You have to know just two things to understand what kind of country America has become in the last generation. First, you need to know how much we're spending on prisons; second, you need to know how much the country is spending on public higher education. Know those things for your state, and the story of the declining American empire, circa 2007, pretty much narrates itself.
Take the state of California, which has long been America's bellwether. Within five years, according to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's current budget, the state will spend more on locking up prisoners ($15.4 billion) than on public higher education ($15.3 billion) -- an historic development and "unique among large states," Maya Harris, the ACLU's executive director in Northern California, concluded recently in the San Francisco Chronicle.
But the trend is even more ominous than it first appears. States' K-12 schools and their prisons are now linked in an insidious system that discards troubled students and imprisons them. In the era of No Child Left Behind, schools are under enormous pressure to raise test scores or get shut down by state authorities. Quietly and out of public view, schools figure that some students are so troubled, so beyond educational and emotional repair, that it pays to push some kids out of school, ensuring that such students won't take the tests that would put the school's existence in jeopardy.
It's hard to estimate just how many students whom schools have discarded as a result of these cynical calculations. But we do have some powerful evidence from a series of studies prior to the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, when states were on a rampage to create high school "exit" tests that students had to pass to graduate, regardless of their actual performance in school.
In their groundbreaking research, Walt Haney and his colleagues at Boston College discovered that millions of students were disappearing from American schools between ninth and twelfth grade in the aftermath of states requiring students to pass these "exit" exams. Worse, Haney and his colleagues found that the national attrition rate tripled from 30 years ago. States with the worst disappearance rates were in the South. In 1987, for instance, 65 percent of Florida's 9th graders made it to high school graduation. But, by 2001, just half of the 9th grade cohort graduated. l
So where did these kids go? Undoubtedly, scores of discarded students wound up in jail. In fact, the relationship between a young person's failure to finish school and going to prison is virtually a law of nature in the United States. Haney and his co-authors noted, for instance, that seven in 10 federal prisoners and six in 10 state inmates have not completed high school. That's in contrast to a jail rate of 18 percent in the general population, which suggests that not finishing high school triples a young person's chances of being imprisoned.
This virtual pipeline ushering kids from school to prison in America is a shameful indictment of the richest democracy on the planet that purports to value equal educational opportunity for all. California isn't alone. According to The Oregonian newspaper, that state has already crossed the line in choosing prisons over education. Oregon taxpayers are now paying more money to lock up some 13,000 inmates than what the public contributes in state funds for more than 400,000 college students.
In Texas, whose fraudulent "Texas Miracle" under George W. Bush's governorship was the inspiration for No Child Left Behind, per capita spending on prisons surged 189 percent between 1980 and 2000, in contrast to a 32 percent increase in spending on higher education. It's no accident that Texas' rate of push outs from school surged in the aftermath of its high school graduation test, particularly among poor whites, Hispanics and black students. For my last book, Standardized Minds, I interviewed one young Hispanic woman who'd taken the graduation test seven times, always failing by just 1 or 2 points on the math section. Although she was getting pretty good grades, the whole fiasco demoralized her and she never graduated.
I'm not suggesting that our increasingly punitive public schools are the only causes of the surge in prison spending. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug and property crimes obviously come first to mind. But, as Maya Harris suggests, bad student behavior that in the past would have merited a trip to the vice principal's office has now been criminalized. Cops routinely work the hallways of public schools, and the lines separating the education and criminal justice systems have been torn apart.
Add to that criminalization of student behavior the imperative of schools to stay afloat in the Orwellian era of No Child Left Behind, and you get a nation that discards its undesirable youths and funnels them into the prison system. It would be a creepy plot for a dystopian novel, but this story is not science fiction. It's the story of the nation we have become.