) in 2021 are shown in the figure above. Additions include cash benefits like Social Security, also included in the official poverty measure, as well as noncash benefits and tax credits (like SNAP, school lunch programs and the Child Tax Credit) only in the SPM.

A key component of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was the CTC expansion. ARPA increased the value of the CTC from $2,000 to $3,600 for children under 6 years of age and to $3,000 for children between ages 6 and 17. The credit was made fully refundable and no longer limited by the taxpayer's income tax liability.

In 2021, the CTC lifted 5.3 million people out of poverty, including 2.9 million children (Figure below).

Children lifted out of poverty due to the addition of the CTC include (Figure below; Table 1):

1 million children under 6.

1.9 million children between the ages of 6 and 17.

The inclusion of the CTC significantly decreased the number of children experiencing poverty across several race and Hispanic origin groups (Table 1).

The CTC reduced the Black child poverty rate by 6.3 percentage points, from 14.5% to 8.1% when included in SPM resources. Overall, this amounted to approximately 716,000 Black children lifted out of poverty by the inclusion of the CTC.

Similarly, the CTC reduced the Hispanic child poverty rate by 6.3 percentage points (not statistically different than the change in the Black child poverty rate), representing 1.2 million Hispanic children. The CTC also removed 820,000 White, non-Hispanic children and 110,000 Asian children from poverty.

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Expansions to Child Tax Credit Contributed to 46% Decline in Child Poverty Since 2020

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In 2021, child poverty rates measured by Supplemental Poverty Measure were the lowest since 2009 for all race and Hispanic origin categories examined.

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The poverty rate in the U.S. has risen dramatically in the year since pandemic benefits ran out - and the child poverty rate has more than doubled, according to U.S. Census Bureau's annual data on poverty, income and health insurance released Tuesday.

Just a year ago, child poverty hit a historic low of 5.2%. The latest figures put it at 12.4%, the same as the overall poverty rate. The surge happened as record inflation was rising and a lot of pandemic relief was running out, but Census officials and other experts say a key was the child tax credit.

In 2021, Congress increased the amount of the credit as part of the American Rescue Plan and expanded eligibility to include millions more low-income families. Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says it was a big factor in initially reducing the poverty rate.

"We sometimes talk about the child tax credit as being an upside down policy," she says. "That's because the children who need it the most get the least, while higher income children get more."

Parrott says that means when the pandemic relief ended, millions of families lost out on this credit for their kids because they didn't make enough money. But married couples making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year do get the full child tax credit of $2,000 per child. While that might sound upside down, as Parrott puts it, the credit is an income-based benefit - so the more you make, the more you get.

Parents overwhelmingly used that extra tax credit money on household essentials like rent and food, according to surveys.

"I could breathe for a moment," says Jennifer Bereskin, who lives in Bothell, Wash., with her 11-year-old son. "I don't have to sacrifice ... I could get everything I needed."

Both Bereskin and her son are on disability. She says used the child tax credit for emergency car repairs, to avoid late fees on bills and to stock up on food at a time when even food pantries had periodic shortages of certain items.

Other parents spent the tax credit money to pay down debt, or on their kids. Angel Jackson is a single mom in Houston with an 8-year-old son.

"My son went to a charter school, so I bought school shirts," she says. "I got his haircut ... took him out to eat with it. It came in handy, kind of like his allowance."

When the tax credit ended, surveys found many parents had trouble paying bills and covering basic expenses like rent and groceries. Jackson, who lobbies for foster parents, says she's been doing OK. With inflation driving up prices, though, she feels worse off in some ways than at the height of the pandemic.

"Honestly, I think the child tax credit would help us right now more than ever, because everything is doubled," she says.

A push to revive the child tax credit

The dramatic effect on child poverty has fueled debate over bringing back an expanded child tax credit, although it's been at a stalemate in Congress.

Democrats are pushing it as part of broader tax negotiations this fall. Several Republicans have their own proposals, generally for a smaller credit with work requirements. Last year, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that after the Supreme Court decided to restrict abortion, Republicans needed a "pro-family" agenda, and listed an expanded child tax credit as part of that.

At the state level, there's been a lot of action. Adam Ruben of the Economic Security Project has been lobbying states to adopt their own child tax credit for a while. A couple years ago 7 states had done so. Ruben says that's now doubled, and just this year a total of 18 states have changed this or other tax programs to help low-income parents.

"The surge of energy that we've seen across many states, Democratic and Republican states alike, to boost tax credits, to provide economic security for families this year, has been stunning," Ruben says.

Median household income fell, outpaced by inflation

The Census Bureau also released new numbers Tuesday on income.

Median household income fell by 2.3% last year, to $74,580. Lower-income workers saw the largest wage gains, but those were outpaced by record inflation. Wages recently overtook inflation, thanks to the strong labor market. But like Jackson, many Americans might not be feeling it with the cost of rent and other things still so high.

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Child poverty more than doubles - a year after hitting record low, Census data shows

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Experts point to the expanded child tax credit as key to this poverty yo-yo. When it ended, many lower-income families struggled to pay their bills or buy enough food.

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Understanding the Refugee Experience of Trauma

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Understanding the Refugee Experience of Trauma

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Service Delivery

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What's Islam Got to Do with It?

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Refugees - What's Wrong with History?

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An Exploratory Study on the Difficulties Faced by First-Generation Learners in Writing Skills

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National Center for Education Statistics

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Trends in High School Dropout and Completion Rates: 2019

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my husband said that this page looks like this gif lol

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Education Next

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This spring, the Biden administration announced it would seek public comment on student race and school climate, which was roundly viewed as a precursor to restoring an Obama-era directive to reduce racial disparities in discipline practices. Those guidelines, which were rescinded by former Secretary Betsy DeVos, have been variously described as a critical means of protecting students' civil rights and a dangerous overreach by the federal government that prevented schools from keeping students safe.

At issue is the school-to-prison pipeline-a term often used to describe the connection between exclusionary punishments like suspensions and expulsions and involvement in the criminal justice system. Black and Hispanic students are far more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled, and Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately represented in the nation's prisons.

Is there a causal link between experiencing strict school discipline as a student and being arrested or incarcerated as an adult? Research shows that completing more years of school reduces subsequent criminal activity, as does enrolling in a higher-quality school and graduating from high school. Yet there is little evidence on the mechanisms by which a school can have a long-run influence on criminal activity.

To address this, we examine middle-school suspension rates in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, where a large and sudden change in school-enrollment boundary lines resulted in half of all students changing schools in a single year. We estimate a school's disciplinary strictness based on its suspension rates before the change and use this natural experiment to identify how attending a stricter school influences criminal activity in adulthood.

Our analysis shows that young adolescents who attend schools with high suspension rates are substantially more likely to be arrested and jailed as adults. These long-term, negative impacts in adulthood apply across a school's population, not just to students who are suspended during their school years.

Students assigned to middle schools that are one standard deviation stricter-equivalent to being at the 84th percentile of strictness versus the mean-are 3.2 percentage points more likely to have ever been arrested and 2.5 percentage points more likely to have ever been incarcerated as adults. They also are 1.7 percentage points more likely to drop out of high school and 2.4 percentage points less likely to attend a 4-year college. These impacts are much larger for Black and Hispanic male students.

We also find that principals, who have considerable discretion in meting out school discipline, are the major driver of differences in the number of suspensions from one school to the next. In tracking the movements of principals across schools, we see that principals' effects on suspensions in one school predicts their effects on suspensions at another.

Our findings show that early censure of school misbehavior causes increases in adult crime-that there is, in fact, a school-to-prison pipeline. Further, we find that the negative impacts from strict disciplinary environments are largest for minorities and males, suggesting that suspension policies expand preexisting gaps in educational attainment and incarceration. We do see some limited evidence of positive effects on the academic achievement of white male students, which highlights the potential to increase the achievement of some subgroups by removing disruptive peers. However, any effort to maintain safe and orderly school climates must take into account the clear and negative consequences of exclusionary discipline practices for young students, and especially young students of color, which last well into adulthood.
Desegregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg
For decades, school enrollment and bus routes in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district were designed to achieve racial integration. The busing plan was ordered by a state judge and upheld by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1971, after the Swann family, who were Black, sued to reassign their 6-year-old son from an all-Black school to an integrated school closer to their home. The landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision required the district to reassign students to new schools to balance their racial composition and influenced similar busing programs nationwide.

It was another parent lawsuit that ultimately ended mandatory busing and redrew school-zone boundaries in Charlotte-Mecklenburg again. In 1997, a white parent named William Capacchione sued the district because he believed his child was denied entrance to a magnet program based on race. This case led to a series of court battles that ended with a 2001 ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld an earlier state court order to stop using race in school assignments. The district had "eliminated, to the extent practicable, the vestiges of past discrimination in the traditional areas of school operations," the court ruled.

As a result, over the summer of 2002, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools redrew school-attendance boundaries based only on classroom capacity and the geographical concentration of students around a building. This mechanical redistricting process rarely took advantage of environmental features such as streams and major roads, and was controversial because it often bisected existing neighborhoods. About half of all students changed schools between 2001-02 and 2002-03.

For some students, that meant going from a school where suspensions were relatively rare to a school with a different approach to discipline (see Figure 1 for an example). While all schools are held to the district's code of conduct and guidance by the North Carolina Department of Education, different schools have higher or lower rates of suspensions and expulsions.

Many discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline center on the possibility that students experiencing suspension differ from other students in ways that could explain their higher levels of involvement in the criminal justice system later in life. The sudden reassignment of half of all Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students in the summer of 2002 meant that students who live in the same neighborhoods and previously attended the same school could be assigned to attend very different schools in the fall. This creates a natural experiment to identify the impact of a school's approach to discipline, which we use to identify a school's influence on a range of outcomes in adulthood, including educational attainment and criminal activity.
A Natural Experiment
Our analysis focuses on 26,246 middle-school students who experienced the boundary change because they were enrolled in a Charlotte-Mecklenburg school in both the 2001-02 and 2002-03 school years. We use district administrative records that track students from 1998-99 through 2010-11. The data include information on student demographics, test scores for grades 3 through 8 in math and reading, and annual counts of days suspended. Overall, 48 percent of students are Black, 39 percent are white, and 8 percent are Hispanic. On average, 23 percent of students are suspended at least once per school year, and the average suspension duration is 2.3 days.

District records also include each student's home address in every year, which we use to determine individual school assignments under the busing and post-busing regimes. To define residential neighborhood, we use the 371 block groups from the 2000 Census that include at least one Charlotte-Mecklenburg student. We use address records to assign students to these neighborhoods and to middle-school zones for both the pre- and post-2002 boundaries.

To look at long-term outcomes, we first match district records to Mecklenburg County administrative data for all adult arrests and incarcerations from 1998 through 2013. Sixth graders in 2002-03 who progress through school as expected would enter 12th grade in the 2008-09 school year. Because our data on crime extends through 2013, we use two main measures of criminal activity: whether the individual was arrested between the ages of 16 and 21 and whether the individual was incarcerated between the ages of 16 and 21. This allows us to observe crime outcomes for all students who were in grades 6 through 8 in 2002-03.

We also track college-going data from the National Student Clearinghouse. That includes records for every student of college age who had ever attended a Charlotte-Mecklenburg school, including students who transfer to other districts or private schools or who drop out of school altogether. Because our data end in the summer of 2009, we cannot examine longer-run measures of educational attainment such as degree completion. Thus we focus on 7th- and 8th-grade students and measure whether they attended college within 12 months of the fall after their expected high-school graduation date.

Approximately 12 percent of our sample eventually drops out of high school, while 23 percent attend a 4-year college within 12 months of their expected graduation date. Between the ages of 16 and 21 years old, 19 percent are arrested at least once and 13 percent are incarcerated at least once. While well above the national averages in terms of suspensions and crime, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is fairly representative of large, urban school districts in the Southern United States.
The Impacts of a Strict School
To quantify each school's strictness, we use the same basic method commonly used to estimate individual teachers' value-added to student test scores. We examine the number of days students are suspended both in and out of school to calculate strictness, while controlling for student characteristics such as test scores, race, gender, special-education status, and limited-English proficiency status, among others. This produces an estimate of each school's predicted impact on suspensions based on how frequently it had suspended students in previous years.

We find that an increase of one standard deviation in school strictness expands the likelihood of being suspended in a given school year by 1.7 percentage points, or 7 percent. The average annual number of days suspended per year grows by 0.38, a 16 percent increase.

How does this affect student outcomes later in life? We look at criminal activity throughout Mecklenburg County and find that students who attend a stricter school are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated between the ages of 16 and 21.

Students assigned a school that is one standard deviation more strict are 17 percent more likely to be arrested and 20 percent more likely to go to jail, based on our estimated increases of about 3.2 percentage points for arrests and 2.5 percentage points for incarcerations. In looking at what types of crimes are involved, we find that school strictness increases later involvement in crimes related to illegal drugs, fraud, arson, and burglary, but not in serious violent crimes like murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

We also look at the impact on student academic performance and educational attainment and find no evidence that school strictness affects overall achievement. Because we measure the net effect across all students in a school, this may be due to a balancing of two opposing forces: negative effects of lost instructional time for those students who were suspended and positive effects of reduced number of disruptive peers in the classroom for students who were not.

However, we do find evidence that suspensions negatively affect educational attainment. A one standard deviation stricter school increases the likelihood that a student drops out of high school by 1.7 percentage points, or 15 percent, and decreases the likelihood of attending a 4-year college by 2.4 percentage points, or 11 percent.

We then compare effects by race and find outsized impacts for Black and Hispanic students. Being assigned to a school that is one standard deviation more strict increases the average number of days suspended each school year by 0.43 for Black and Hispanic students compared to 0.21 days for non-minority students. That number is even larger for Black and Hispanic males, who are suspended 0.82 more days each year, on average-more than three times the effect for non-minority males.

As adults, Black and Hispanic students assigned to stricter schools are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated than their non-minority classmates. A one standard deviation stricter school increases the likelihood of being arrested by 3.9 percentage points for Black and Hispanic students compared to 2.7 percentage points for non-minority students (see Figure 2). The effect on incarceration in adulthood is 3.1 percentage points for Black and Hispanic students compared to 1.9 percentage points for non-minority students. Negative effects are especially pronounced among Black and Hispanic male students, who are 5.4 percentage points more likely to be arrested and 4.4 percentage points more likely to be incarcerated as adults.

While the average impact of a strict school across all students is negative, we do find small positive impacts on academic achievement for white male students. White male students who are assigned a school that is one standard deviation stricter score about 0.06 standard deviations higher on middle-school math and reading tests. This is consistent with prior studies that show positive short-run academic benefits to some students from removing disruptive peers from the classroom. However, we find no long-run impact on educational attainment for white males, who also experience substantial increases in adult arrests and incarcerations of 4.9 and 3.7 percentage points, respectively.
What Drives School Strictness?
We investigate three potential factors driving differences in school strictness. First, we look at the potential role of school peers. Prior research has found that peers are important contributors to students' educational experiences, but we find little relationship between school strictness and peer characteristics, suggesting that our results are not driven by changes in peer composition.

Second, we test our main school strictness results alongside two other measures of school effects, based on student-achievement gains and teacher turnover. We find that disciplinary strictness is the only predictor of students' later involvement in the criminal-justice system. This serves as further evidence that our results are driven by school effects on suspensions rather than other aspects of school quality or simply the disruption caused by sudden changes in enrollment patterns.

Finally, we turn to the role of school leaders, who have considerable discretion in how they handle disciplinary action. Principals have the authority to set parental meetings, after-school interventions, and in-school suspensions. Even the process for short-term out-of-school suspension is almost completely up to school leaders in Charlotte-Mecklenburg; the superintendent's approval is only required for long-term suspensions of 11 days or more. We look at the movements of principals across schools and find that when a principal who has been strict in prior years switches into a new school, suspensions in the new school increase. This suggests that school effects on suspensions are driven by leadership decisions.

These findings echo the public's anecdotal understanding of the strong role that principals play in establishing school climate and discipline. Consider Charlotte-Mecklenburg's recent approach to limiting suspensions among young elementary-school students. Suspending very young students has come under public criticism across the country, with policymakers in New York City, Colorado, and New Jersey weighing moratoriums on the practice. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board considered a moratorium but opted to limit principal discretion instead and now requires the superintendent's approval. In 2017-18, the first year of the new policy, the number of suspensions for K-2 students fell by 90 percent.
Implications
Misbehaving peers can have strong negative impacts on other students in the classroom, and all students need a safe, predictable, and peaceful environment to thrive. But our findings show that the school-to-prison pipeline is real and poses substantial risks for students in strict school environments. On average, students who attend middle schools that rely heavily on suspensions are at greater risk of being arrested and incarcerated as young adults and less likely to graduate from high school and go to college. Further, these effects are most pronounced for Black and Hispanic males, who are dramatically underrepresented among college graduates and overrepresented in the nation's prison system.

This raises a critical question for policymakers and educators who enforce strict school discipline: for whom are our schools safe? And it establishes an opportunity for principals and organizations that support school leadership to weigh the tradeoffs between strict discipline practices and longer-term outcomes for students. As the nation continues to grapple with questions about racial equity and police reform, the contributing causal role that school-discipline practices play in raising the risk of criminality in adulthood cannot be ignored.
Andrew Bacher-Hicks is assistant professor of education at Boston University. Stephen B. Billings is associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. David J. Deming is professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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Stricter middle schools raise the risk of adult arrests

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Learning for Justice

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In Meridian, Miss., police routinely arrest and transport youths to a juvenile detention center for minor classroom misbehaviors. In Jefferson Parish, La., according to a U.S. Department of Justice complaint, school officials have given armed police "unfettered authority to stop, frisk, detain, question, search and arrest schoolchildren on and off school grounds." In Birmingham, Ala., police officers are permanently stationed in nearly every high school.

In fact, hundreds of school districts across the country employ discipline policies that push students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system at alarming rates-a phenomenon known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Last month, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., held the first federal hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline-an important step toward ending policies that favor incarceration over education and disproportionately push minority students and students with disabilities out of schools and into jails.

In opening the hearing, Durbin told the subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, "For many young people, our schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system. This phenomenon is a consequence of a culture of zero tolerance that is widespread in our schools and is depriving many children of their fundamental right to an education."

A wide array of organizations-including the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP and Dignity in Schools-offered testimony during the hearing. They joined representatives from the Departments of Education and Justice to shine a national spotlight on a situation viewed far too often as a local responsibility.

"We have a national problem that deserves federal action," Matthew Cregor, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, explained. "With suspension a top predictor of dropout, we must confront this practice if we are ever to end the 'dropout crisis' or the so-called achievement gap." In the words of Vermont's Sen. Patrick Leahy, "As a nation, we can do better."

What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

Policies that encourage police presence at schools, harsh tactics including physical restraint, and automatic punishments that result in suspensions and out-of-class time are huge contributors to the pipeline, but the problem is more complex than that.

The school-to-prison pipeline starts (or is best avoided) in the classroom. When combined with zero-tolerance policies, a teacher's decision to refer students for punishment can mean they are pushed out of the classroom-and much more likely to be introduced into the criminal justice system.

Who's in the Pipeline?

Students from two groups-racial minorities and children with disabilities-are disproportionately represented in the school-to-prison pipeline. African-American students, for instance, are 3.5 times more likely than their white classmates to be suspended or expelled, according to a nationwide study by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights.

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Policies and practices that favor incarceration over education do us all a grave injustice.

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The ACLU is committed to challenging the "school-to-prison pipeline," a disturbing national trend wherein youth are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Many of these youth are Black or Brown, have disabilities, or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, and would benefit from additional supports and resources. Instead, they are isolated, punished, and pushed out.

"Zero-tolerance" policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in schools lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline. Related Resources

The ACLU believes that children should be educated and supported in schools, not incarcerated. We are working to challenge numerous policies and practices within public school systems and the juvenile justice system that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.

For a growing number of students, the path to incarceration includes the "stops" below.

Failing Public Schools
For most students, the pipeline begins withinadequate resources in public schools. Overcrowded classrooms, a lack of qualified teachers, and insufficient funding for "extras" such as counselors, special education services, and even textbooks, lock students into second-rate educational environments. This failure to meet educational needs increases disengagement and dropouts, increasing the risk of later court involvement. (1) Even worse, schools may actually encourage dropouts in response to pressures from test-based accountability regimes such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which create incentives to push out low-performing students to boost overall test scores. (2)
Zero-Tolerance and Other School Discipline

Lacking resources, facing incentives to push out low-performing students, and responding to a handful of highly-publicized school shootings, schools have embraced zero-tolerance policies that automatically impose severe punishment regardless of circumstances. Under these policies, students have been expelled for bringing nail clippers or scissors to school. Rates of suspension have increased dramatically in recent years-from 1.7 million in 1974 to 3.1 million in 2000 (3) - and have been most dramatic for children of color.

Overly harsh disciplinary policies push students down the pipeline and into the juvenile justice system. Suspended and expelled children are often left unsupervised and without constructive activities; they also can easily fall behind in their coursework, leading to a greater likelihood of disengagement and drop-outs. All of these factors increase the likelihood of court involvement. (4)

As harsh penalties for minor misbehavior become more pervasive, schools increasingly ignore or bypass due process protections for suspensions and expulsions. The lack of due process is particularly acute for students with disabilities, who are disproportionately represented in the pipeline despite the heightened protections afforded to them under law.

Policing School Hallways

Many under-resourced schools become pipeline gateways by placing increased reliance on police rather than teachers and administrators to maintain discipline. Growing numbers of districts employ school police officers to patrol school hallways, often with little or no training in working with youth. As a result, children are far more likely to be subject to school-based arrests-the majority of which are for non-violent offenses, such as disruptive behavior-than they were a generation ago. The rise in school-based arrests, the quickest route from the classroom to the jailhouse, most directly exemplifies the criminalization of school children.

Disciplinary Alternative Schools

In some jurisdictions, students who have been suspended or expelled have no right to an education at all. In others, they are sent to disciplinary alternative schools.

Growing in number across the country, these shadow systems-sometimes run by private, for-profit companies-are immune from educational accountability standards (such as minimum classroom hours and curriculum requirements) and may fail to provide meaningful educational services to the students who need them the most. As a result, struggling students return to their regular schools unprepared, are permanently locked into inferior educational settings, or are funneled through alternative schools into the juvenile justice system.

Court Involvement and Juvenile Detention

Youth who become involved in the juvenile justice system are often denied procedural protections in the courts; in one state, up to 80% of court-involved children do not have lawyers. (5) Students who commit minor offenses may end up in secured detention if they violate boilerplate probation conditions prohibiting them from activities like missing school or disobeying teachers.

Students pushed along the pipeline find themselves in juvenile detention facilities, many of which provide few, if any, educational services. Students of color - who are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended, expelled, or arrested for the same kind of conduct at school (6) - and those with disabilities are particularly likely to travel down this pipeline. (7)

Though many students are propelled down the pipeline from school to jail, it is difficult for them to make the journey in reverse. Students who enter the juvenile justice system face many barriers to their re-entry into traditional schools. The vast majority of these students never graduate from high school.

Endnotes:
1. American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on School Health, "Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion," PEDIATRICS (Vol. 112 No. 5, Nov. 2003), p. 1207. See also: Johanna Wald & Dan Losen, "Defining and Re-directing a School-to-Prison Pipeline," NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT (No. 99, Fall 2003), p. 11.
2. David N. Figlio "Testing, Crime and Punishment," JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS (Vol. 90 Iss. 4-5, May 2006).
3. Advancement Project, EDUCATION ON LOCKDOWN: THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO JAILHOUSE TRACK (Mar. 2005), p. 15.
4. American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on School Health, "Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion," PEDIATRICS (Vol. 112 No. 5, Nov. 2003), p. 1207. See also: Johanna Wald & Dan Losen, "Defining and Re-directing a School-to-Prison Pipeline," NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT (No. 99, Fall 2003), p. 11.
5. ACLU, The Children's Law Center & The Office of the Ohio State Public Defender, A CALL TO AMEND THE OHIO RULES OF JUVENILE PROCEDURE TO PROTECT THE RIGHT TO COUNSEL (Jan. 2006), p. 1.
6. Russel J. Skiba, ZERO TOLERANCE, ZERO EVIDENCE (2000), pp. 11-12; The Advancement Project & The Civil Rights Project, OPPORTUNITIES SUSPENDED: THE DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES OF ZERO TOLERANCE AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE POLICIES (June 2000), pp. 7-9; Russell J. Skiba, et al., THE COLOR OF DISCIPLINE: SOURCES OF RACIAL AND GENDER DISPROPORTIONALITY IN SCHOOL PUNISHMENT (2000).
7. David Osher et al., "Schools Make a Difference: The Overrepresentation of African American Youth in Special Education and the Juvenile Justice System," RACIAL INEQUITY IN SPECIAL EDUCATION (Daniel J. Losen & Gary Orfield eds., 2002), p. 98.

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