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From the reading in which Erica describes the school to prison pipeline (Right to Be Hostile, p. 6 ), I noticed the following quote: “These students leave school in no position to seriously challenge

the institutional narratives and media images that represent them

as violent and uneducatable and that contribute to the notion that

imprisonment is a reasonable, if not natural, option in their lives.

(Duncan, 2000, 39).”

The Nice White Parents Ep. 1 podcast notes the phenomenon of the white students making up the STEM classes of the public school (2:45). It was also notable that upon the walk through, the parent did not ask about this. If the white parents never ask about it, we know the institutions will not listen so easily to Black people who attempt to equalize society.

R. Benjamin notes in the Ted video (14:00) that it “says something about us” that people seek genetic reasons to explain gun violence. To me, it says this about us: we would rather blame what is natural than admit what we have manufactured for society is wrong.

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"The NYC Dept of Education was aware their schools were segregated. It was also aware that desegregation is the most effective way to close the gap in achievement between Black and white students." This quote from the "Nice White Parents" podcast keeps ringing in my ears. This feels like watching your favorite team throw an interception in the endzone. They get it all right and still throw it away right at the goal line. If they acknowledge the problem, acknowledge the solution, but leave the means to that end up to "selling" public schools, then they've lost the battle. Also, I think Joffe-Walt gets the tone right early on in the episode. There's a grossness to the whole thing. Mostly white parents, touring mostly non-white schools, led by mostly non-white administrators, being sold on why they should send their kids there. How can they get so close and still fail to take the next right step?

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It was interesting to see how people use brain scans to learn about impulsivity. This was also tied in to people who commit crimes and this made me think back to the school and prison reading. It is interesting how we can connect technology and human behaviors to school and prison as well. This TED talk truly helped me piece this entire section together.

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Where I live, there's not really a choice and where are you go to school. The districts are pretty spread out and you just go to the school district in which you live in. I was very surprised by the fact that some schools are filled with kids and schools right down the block could be almost empty. The idea of school district selling their schools to white parents was astonishing. I feel like schools should just focus on trying to give students the best education and not trying to dress up their schools.

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The statistics in this reading were shocking to me. When I read that 75% of all women are in jail for nonviolent offenses, my eyebrows rose up. I am guessing that most of these cases would not have occured without proper resources or mental health help. This also goes for most people in jail in general, it seems like such a non-solution to throw anyone and everyone in jail, rather than get them help before these issues even arise to where they need to be sent to jail.

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After watching this video, one of the key takeaways I took from Benjamin's discussion is that technology is not a neutral space for all. In other words, technology can offer discriminatory designs rather than serve as a safe platform for all to utilize. While listening to this, I instantly connected some information I had researched outside of this course. Particularly, when it comes to the growing concern of ChatGPT and xAI databases and the resources they are stealing from local communities. Recently, xAI opened up a new database center in a historically Black community within Memphis. As A.I. requires massive amounts of water to cool their servers, it has led to complications with water resources in this community, growing pollution, and noise complaints. I recently read how this is particularly impacting students, who spoke openly about how this database center frightens them in thinking about the health of their community. While this may be a little off-topic, I can't help but connect these dots in considering how technology cannot serve as a neutral space.

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"Here they come to save our poor struggling school that couldn't possibly make it on its own without their money and their vision."

This quote struck me instantly in terms of contextualizing the economics of education and who may be holding the main power. Instantly, I was able to connect this quote with the podcast we listened to last week which covered the significance of Brown v. Board. In the podcast, someone commented how a narrative had been spun that Black children in segregated schools "needed to be saved", insinuating that Black educators did not have the proper qualifications or skills to teach. In other words, there was a popularization of a "White Savior Complex", which demeaned the efficacy of Black educators across the United States. Hearing this quote made me further realize the lasting impact this mentality has had in education. It is not in the far past but rather, remains in our educational spaces.

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Benjamin’s talk urges us to recognize that design in any setting is never neutral. Design choices reflect values, power, and often presumption about who is normal, who is different, who is expendable. One powerful insight that I gleaned is that when we frame injustices as technical or biological problems, we risk ignoring racism, inequality and policy limitations and failures. Also, seeing people only as data or subjects reinforces inequality; genuine inclusion demands uplifting voices of those affected and shifting from designing for to designing with.

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Instantly, the prose that Erica Meiners offered in this piece struck me as I reflected upon my own experiences in education. Meiners draws comparisons between school uniforms, metal detectors, and staggering security guards to the same surroundings seen in a prison, questioning, "What are they preparing us for?" I found it especially relevant when the author brought relevant information about certain disciplinary policies in schools that at as predecessors for incarceration, such as expulsion or suspension. As a child, these were policies that always seemed bizarre to me. Why would we wish to punish a child who needs more support in school by withdrawing that support from them? Rather than support such policies, what if schools operated to provide more support for these students? For example - finding deeper connection and meaningful relationships with students to discover why they may be lashing out at home.

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Nice White Parents provides a snapshot into how society has always been structured around status; who belongs, who holds power, and who is pushed aside. I appreciated that through storytelling, it shows how laws, traditions, and even unspoken cultural norms that shape people’s opportunities and experiences. What stands out is how these systems of status are not just historical; they’re ongoing, living in the way we frame identity, access, and belonging today. I appreciated how the conversation pushes us to consider not only how status is assigned but also how it can be challenged, reimagined, and dismantled. Some takeaways for me were: status is often invisible by greatly influential, historical practices continue to rear its head today which continue to allow inequities to exist and finally understanding whoever benefits and whoever is harmed by these current systems is the key to creating change.

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"Rather than dealing with the underlying conditions we create short term responses that often get the issue out of sight out of mind. These responses too often locate the problem inside kinds of people like the so called loiterer rather than deal squarely with the political and economic conditions that create the need to sleep on a park bench in the first place"

In such a quickly moving society focused on immediate reward it is hard to imagine a time where long term meaningful change arises from addressing deep systemic issues.

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"They were pleading with us to please take part in this public school. I don't think I've ever felt my own consumer power more viscerally than I did shopping for a public school as a white parent. We were entering schools that people like us had ignored for decades. They were not our places, but we were being invited to make them ours"

It feels so wrong that schools should be sold as a pitch and even worse that many schools are forced to do so in order to increase funding. Students that don't have the privilege of a choice of where to go to school, many times non-white students, are left to depend on the decision of primarily white families to determine funding and resources available to them.

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What we see in the 'school-to-prison pipeline' is a cycle where discipline policies, heavy surveillance, and underfunded schools mirror the logic of incarceration—disproportionately impacting youth of color and other underrepresented groups. The effects extend beyond prison walls, stripping people of rights, opportunities, and dignity long after release. Too often, when students push back against inequity, their anger is pathologized instead of being recognized as a valid critique. At the same time, the state’s decision to fund prisons over schools reveals whose futures it considers expendable. Breaking this cycle means not only rethinking policies but also amplifying the voices of those directly impacted, shifting the narrative from individual failure to systemic accountability. Some questions for takeaway are: How might schools actively work to transform anger into collective action, rather than vilifying it? What role can we as educators and community members play in changing the narrative around youth of color in media outlets and policies?

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"Anger, an "outlaw emotion" (Jagger, 1989), is a legitimate response to injustice or violence. But what happens when individuals who are racially profiled and tracked toward special education, undereducated in low-resource schools that posses metal detectors and have drug searches conducted by the on-site school police stations, one guidance counselor for 500 students, and a low track record for graduation or for placing students in a community college or university get angry? Who possesses the "right" to be hostile?"

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How do go about creating an equitable society? It starts with the design and framework. Considerations to people from ALL aspects of life and not just the communities of people who are behind the design itself.

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“One by one, people are talking about equality, and diversity, and community, and the meaning of public education. Here, at the Culture Palatial Palace, full of white people.”

As a native New Yorker and person of color, this piece really resonated with me especially when recognizing how truly segregated the NYC public school system is. With my identities, it was also really easy empathize and understand the feeling of colonization the parents and students of SIS felt when the new white familles had essentially taken over the PTA.

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When I was in high school, the presence of metal detectors signified that the school was in a “dangerous” neighborhood. These schools were heavily in black and brown neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. “Metal detectors” was really just a code that alerted students and families that the high school was either underfunded, had gang activity, and/or limited academic opportunities. Given the prevalence of school shootings, the perception of metal detectors has shifted dramatically.

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“Susan is white herself, but she didn’t come in with the new white parents. When she started, her son was one of the only white kids in the school. And now she felt like they were all being written into a narrative that wasn’t true, that SIS was a bad school before, and now that the new white families had arrived, it was being turned around.”

One of my takeaways was how there was a clear divide between the “new” parents and the “old” parents, which in turn created a divide between the “new” students and the “old" students. SIS was not a bad school prior to the influx of white families, but it was labeled by those families, creating the bad reputation.

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Nice White Parents was a very eye-opening regarding how much of an influence money can have on your education/life. When the new white parents asked for a dual-language French program as SIS, they got it. There was not a school-wide debate about it. It was not decided as a whole. Other dominant or useful languages were not even considered. I found it interesting because it seemed as though just because these white parents had money, they could more easily just get what they wanted-without much resistance. I can see how that could cause tension and frustrations among the school and parents.

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As an educator, I have often taken a step back to look at the educational system and notice similarities between schools and correctional facilities.

Page 3 of the Introduction really stuck in my mind as I was reading- "As the interlocking relationships between schools and the judicial system increased in the 1990s, select schools in the United sated not only resemble prisons and apply the same disciplinary and surveillance technologies, but they also use the same language, "pedagogies," and philosophies espoused by prisons and jails (Salman & Gabbard, 2003).

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“Technology should be a bridge, not a barrier. Equity isn’t a feature, it’s the foundation.”

When tech is built without equity at its core, it stops being a tool for connection and starts becoming an barrier.

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The economics policies podcast well-off families treat public schools like luxury boutiques, they favorable prestige programs and stay away from core supports, deepening inequities and sidelining the students these schools exist to uplift…

“Everyone wants what’s best for the school, but they don’t share the same vision of what ‘best’ means.”

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Meiners states that “When…states build more prisons than school colleges, this shapes academic options for youth. When budgets for corrections balloon and funding for higher education contracts, the state’s priorities about the future of select youth are clear.”

This echos the quiet violence of several institutions and their budgets by either locking them up, and not investing in them. This reframes the “school-to-prison pipeline” as a funding pipeline-money flows to cells, not classrooms.

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Why is more spending funneled into the creation/expansion of prisons rather than the creation/expansion of social services that would prevent the need for the PIC?

Who wins from the spending of money this way? It certainly isn't people of color, nor do I think it's society as a whole who would benefit from less incarceration..

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The same structures of inequity seemed to be transferred from an issue across schools to an issue within schools. Without a change in how we approach education funding (or other aspects of education for that matter), we will continue to perpetuate the same broken systems.

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"The heart of discriminatory design is that we can create technological fixes for social crises ... rather than dealing with the underlying conditions"

How many of our systems are based in this short-term fix mentality?

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Benjamin observes that when it comes to social issues, such as the housing crisis or gun violence, we often look for and locate the problem in the individual, ignoring structure. Thinking about this in terms of education and the attention crisis, we likewise locate the problem in the individual: “students can’t pay attention today” is commonly lamented. We see evidence of this in the tool and technologies we are designing to handle this: designs for glasses that would administer a slight shock to the brain when detecting a person’s attention has strayed; calls for personal digital hygiene or berating a student for lack of “will power.” How would our approach look different if we located the structural harms of the attention economy and the relational nature of attention?

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In the first episode of Nice, White Parents, Imee, a parent at the school featured, says “money tends to scare people…because it twists everything around.” She gives the example of how money can warp what it means to build community: her idea of community is a culturally diverse potluck – not a catered dinner. The host likewise makes an observation about the different invocations of “gentrification” versus “diversity.” Gentrification involves money and cultural displacement. Later, when discussing the separate (massively successful) fundraising efforts by the newer parents for the dual-language program they established, it becomes clear that this new dynamic takes on the face of the “white savior,” offering – so to speak – a catered dinner to a community that is just trying to hold on to their potlucks.

This episode reminded me of the one by Malcolm Gladwell, who commented on the way white parents and educators viewed Black schools as inferior to their way of doing things. Here, too, non-white children were in need of “saving.”

A related takeaway for me is that the things we value as a society determine what we see as inherently good (e.g. luxury, efficiency, ease; connection, satisfaction, effort) – but it is the privileged groups who have the power to assert these values.

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One powerful takeaway for me in this short introduction to Meiner’s book concerns the “pathologization of dissent.” While we have reflected quite a bit on the ideologies underlying the very foundation of public education and education policy in the United States, this idea suggests that beyond reifying unjust or oppressive social structures, schools (and other social institutions) work to reify subjecthood that is complacent in injustice and oppression.

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The ways technology is designed and implemented in schools can either reinforce existing inequalities or provide new opportunities for learning. “Innovation is not just about what we create, but also about what and who we leave behind.” – Ruha Benjamin

Benjamin highlights that the interests and biases of its designers are reflected in technology, which is never impartial. She uses park benches that are intended to keep homeless people out as an example of how even minor design decisions may ingrain social injustices into daily life. This idea also applies to digital tools, software, and learning platforms in education, which may unintentionally give preference to students who have greater resources or experience. She contends that in order to ensure that all kids can fully participate, acquire new skills, and interact creatively, equitable technology needs to be intentionally designed, accessible, and supported. Depending on how it is used, technology may either deepen already-existing gaps or be a potent instrument for inclusivity.

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Socio-economic factors and social privilege play a major role in shaping public schools, often in ways that extend beyond funding disparities. “The single most powerful force shaping our public schools isn’t money. It’s white parents.” – Chana Joffe-Walt.

Joffe-Walt demonstrates how the arrival of white families at the School of International Studies profoundly changed the goals for decision-making, the resources available, and the makeup of the class. Although they frequently portray their involvement as supporting "the best" for the school, these parents' ideas of success and excellence are frequently based on their own social and cultural norms. This dynamic illustrates how access, opportunity, and influence within public schools can be shaped by social and racial privilege, sometimes at the expense of many students and families. It demonstrates that inequalities in education are caused by both who has the authority to influence school environments and financial disparities.

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The connection between schools and prisons shows how educational institutions can sometimes push students toward incarceration instead of supporting them. “The term ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ names the connections between public schooling and the increasing reliance on prisons in the United States.” – Erica Meiners. Meiners draws attention to the ways that criminal justice system procedures are mirrored in school disciplinary measures, such as frequent suspensions and zero-tolerance regulations. Black, Latino, and disabled kids are disproportionately impacted by these regulations, which frequently force them to leave classrooms and into courts and jails. She highlights that systematic racism, structural inequality, and punitive attitudes to school behavior are the causes of the pipeline rather than a spontaneous occurrence. By making this link, Meiners challenges educators and legislators to think about how schools could be places of opportunity, support, and intervention rather than punishment.

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When I heard a quote, “It’s very possible if we only leave it to technical experts that we will have a future that is more unequal than our present”, it made me think about how progress is defined and who gets to shape it. If only experts or those with privilege are involved in designing solutions, their perspectives and priorities may dominate, while the needs of marginalized groups are ignored. This can make new technologies reproduce the same inequalities we already have. True progress requires including diverse voices in decision-making so that the future we build does not deepen existing divides but creates more fairness for everyone.

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This podcast made me think about how fundraising and resource allocation can create more division if they only serve the priorities of certain parents. The new white parents at SIS raised substantial amounts of money, but much of it was directed toward the French program, which reflected their own interests. Parents of color, who had been part of the school community for years, felt excluded from these decisions. For fundraising to truly benefit all students, it has to be transparent, collective, and centered on the needs of the whole school community, not just a select group. Otherwise, the same inequalities that exist outside the school get reproduced inside it.

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I loved Ruha's insight about the design. What really stuck with me was when she said “Rather than dealing with the underlying conditions, we create short term responses that often get the issue  out of sight out of mind ….and these responses too often locate the problem inside ‘kinds of people’ like the so called loiterer rather than deal squarely with the political and economic conditions  that create the need to sleep on a park bench in the first place.”

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When I read the remark, “The uniforms are just like the ones we had to wear in elementary school...what were they preparing us for?” I was struck by how it links schooling to the prison system. The comment shows how students can see uniforms, discipline, and surveillance as more than just school rules. They can feel like preparation for confinement. Coming from Thailand, where school uniforms are also required, I started to reflect on my own experience. I had always thought of uniforms as a symbol of tradition and order. Still, this perspective made me wonder if they also teach students to accept authority and control in ways that limit individuality. It raises questions about whether schools sometimes prepare us more for compliance than for real learning.

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In the third part of the video, Ruha Benjamin talked about how there always seems to be an immediate turn to studying the "DNA of mass killers" after a school shooting occurs.

This excerpt stood out to me because it led to me recalling when investigators after the Parkland Florida high school shooting were immediately trying to figure out what was going on in the suspect's mind before considering other items such as one's accessibility of firearms.

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"For a lot of kids of color, this looked a lot like something they’d already seen happen in their neighborhoods — white families showing up in large numbers, taking over stores, familiar spots. There’s a word for that. It’s gentrification. But I noticed that no one was using that word about the school. What was happening here was 'diversity'."

This quote was a key takeaway for me after reading the transcript of the provided core material because it helped me better understand the statements from different groups of people within the school in terms of how they viewed the new influx of white students into the school.

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"Adding the institution of education into the PIC asks researchers, activists, and educators to consider not just how our schools’ physical structures resemble prisons—metal detectors or school uniforms—but also the tentacles in policies, practices, and informal knowledges that support, naturalize, and extend relationships between incarceration and schools."

This quote was a key takeaway for me after reading the provided core material because it helped me understand or conceptualize the different ways in which education is intertwined with prisons.

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I really enjoyed how this video connected to the Meiners reading. Both ask, "How is X being designed, and what is its purpose?" I also appreciated Ruha Benjamin's point that "there are multiple futures in front of us, and where we end up really is going to be shaped by who we are consulting, who is participating, who is thought to get us there." I think about this a lot in relation to the rise of AI, a technology that is increasingly being used by educators and students alike. Those who are heavy users of AI might want to consider the forces that are shaping artificial intelligence, from government policies to the copyrighted material used to train large-language models without their authors' consent.

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The story of the NY School of International Studies showcases how students can be in the same school and still not be equal. To reduce inequality in our schools, we will need a shared sense of reality

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"When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison."

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When relaying the story of impulsivity testing on parolees, a quote that resonated with me was that the testing layered the "veneer of scientific inquiry onto existing prejudices". A great line encouraging critical thought about whose interests are served through science.

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Chana Joffe-Walt

Did you think about yourself as integrators? Or did you think about —

Rob Hansen

No. [LAUGHS] My pause was because I was trying to think if that had gone through my mind. And no, no. The — not integrators. Participants in a school that was going to, hopefully, be diverse, but yeah, not — that’s not a framing or a way of thinking about it that would have occurred to me at the time. [LAUGHS]

To me, this exchange—and the events that follow, culminating in an elite fundraiser that is both physically and ideologically removed from the school community it was intended to benefit—is a cautionary tale about not considering your positionality before engaging with a community. It's upsetting to me to see that Rob didn't consider his position before bringing his considerable experience and talent as a fundraiser to SIS. What might have been possible if Rob had solicited unrestricted funding for SIS instead of focusing on the French immersion program, or if he had polled educators, parents, and students about their priorities before speaking with potential funders?

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The readings about technology made me realize how easily tools can carry bias and shape what students learn. I connected with the idea that technology is never neutral; it reflects and shapes the values of the society that builds it. It also made me think about how quickly new apps or devices get added to classrooms without asking who they benefit most, or how they might widen gaps instead of closing them.

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Learning more about Brown v. Board and hearing from Nice White Parents helped me see how money and influence shape opportunity. The line that schools for Black children “rarely received the funds needed to meet even minimum standards” shows how uneven access was built in from the start. It makes me think about how funding, community voice, and political pressure still decide which schools get the most support today.

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Reading Right to Be Hostile made me look at discipline through a new lens. Meiners says schools and prisons form “a nexus of policies and practices that control young people.” It made me think about how often student behavior is treated as a threat instead of a sign that something isn’t working for them.

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Meiners quoting Duncan: "These students leave school in no position to seriously challenge the institutional narratives and media images that represent them as violent and uneducatable and that contribute to the notion that imprisonment is a reasonable, if not natural, option in their lives. (Duncan, 2000, 39)"

A school library program with a qualified, certified librarian can play a critical role in countering this phenomenon. When given the time and resources, certified librarians can offer students instruction in the areas of critical thinking and media literacy. Furthermore, they're trained to develop collections that include books that can be both mirrors and windows for these students (h/t Rudine Sims Bishop), serving as counterprogramming to the dominant, traditional narrative.

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"Researchers speaking back to this particular work say that it potentially violates a number of personal liberaties and that one Harvard geneticist says it says more about us, that we wish there was something inside of these people to explain."

This quote was said during the third discriminatory design as researchers want to look into the genetics of violence in hopes of preventing it. I think this quote can be used for various scenarios, even going back to some of the previous videos we have watched and articles we have read. It seems like people want to find an excuse or reason for anything that happens instead of learning from mistakes or owning up to them.

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A parent was "worried the school was changing in ways that were damaging to the community".

This happens more often than not, as someone who comes from a district that quite literally splits elementary schools between lower-income and middle/upper-income, there are often parents who get upset about whether the money collected will stay with the school that already has plenty of money, or help the students in the other building gain more resources. Parents often forget that the main goal is ensuring all students have the resources they need to succeed, and that they should truly be a community; however, money tends to cause a lot of issues, whether it's one person or within a school.

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"Mass media sutures the transition between schools and jails with
hyperbolic representations of youth of color as defective and in need of
management."

Seeing the various forms of technology and what is displayed on the screens of our youth, it is horrifying to see the people and things they start to praise/prioritize over their academics. I completely agree with this quote, as instead of exposing our youth to violence, crime, etc, they should be hearing positive stories in their communities. What our students see on their screens definitely takes a toll on their personalities and daily actions.

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"When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison." What is more important, that students learn and grow as academics and as a person, or that they learn to conform and follow directions and rules?

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Something that frustrated me while listening to Benjamin's speech is how we as a society "deal with the conditions that create the need to sleep on a park bench in the first place" rather than addressing the underlying issue, which would solve the entire problem.

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Two quotes really stuck out to me as I listened to the episode, and they both revolve around who was involved in the decision-making process.

"But there was no school-wide debate about it, or consensus. The community didn’t decide."

"Because here I am trying to build something with the school. Why didn’t you just involve me? Why didn’t you just tell me about it? Like, it felt like it was a secret. I don’t know if it was or if it wasn’t. I’m invested in the school. Clearly, I’ve proven to you I’m invested in the school. And you couldn’t tell us that you wanted to fundraise in a different way?"

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The difference between a school experiencing a rise in diversity and a rise in gentrification lies in the sense of community. It was interesting to listen how PTA fundraising caused tension rather than connection.

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"These linkages are physical and grotesquely evident in urban schools with the increased use of surveillance and incarceration tools: metal detectors, surveillance cameras, school uniforms, and armed security guards. Schools look an awful lot like prisons, and sometimes schools look more like prisons than do real detention centers."

I teach in the rural setting and the inclusion of safety measures like metal detectors and a school resource officer have good intentions though I wonder if they just as well generate fear within student bodies.

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I resonated with Ruha's mention of who could be sitting at "the lab bench." Recently, my school administrators have taken an initiative to change and enforce the dress code to an extreme degree. The student response was expectedly ice cold. After the crackdown, many students arrived the following day wearing a series of uncommon outfits: garbage bags over their clothing, full suit and tie, cat ear headbands, etc. just to provoke or escalate the initiative and those leading it. Now, I am not taking a position that I believe dress codes should be ignored. It has its purpose but I believe an element is missing. Of the conversations I overhear students having in the daily repertoire of topics includes their reasonable opinions about what dress code could look like. Discriminatory design, at the high school level, often ignores the voices of the student body. I am a firm believer of creating opportunities for my students. Aren't we all? Allowing them a space at the table on the topic of dress code could build the strongest bridge. It may not be their responsibility to set the ruling of what should be allowed, but their input has value.