Advancing QuantCrit to Rethink the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Latinx and Black Youth

Abstract

Latinx and Black youth are pushed out of school at a higher than average rate of 7.7% and 5.5%, respectively, compared to 4.1% of White youth. By “pushed out” we are referring to students who are labeled as “drop outs.” This language shift is important, as, “dropout” implies a choice made by students to leave school while “pushout” accounts for the various forces that lead to students leaving school. One factor that contributes to this alarming statistic is that harsh school punishment disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minority students in urban settings, rather than making school more accessible for them. Using data from the California Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Data Collection repository, we provide a descriptive analysis of the school-toprison pipeline in Southern California. This description is based on two innovative critical race methodologies: QuantCrit (quantitative) and Counterstorytelling (qualitative). These methodologies illuminate the experiences of thirty-nine former high school students who were pushed out of high school through the activity of counter-storytelling, these former high school students speak and remember how racism, sexism, and classism manifested in their schooling experiences. This study shows how to use QuantCrit and counter-storytelling in criminal justice education.

Keywords:

• school-to-prison pipeline
• QuantCrit
• pushout
• youth control complex
• counter-stories

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We recognize recent linguistic and grammatical moves of “Latinx” and “BIPOC” to challenge gender binaries and ethnoracial homogenization.

2 When discussing secondary data that we did not collect we use the nomenclature of how the Juvenile Justice Department identifies race and ethnic variables in their research processes—Hispanic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nichole M. Garcia

Nichole M. Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, New Brunswick.

Jonathan M. Ibarra

Jonathan Ibarra is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and research associate at the Center for Publicly Engaged Scholarship.

Rebeca Mireles-Rios

Rebeca Mireles-Rios is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Gevirtz Graduate School of Education and Director of the Center for Publicly Engaged Scholarship.

Victor M. Rios

Victor Rios is a MacArthur Foundation Chair and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys.

Katherine Maldonado

Katherine Maldonado is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Ford Foundation and American Sociological Association Minority fellow.