Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline
| When |
Apr 09, 2025
from 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM |
|---|---|
| Where | Ekstrom Library, Chao Auditorium |
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The recipient of the 2025 Grawemeyer Award for Education, Mark R. Warren, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston will give a talk on “Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline.”
This book describes and analyzes the building of the grassroots movement to end racially disproportionate school discipline policy and policing practices in schools across the United States.
In the book, Warren shows that some of the first people to name and challenge the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) in a way that created a movement for change were Black and Brown parents and students of color in places like the Mississippi Delta.
The movement they created played a pivotal role in placing the STPP on the agenda of educators and policymakers and led directly to the adoption by the Department of Education of federal guidelines warning against racially discriminatory school discipline policies.
Where grassroots organizing has been strong and persistent, policymakers have ended zero-tolerance discipline policies and moved toward restorative alternatives, leading to important declines in exclusionary discipline, as well as more recent reforms to eliminate policing practices in schools.
“Change efforts in schools often focus on educators and school leaders, but usually fall short when it comes to addressing deep-seated systems that perpetuate inequity,” said Grawemeyer Award for Education Director and University of Louisville Professor of Educational Psychology Jeff Valentine. “As ‘Willful Defiance’ powerfully demonstrates, the voices, experiences, and leadership of those most affected by these issues must be central to any meaningful process of change.” Free and open to the public.
