#1 – The Opportunity Gap (Transcript)
In this first podcast of the three-part series, we’ll introduce you to the issue of Washington’s opportunity gap. We’ve been working together, researching and interviewing for several months now, trying to answer some questions that are at the heart of this issue. What is the Opportunity Gap? What is the school to prison pipeline? What causes these phenomena? Listen.
#2 – The Cost of Inequity (Transcipt)
In this podcast, we’ll be taking a closer look at the actual cost of our nation’s inequities within the public school system. When we talk about cost here, we are talking more than a dollar amount. There are definitely lost opportunities for an individual when he or she doesn’t graduate high school, but we’ll also try to shed light on some of the social and cultural costs to school climate under zero-tolerance policies. And, we’ll look at some of the drawbacks for Washington State when we don’t educate our students. Listen.
#3 – From Pupil to Prisoner (Transcript)
The last segment explored the economic, social and cultural cost of educational inequity. This time we’ll be looking more closely at the connection between a broken prison and education system and how ultimately they work together to disenfranchise youth with a very real and lasting effect on their lives. How exactly do we push kids out of schools and onto a path towards jail? What does that process look like? In this podcast we’d like to paint a picture of exactly how this broken system is changing kids from being pupils to being prisoners. Getting our queue from Michelle Alexander’s recent work, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness” we’ll be looking at how these two systems—education and prison—perpetuate the very same inequities seen in America’s Jim Crow era. Listen to Part One. Listen to Part Two.