Education Justice

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

–Frederick Douglass

New for 2010/2011!

SYPP is launching a new campaign against racist and unjust discipline policies in local schools!

The school-to-prison pipeline is a tangible reality in our community; a systemic conduit that tracks marginalized youth out of the school system and into cycles of poverty and incarceration. In King County, youth of color and low-income youth get pushed out of the public school system at higher rates than their white counterparts.[1] We also know that youth who “drop out”[2] of high school are 3.5 times more likely to be arrested than high school graduates.[3] TeamChild, a Seattle based legal advocacy agency, identifies the school-to-prison pipeline as part of a domino effect in which under-resourced communities lean on schools to support youth, and then those school systems implement policies that push youth of color and low-income youth towards prison and poverty.[4]

Enough is enough! Youth organizers across the country are taking action against the school to prison pipeline by fighting for education justice and for liberatory discipline policies.  Now, SYPP organizers in the YO 2.0 program are gearing up for a new campaign to change the discipline policies in Seattle schools.  This is a powerful follow-up to our previous campaign to take on the institutionally racist WASL test.

As of December 1st, 2010, we’re only in the beginning stages of campaign development, but we are already looking for allies.  Interested in helping us with research or outreach?  Are you a youth who wants to join our organizing efforts?  Contact us at info@sypp.org!

Education Justice Campaign Infosheet

SYPP’s Legacy of Campaign Organizing

As our past projects show, youth organizers at SYPP have a long history of initiating fierce and creative action campaigns to win the changes they want in their communities.

Some of those campaigns include:

-Our 2 year Education Justice Campaign against the  Washington Assessment of Student Learning,  which focused its first demands on the decoupling of the institutionally racist exit exam from high school graduation requirements.

-Our multi-year fight against institutionally racist history curriculum in schools, with the demand for Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to be taught as part of the Seattle schools curriculum.

-Our  campaign against sexual harassment in schools which, in 1997, led SYPP members to found the Beyond Survival Young Women’s Conference.

[1] According to the Office of Strategic Planning and Performance Management the on-time graduation rate for white students is 80.5% compared to the rate for African American, Latino and Native American students which is an average of 64.3%.

[2] At SYPP we use the term “push out” to signify systemic factors that influence whether youth graduate from high school.

[3] Coalition for Juvenile Justice, Abandoned in the Back Row: New Lessons in Education and Delinquency Prevention,2 (2001), at http://www.juvjustice.org/media/resources/resource_122.pdf

[4] TeamChild, The School to Prison Pipeline Toolkit, at http://www.teamchild.org/stp/toolkit.htm