ARTISTS

Digging Up the Pipeline:
Anna Deavere Smith Takes Notes from the Field
by Notes from the Field Dramaturg Alisa Solomon
Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva
Anna Deavere Smith as Linda Wayman, Principal,
Strawberry Mansion High School, Philadelphia, PA
What should happen to an elementary school student who declines to come in from recess
when the teacher calls? Or who grabs a classmate’s Play-Doh and refuses to give it back?
Or doesn’t take turns while playing with other kids? In Boston, according to Greater Boston
Legal Services, kids in grades K-3 have been suspended for these specific behaviors— kicked
out of school for a time simply for acting like children. Instead of disciplinary methods that
help children to grow socially and academically, suspensions, studies repeatedly show, are
counterproductive: they take kids out of a learning environment and leave them further behind
in their studies. What’s more, they do not help correct students’ misbehavior; rather, they often
confuse children, produce antipathy toward school, and, especially as students get older, leave
them unsupervised with unstructured time, free to hang out and get into trouble—often, with
the law.
School suspensions—disproportionately meted out to students of color and students with
disabilities—make up just one of the conduits feeding what child advocates and policy
experts have come to call the “school- to-prison pipeline”: the policies and practices that
push schoolchildren, especially those most at risk, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and
criminal justice systems.
It’s a disturbing, astonishing term that conjures a rushing tide of young people being funneled
behind bars. Some analysts have begun to call it the “cradle-to-prison pipeline,” noting that
FROM THE ARTISTS
NOTES FROM THE FIELD EDUCATIONAL TOOLKIT 8