Chapter 6

The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education,

and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Maisha T. Winn
Nadia Behizadeh
Emory University

I n 1988, the Modern Language Association hosted “The Right to Literacy” confer-
ence at the Ohio State University. Arguing that literacy was a “right” as opposed
to a “privilege,” participants in this conference grappled with the relationship
between literacy, freedom, democracy, and citizenry (Lunsford, Moglen, & Slevin,
1990, p. 2). Twenty years later, scholars contributed to an edited volume titled
Literacy as a Civil Right: Reclaiming Social Justice in Literacy Teaching and Learning
(S. Greene, 2008). In this volume, S. Greene and his colleagues, who initially pre-
sented their work at the 2006 National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for
Research, challenge and reclaim “the notions of civil rights and social justice,” which
they posit “have been appropriated by conservatives to explain the goal of increased
accountability and testing” (p. 3). Scholars in Greene’s edited volume confront the
culture of accountability and testing as well as practices that put African American
and Latino youth in American public schools under the watchful and critical gaze of
the rest of the country. While Greene builds on Nieto’s components of social justice,
and more specifically her assertion that “social justice is about understanding educa-
tion and access to literacy as civil rights” (Nieto cited in S. Greene, 2008, p. 4),
Greene and others question and critique power and privilege through the lens of
critical race theory making race and class central to the relationship between school-
ing, literacy, citizenship, and civil rights. Classroom practitioners and education
nonprofits have joined this growing body of research. In The Right to Literacy in
Secondary Schools: Creating a Culture of Thinking, Plaut (2009) and her colleagues
seek to show what schools that adhere to teaching literacy as a “right” may look like
in order “to spark a social movement to ensure our education system empowers every
student to become fully literate” (p. 1). As scholarship increasingly explores literacy

Review of Research in Education

March 2011, Vol. 35, pp. 147–173
DOI: 10.3102/0091732X10387395
© 2011AERA. http://rre.aera.net

147
148     Review of Research in Education, 35

as a “right” for youth, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth are often missing
from this discussion. Childhood poverty, the lack of early childhood education, and
the denial of a college-preparatory K–12 education promoting critical literacies have
contributed to producing what has been referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline
(Children’s Defense Fund, 2007; Duncan, 2000; Fisher, 2008; Meiners, 2007;
Polakow, 2000). Youth in underserved and underperforming schools that focus more
on discipline policies as opposed to academic rigor would benefit the most if educa-
tional institutions adopted the view of literacy as a right. “Unequal life chances”
among America’s children (Polakow, 2000, p. 10) and the denial of literacy as a civil
right are two ways African American and Latino youth are ushered into this pipeline
(Lipman, 2008). This review of the research seeks to address how and why particular
youth have become potential victims of the school-to-prison pipeline and why schol-
arship seeking to examine the relationship between literacy and civil rights must
make these young lives central to the discussion.
Racial disparities in the U.S. juvenile justice system are widespread (Duncan,
2000; McGrew, 2008; Meiners, 2007; Poe-Yamagata & Jones, 2000; Polakow,
2000). Arguing that the “racial and ethnic disparity in discipline sanctions has not
received the attention it deserves,” Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera (2010) posit that
more studies examining the relationship between the achievement gap and “disci-
pline gap” are needed (p. 65). The purpose of this chapter is to examine the literature
on the school-to-prison pipeline—that is, the ushering of African American and
Latino youth from schools to jails and prisons through suspensions, expulsions,
miseducation, and “diploma denial” (Fine & Ruglis, 2009). We interrogate this lit-
erature to examine and complicate the relationship between this so-called pipeline
and the denial of literacy as a civil right. Ultimately, we argue that youth-centered
scholarship focusing on cultivating critical literacy skills for urban youth can gener-
ate possibilities for disrupting and dismantling this pipeline. Educational research
needs to raise critical questions about children in urban public schools who routinely
encounter surveillance and policing more than a rigorous curriculum and safety net
of caring adults. For example, scholarship examining the school-to-prison pipeline
has asked, “Whose children do we see when we construct the meaning of childhood
at the dawn of the new century in the United States? Which young lives matter and
which young lives do not?” (Polakow, 2000, p. 2). Some questions are even more
straightforward: “Are the children our future or are they not?” (Gallagher, 2007).
These questions challenge education research and the role of teacher education and
policymakers in disrupting and dismantling this pipeline.
In this chapter, we provide a selective review of both research and policy repre-
sented in part by two concepts that have been discussed in educational research—the
“right to learn” (Darling-Hammond, 1997, 2006) and the notion of “literacy as a
civil right” (S. Greene, 2008; Plaut, 2009) and how these issues of access and equity
are undermined by the school-to-prison pipeline. First, we outline how scholarship,
and literacy research in particular, has embraced the ideology of looking at critical
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     149    

literacy and learning as civil rights in an effort to convey the urgency of creating
young learners who are equipped for 21st-century ways of knowing. Critical literacy,
according to Morrell (2008), “is necessary not only for the critical navigation of
hegemonic discourses; it is also essential to the redefining of the self and the trans-
formation of oppressive social structures and relations of production” (p. 5). We
argue that the lack of opportunities for youth to engage in literate practices such as
reading, writing, and speaking feeds the school–prison nexus.
Next, we provide a narrative of the history of the “educational debt” that has
contributed to and in some cases propelled inequities by ushering youth from
schools to jails and prisons (Ladson-Billings, 2006). We contextualize salient issues
facing urban youth in a larger discourse of the “educational debt” as opposed to
focusing on the language of the “achievement gap” because of the legacy of denying
education and thus literacy as a “civil right” (S. Greene, 2008). The historical fram-
ing is followed by an examination of school-to-prison pipeline literature, both schol-
arly works as well as policy reports, in order to examine the factors that create this
so-called pipeline and how it affects urban youth. We offer a discussion of emerging
scholarship that challenges the school-to-prison pipeline by focusing on critical lit-
eracy development and how critical literacy can be used as a tool for urban youth.
Finally, we offer researchable and practice-focused issues to consider. Throughout
this chapter, we use a sociocritical lens to understand literacy (Gutiérrez, 2008)—
that is, a lens that underscores “historicizing literacy.” We aim to show the relation-
ship between the school-to-prison pipeline and a legacy of leaving particular students
behind.

LITERACY AS A CIVIL RIGHT

Civil rights are composed of skills and actions necessary for political and civil
involvement. Voting and protesting are commonly viewed as civil rights, but reading
and writing are also activities crucial for civic involvement, specifically the ability to
read and write critically. Because of the destructive consequences of denying both
basic and critical literacies to students (e.g., due to incarceration), literacy has
become a new civil rights frontier (S. Greene, 2008) alongside a similar movement
connecting civil rights to mathematical literacy (Moses & Cobb, 2001). “Education,”
argues Gomez, “is the one realm in which constitutional guarantee of equal oppor-
tunity has not been adequate to promote and protect the social equity embedded in
the promise of U. S. democracy” (Gomez cited in S. Greene, 2008, p. 3). Although
we disagree that education is the sole realm, Gomez is correct in illuminating the
neglected nature and potential power of education in the role of civic engagement.
Education is a civil right, especially learning to read and write critically, for students
to both interrogate written texts and disseminate their own writings. Critical reading
and writing skills are tools students need to navigate and transform the world around
them (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Reading and writing critically are essential tools for
survival in a current educational system in which students of color are disproportion-
ately in special education, suspended, and expelled, which all contribute to a higher
likelihood of incarceration (Meiners, 2007).
150     Review of Research in Education, 35

A key link between inequitable school policies and prisons is low-quality educa-
tion or a lack of education. Official policies such as zero-tolerance discipline and
unofficial policies such as overrepresentation of students of color in special education
affect the quality and quantity of education students receive, which affects students’
academic achievement and opportunities (Meiners, 2007). Time spent in out-of-
school and in-school suspensions or misplaced in self-contained special education
classrooms contributes to the gap in standardized test scores between White and
Black students. As data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
demonstrate, Black students are significantly trailing behind their White counter-
parts in terms of standardized test scores. Across all subject areas, White students on
average score 26 points above Black students on a 500-point scale (Vanneman,
Hamilton, Baldwin Anderson, & Rahman, 2009). Gaps in test scores are misleading
and are not the real problems. The real problems are a focus on basic skills, reme-
diation, and overzealous test preparation that occurs more often in classrooms serv-
ing students of color (Apple, 2001; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000).
Low-quality literacy education is a key component of the school-to-prison pipe-
line. In this section, we review research on how literacy education, which values
student backgrounds and develops critical reading and writing skills, is all too often
missing in classrooms serving students of color. The causes for violations of the right
to literacy are explored, including narrow constructions of literacy, the impact of
federal accountability policies, false beliefs in color blindness, a discourse of defi-
ciency regarding students of color, and deficit views of languages other than main-
stream American English. Even one of these issues can limit a student’s access to
critical literacy; unfortunately, many of these issues appear together.

AN EVOLVING CONSTRUCT OF LITERACY

An essential question for literacy researchers and educators is, “If literacy is a civil
right, how is literacy defined?” To understand the relationship between the denial of
literacy and prisons, we first examine how literacy has been defined over time and
how narrow constructions of what it means to be literate contribute to the school-
to-prison pipeline. Historically, literacy in the United States has been commonly
defined as “the bare ability to read and write” (Good & Merkel, 1973). The content,
context, and purpose of reading were unimportant; literacy was conceptualized as a
neutral, decontextualized skill (Goody & Watt, 1963; Olson, 1977; Ong, 1982). It
was not until the 1980s and 1990s when sociocultural research became more prom-
inent (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Dyson, 1993; Heath, 1983; Scribner & Cole,
2001; Szwed, 1981) that how literacy was defined, taught, and tested was signifi-
cantly called into question, although there was (and still is) “little agreement among
educators on the meaning of ‘literacy’” (Barrow & Milburn, 1990).
One useful model that emerged was Street’s (1984) ideological model of literacy,
which includes the social context and political nature of literacy, as well as allows for
multiple versions of literacy (literacies) versus one monolithic literacy. Street cautions
that being defined as literate or illiterate depends on who creates the definition.
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     151    

Cross-culturally, literate practices are not the same. By the first decade of the 21st
century, UNESCO reported that early literacy campaigns internationally “revealed
that literacy cannot be sustained by short-term operations or by top-down and uni-
sectoral actions primarily directed toward the acquisition of technical skills that do
not give due consideration to the contexts and motivations of learners” (UNESCO
Education Sector, 2004). In other words, the social context of learning cannot be
ignored. Teaching basic literate skills that are not equally valued or even valid across
countries needs to be replaced with literacy education that connects to the specific
social realities and literate practices of culturally diverse communities.
We use Street’s (1984) conception of literacy when we speak of literacy as a civil
right, including critical reading skills, learning to analyze and synthesize materials,
making meaning in multiple texts, and engaging in literary reasoning (Lee, 2001).
Denying this right can put young learners at a disadvantage when competing for jobs
or college admissions. Even more alarming, denial of literacy contributes to the pos-
sibility of dropping out or going to prison (Lipman, 2008). It is important to note
that by being offered only one version of literacy, students are in effect denied literacy
because isolated and irrelevant instruction often fails to result in the development of
rich literate practices that are necessary for social and political involvement (Bakhtin,
1981; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). Literacy as a civil right really translates into “litera-
cies” as a civil right, including children’s right to their own creative and cultural liter-
ate practices, academic literacy, which is on the test, and critical literacy, which
transcends what can be tested, for example, epistemic writing in which writing
becomes “a personal search for meaning” (Bereiter, 1980, p. 88).
If literacy acquisition is viewed through the lens of civil rights, then administrators,
teachers, and researchers must provide students access to hybrid literate practices,
which then allow students to be successful on tests and challenge narrow definitions
of literacy that perpetuate the discourse of deficiency. Both school and student litera-
cies are needed, with the student literacies providing a bridge to school literacies (Lee,
2001; Mahiri, 2000/2001). Schooling is political, and teaching students from diverse
backgrounds the language of power while valuing students’ cultures (Delpit, 1995) is
an important part of dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline because this form of
instruction increases students’ abilities to question, criticize, and create. At the same
time, students have the right to their own language(s) and the language of power
(Kinloch, 2010; Smitherman, 1999). To reduce these apparent tensions, students
need classrooms that value multiple literacies.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND AND DECLINING ACADEMIC RIGOR

The decline of academic rigor in schools has contributed to the culture of the
school-to-prison pipeline. Academic rigor is characterized by complex intellectual
problems that expand and develop higher cognitive thinking skills such as synthesiz-
ing and evaluating (Bloom, 1956). To achieve academic rigor in literacy, students
need a literacy education that is social, contextualized, and values multiple literacies.
Yet No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the testing culture induced by this policy of
152     Review of Research in Education, 35

education assume homogeneous students and one literacy (Au, 2007; S. Greene,
2008; Lipman, 2008). Current reform assumes that literacy can be reduced to a set
of skills separate from any cultural ideology or practices (S. Greene, 2008). Although
sociocultural perspectives on literacy learning have become widespread (Engëstrom,
1987; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-Lopez, & Tejada, 1999; Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson,
1995; Lee, 2001, 2006; Nasir & Hand, 2006; Roth & Lee, 2007), the dominant
paradigm employed by NCLB is that literacy is neutral. When policymakers employ
a neutral conception of literacy, a result has been to increase the amount of time
struggling students spend with irrelevant and basic curriculum that does not connect
to their personal and cultural literate practices, resulting in low academic rigor (Au,
2007). By centering on acquisition of basic and standardized skills, federal policies
such as NCLB, which intend to close the Black–White achievement gap, actually
widen it (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2009). In addition, the idea of neutral literacy
represented in standardized tests may encourage administrators and teachers to
develop a color-blind ideology and discourse of deficiency regarding students who
have different literate practices (S. Greene, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 2009a; Lipman,
2008).
Lipman (2008) argues that “rather than enrich teaching and learning and pro-
mote the sorts of literacies and academic dispositions prized in the new economy,
accountability policies promoted a narrow focus on skills to pass high-stakes tests”
(p. 53). Scholars like Lipman demonstrate how declining academic rigor (specifi-
cally, an emphasis on basic skills rather than higher level skills) because of a focus on
high-stakes testing occurs most often in schools with students of color who have
been historically underserved (S. Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003; Lipman, 2008).
Students who are already behind because of the “education debt” owed to them
(Ladson-Billings, 2006) are then presented with a watered-down curriculum that
reinscribes the subordination of knowledge and identity historically experienced by
marginalized groups (Lipman, 2008). Of course, the irony is that this is the very
curriculum intended to reduce the achievement gap.
As Fecho and Skinner (2008) argue, “If literacy is a civil right, we need a literacy
that gets beyond the rote skill and drill of phonics, decoding, and comprehension”
(p. 105). Without higher-level skills such as writing persuasively and reading criti-
cally, low-achieving students are not given access to the tools necessary to succeed
both in and out of school. Mintrop and Sunderman (2009) through their work with
the Civil Rights Project have detailed how the federal accountability system encour-
ages states to adopt low standards of achievement so that struggling schools can meet
their goals. Teachers are then pushed “to run a tight ship around test-driven basic
skills remediation . . . This is particularly destructive for poor students and students
of color who, more so than White students, are concentrated in the schools that
NCLB identifies as failing” (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2009, p. 360). Furthermore,
Au (2007) established that high-stakes testing contracted curriculum, fractured
knowledge, and led to teacher-centered pedagogy. In fact, in his meta-synthesis of 49
studies, this dominant “theme triplet” was evident in 75% of the studies that gener-
ated themes in all three aspects of curriculum (p. 263). When students of color are
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     153    

denied access to a rigorous and challenging education, their job options become
limited, supporting a “barbell economy” with students of color channeled into low-
paying jobs or prisons (Lipman, 2008).

THE MYTH OF COLOR BLINDNESS AND

DISCOURSE OF DEFICIENCY
In addition to federal policies, another factor contributing to the denial of critical
literacy education is institutional illiteracy within schools as demonstrated by two
related concepts: the myth of color blindness and the discourse of deficiency.
Although seemingly contradictory beliefs, the combination of claiming not to see
skin color and then expecting students of color to be inferior prevents schools from
providing the culturally responsive teaching that students need. The practices of
teachers who unknowingly (or knowingly) participate in the discourse of deficiency
also contribute to students of color being denied access to literacy (Ballenger, 1999;
Paley, 1979). Lewis (2008) reflected on her first-year teaching when a fellow teacher
and the principal listed all the students with discipline problems in her class. She
recalled being dumbfounded when she realized that “they had named every single
Black male from our class” (p. 70). When Lewis decided to study other classrooms
to see how race factored into how teachers treated students, she found that although
many teachers claimed to treat students of color the same as their White counter-
parts, claiming to be “color-blind,” in reality, the teachers were more likely to disci-
pline students of color more severely than White students. When students are sent
out of class, they are denied the education that is their right. African American stu-
dents “are disciplined and suspended more frequently than White students for sub-
jective behaviors like disrespect, excessive noise, threats, and loitering” (Meiners,
2007, p. 33). Teachers and administrators have come to expect this disparity, produc-
ing a culture of normality with regard to the school–prison nexus (Dixson, 2008;
Lewis, 2008; Meiners, 2007).
Another component in the discourse of deficiency is the media portrayals that
contribute to perceptions of youth as violent, dangerous, and in need of manage-
ment (Meiners, 2007; Rapping, 2003). Specifically, Meiners (2007) suggests that
television and media portray youth as the “superpredator,” while “disproportionately
using images of street crime that highlight African-Americans or Latinos as perpetra-
tors” (p. 83). Dorfman and Schiraldi (2001) corroborate this claim with their meta-
synthesis of social science research highlighting how the media portrayal is “off bal-
ance” in the overemphasis on youth committing crime, youth of color in particular.
This means that teachers who watch the news and see young people of color con-
stantly represented as violent, lawless criminals may internalize this image and have
lower expectations for their students of color in terms of their behavior. A vicious
cycle can develop where teachers expect students of color to misbehave, focus on
order in the classroom rather than academic rigor, discipline students of color more
severely, and, in short, deny students the academic tools they need to be successful.
154     Review of Research in Education, 35

Along with inequitable discipline practices, color-blind ideology is the antithesis

of culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009b; Lewis, 2008). When
students’ identities, ways of knowing, and linguistic diversity are ignored or
coopted, color-blind ideology encourages irrelevant curriculum for students of
color. “Misperspectives” or incorrect versions of Latino contributions to literacy
(J. C. Greene, 1994), as well as the lack of acknowledgement of literacies in Native
American (McCarty, 2005) and Southeast Asian (Li, 2008) communities, affect
children in K–12 schooling. These omissions can make it difficult for students from
nondominant communities to view themselves among the “literate and literary”
(McHenry & Heath, 1994). In Dixson’s (2008) study, she analyzed two classrooms,
documenting the beliefs and actions of both the teachers and students as related to
race and curriculum. She detailed one White teacher, Ms. Green, whose color-blind
ideology caused the teacher’s failure to acknowledge the negative impact the one-
sided curriculum had on her African American students. Dixson (2008) asserted,

Denzel, Makayla, and other students in the study stated that they explicitly wanted a curriculum that
focused on what they described as Black history . . . These students would have welcomed explicit
overtures by Green to hand them books and materials that focused on Black people. Green’s unwilling-
ness to acknowledge and notice race and distribute materials to students that reflected their cultural
backgrounds demonstrates the ways in which she is oblivious to her students’ desire for a culturally
relevant curriculum. (p. 141)

Ms. Green most likely thought teaching all her students from one standardized
text was equitable, yet the text she saw as neutral was only presenting a particular
literacy “associated with the transmission and mastery of a unitary Western tradition”
(Giroux, 1987, p. 3). For students with different cultural backgrounds who do not
see themselves in the text, school can be alienating.
Today, students of color are dropping out and being pushed out of high school,
which limits job options and contributes to the school–prison nexus. According to a
report from the Center for Research on Students Placed At Risk (CRESPAR), “A
majority minority high school is five times more likely to have weak promoting
power (promote 50% or fewer freshmen to senior status on time) than a majority
white school” (Balfanz & Legters, 2004, p. v). Another study found that more than
half of high school dropouts are minority students of color: Hispanic, African
American, or Native American (Harada, Kirio, & Yamamoto, 2008). One theory for
why students of color are dropping out of high school is that the curriculum is irrel-
evant, in part because schools fail to acknowledge that different students have differ-
ent needs based on their cultural heritage. Native American students struggle to be
successful in mainstream English-only schools and to balance their heritage with the
values of popular culture introduced through the media (Nicholas, 2005). “Students
who drop out claim that the curriculum is disconnected from real life and that their
schools are impersonal systems where no one really cares about them” (Harada et al.,
2008, p. 14). When the curriculum celebrates European history and ignores African
history, Latin American history, Asian history, and the history of indigenous peoples,
these omissions can insult and alienate students who are not of European heritage.
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     155    

A RIGHT TO LANGUAGE: COUNTERING DEFICIT

VIEWS OF LANGUAGE
Related to the failure to represent diverse cultures in the curriculum, another
major component of the discourse of deficiency is the devaluation of different dia-
lects of languages. In Larson’s (2003) qualitative study of a Language Arts textbook
pilot program, she discovered that

Teachers in the textbook study described their students as being without language, as not having appropri-
ate background experiences to prepare them for school, and as being so far behind as to need extensive
remediation to catch up to grade level. (p. 93)

Because these teachers failed to recognize the linguistic diversity of their students,
the teachers reduced the curriculum to the minimum they thought the students
could handle, mostly relying on worksheets that focused on isolated skills. Also,
when African American students used African American Vernacular English (AAVE),
they were told they were wrong. If classrooms redefined curriculum by creating a
mosaic of the varied texts and literate practices of the students, using what Gutiérrez
et al. (1995) call “social heteroglossia,” students would have some agency in what
counts as school-appropriate curriculum. Social heteroglossia increases academic
rigor by aiding in the development of a variety of linguistic tools with which to
problem solve, communicate, and access materials.
Students who do not speak what is often referred to as standard English, or the
language of tests and textbooks, often encounter curricula and teachers that devalue
their primary language. In a Navajo community, McCarty, Romero-Little, and
Zepeda (2006) found that although some students were proud of their ability to
speak Navajo and saw many positive cultural benefits from speaking their traditional
language, other students were ashamed of being able to speak Navajo and scoffed at
those who did so in school. These students had internalized the message taught in
the boarding schools of their parents; speaking Navajo is backward and shameful.
Students associated English with progress and opportunity and felt that they needed
to make a choice between the two languages. Based on her research in schools that
serve Hopi children, Nicholas (2005) forcefully states, “Essentially, schools have
silenced the Hopi people” (p. 33). Similarly, in her work Talkin’ and Testifyin’,
Smitherman (1986) refers to the “linguistic tyranny of American education and its
negative effects on Black students” (p. 243). AAVE or Black English is repeatedly
devalued in academic settings, notwithstanding scholarship demonstrating its lin-
guistic complexity and its benefits for Black children in terms of their cultural iden-
tity (Jordan, 1989; Rickford & Rickford, 2000; Smitherman, 1999). In a diverse
classroom, Kinloch (2005) describes a day in her college composition class when a
student laments how the way she talks results in other people not understanding her,
giving her disapproving looks, and not respecting her opinion. In the words of the
student, “the more proper or standard or the more you sound like the teacher, the
more respect” (p. 92).
156     Review of Research in Education, 35

For all groups that have been historically oppressed, one element in their oppres-
sion was to devalue their language and categorize it as deficient. McCarty et al.
(2006) posit, “The psychosocial and linguistic consequences of genocide, coloniza-
tion, and language repression have been documented for speech communities
around the world” (p. 671). As the previously detailed research has shown, the
devaluing of language is still a functioning practice in American schools. Those who
will not conform, who will not accept that their history and language is deficient, all
too often end up dropping out of school, or more accurately, being pushed out.
Clearly, the right to literacy has been and is being violated for students of color.
When schools subscribe to an autonomous or neutral view of literacy (Street, 1984),
students who have literate practices outside of this narrowly defined realm are ostra-
cized. The bulk of this opening section on literacy as a civil right has focused on
research at the school level, touching on how policies at the district or federal level
are creating a culture that does not value multiple literacies. Next, we turn to a
deeper analysis of the zero-tolerance policies that create a deleterious atmosphere for
learning and explicitly prepare particular groups of students for prison rather than
professional and academic success.

PUBLIC ENEMIES, EDUCATION’S PRISONERS, AND THE

CREATION OF A SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE
Youth have been increasingly portrayed as dangerous, undisciplined, and in need
of surveillance in the news and other forms of media, thus constructing them as
public enemies (Meiners, 2007). This notion of youth as public enemies has
prompted some schools—especially those serving youth of color—to hire more
security, install metal detectors and surveillance cameras, and even employ police
officers in schools. We challenge and question the ways in which youth identities get
created; the more youth are constructed as dangerous and in need of management,
the fewer opportunities they will have to develop self-discipline and learn how to
make responsible decisions for themselves. For example, McGrew (2008) has argued
that youth in poor urban districts are actually “education’s prisoners.” In other
words, overpolicing and zero-tolerance policies are enabling school security and
campus police to punish students for the smallest infractions (Advancement Project,
2000). Zero-tolerance policies create a police state in urban public schools and
detract from focused work on education and literacy. Duncan (2000) refers to such
policies as “urban pedagogies.” According to Duncan, urban pedagogies “work
through and upon adolescents of color” by focusing on “discipline and control” as
opposed to “intellectual rigor and the development of meaningful skills” (p. 30).
Although discipline is important, the word has been misused. Recent scholarship
argues that students need to develop self-discipline rather than be disciplined, which
will be reviewed later in this article (Yang, 2009). Indeed, the relationship between
the increased policing, zero tolerance, and a “public assault” (Polakow, 2000) on
American children can be linked to an ideology that Black and Brown bodies are in
need of surveillance and control in underserved urban public schools.
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     157    

Scholars have argued that the police presence and ushering of particular youth
from schools to jails “illustrates that a failure to control oneself, to keep that anger
in check, to act and learn appropriately, in particular for those in any way marginal-
ized, might mean school expulsion, criminalization, or pathologization” (Meiners,
2007, p. 30). Zero-tolerance policies and practices in schools have become one of the
greatest contributing builders of this pipeline (see Civil Rights Project, 2000;
National Association of the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and
Educational Fund [NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund], 2005). Although
schools have always encountered students fighting, skipping class, and breaking
school rules, many of these infractions are now being handled by law enforcement
rather than on-site conflict management or intervention strategies. As school admin-
istrators are increasingly pressured to raise test scores, students who are deemed as
distractions and “throwaways” (Bell, 2000) are being removed from class rosters and
attendance sheets. Youth are aware of this “throwaway” status; once they become
disinvested in their education process they become targets for policies and practices
that push them out of schools and into detention centers and jails (Fisher, 2008;
Winn, 2010). Fine and Ruglis (2009) refer such ideologies and practices as “circuits
of dispossession”—that is, a systematic funneling of public education funding to
private enterprises. “With moves toward privatization,” argue Fine and Ruglis, “state
responsibility for the provision of adequate education falls off the hook, testing com-
panies’, private vendors’, and publishers’ profits swell; police-in-school and military
recruitment budgets grow and youth of color slowly disappear” (p. 21). Building and
sustaining relationships among students and their peers, students and teachers as well
as students and school staff become secondary to using budget line items for the
management of Black and Brown bodies.
The “zero-tolerance revolution” (Parenti, 2008, p. 70) has resulted in students
being pushed out and an “overrepresentation” of African Americans in school sus-
pension rates is well documented (Gilliam, 2005; Gilliam & Shahar, 2006; NAACP
Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 2005; Noguera, 2003b). Expulsions and sus-
pensions from school increase the likelihood for incarceration, thus making African
American students prime candidates for the movement from schools to jails. In a
multisited ethnography following incarcerated girls’ trajectory in a theater program
to their involvement after being released from detention centers, Fisher found that
peer conflicts in school, as well as searches by school security (including male security
officers searching girls), feed the pipeline (Fisher, 2008; Winn, in press). Furthermore,
girls who have infractions that initially took place off campus receive probation vio-
lations for any school suspensions.
Many children and youth are scanned, wanded, and greeted by security guards or
polices officers who have been hired as security long before they are greeted by teach-
ers, counselors, and administrators. This culture of surveillance and policing dimin-
ishes opportunities for children to view schools as a potential safety net and teachers
as well as other school personnel as their advocates. Teachers are under increasing
pressure to raise test scores and to meet accountability measures with fewer resources,
158     Review of Research in Education, 35

making them less patient to take care of classroom conflict “in house.” When stu-
dents have been criminalized through such policies, their “developmental needs”
have been compromised “by not allowing students to form strong and trusting rela-
tionships with key adults and by creating negative attitudes toward fairness and
justice” (Advancement Project, 2000, p. 33). Zero-tolerance hides behind a “race-
neutral vocabulary.” However, the reality is that Black and Latino students are enter-
ing the school-to-prison pipeline more than their White and Asian peers. Although
the normalizing of expectations for incarceration has profound consequences for
poor youth of color (Meiners, 2007), it also has implications for teachers and admin-
istrators looking for alternatives to harsh punishments (Yang, 2009). When deten-
tion centers and jails are considered a viable option, school administration and staff
often cease to think critically about strategies, solutions, and alternative ways to
address problems that arise with students and depend on the culture of incarceration.

FROM “EDUCATION DEBT” TO “ACHIEVEMENT GAP”:

HISTORICIZING THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE
The overrepresentation of poor youth of color in detention centers, jails, and
prisons is part of a larger landscape in which communities of color have been denied
access to educational institutions and the tools needed to navigate the American
workforce. In an effort to contextualize the achievement gap in American public
schools, Ladson-Billings (2006) signaled a call to critically examine the “education
debt” the United States owes its children. Ladson-Billings posits that pervasive his-
torical, economic, political, and moral debts must frame any discussion of an
achievement gap. Families of color, according to Ladson-Billings, “have regularly
been excluded from the decision-making mechanisms that should ensure their chil-
dren receive quality education” (p. 7). Literacy scholars have demonstrated the ways
in which this debt looms over children and youth in Native American (McCarty,
2005), African American (Ball & Lardner, 2005; Fisher, 2009; Ladson-Billings,
2005; Lee, 2006, 2007; Smitherman, 1999), Latino/a (Gutiérrez, Ali, & Henríquez,
2010), and South East Asian (Li, 2008) communities.
The notion of an educational debt is inextricably linked to the building as well as
to the potential dismantling of the school-to-prison pipeline. For example, Duncan
(2009) argues that the historical significance of “race-making” in America—
beginning with the enslavement of Africans in America—cannot be undermined
when examining the 21st-century crisis of America’s fixation with incarceration. “By
stigmatizing black populations with the institutional brands of ‘slave’ or ‘felon,’”
Duncan posits, “race-making institutions, such as plantations and prisons, have
provided a public rationale for why certain groups are systematically denied the full
rights of citizenship” (p. 5). Tracing the trajectory of the “Negro job”—that is,
menial and sometimes degrading work without adequate compensation—Duncan
asserts the new “Negro job” is being a prisoner. James Anderson’s (1988) pivotal
study of education in the South traces the Black struggle for public education after
the enslavement of Africans in America and elsewhere; scholars have argued that a
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     159    

period of “re-enslavement” took place between the Civil War and World War II
(Blackmon, 2008). Blackmon asserts that in the late 19th century when public edu-
cation was emerging, Black and White per-pupil spending was the same. According
to Blackmon, White people found it “infuriating” to know that part
of their “white taxes” helped educate Black children “rather than solely their own”
(p. 105). Immigrant families and children of migrant farm workers have also experi-
enced discrimination and marginalization in educational institutions (Gutiérrez,
2008; Gutiérrez et al., 2010; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010).
Similarly, Ladson-Billing’s (2006) concept of an education debt is evidenced in
the discrepancies among per-pupil spending in urban school districts versus districts
in affluent suburbs. For example, Ladson-Billings posits that New York City per-
pupil spending is $11,627 with 72% Black and Latina/o students, while the 91%
White Manhasset schools spend $22, 311 per pupil. Chicago public schools are 87%
Black and Latina/o and spend $8,482 per pupil, while the Highland Park suburb
spends $17,291 per pupil in a district that is 90% White (Kozol cited in Ladson-
Billings, 2006). These figures raise questions about the impact of desegregation in
American public schools. Siddle Walker’s (1996) groundbreaking study of education
in a segregated African American school found that the teachers and students devel-
oped relationships with students that encouraged students to reach “their highest
potential.” Although Siddle Walker’s work is not typically considered in a discussion
of the school-to-prison pipeline, it is essential to question the ways in which the ethic
of care became lost during desegregation. Siddle Walker’s scholarship also forces the
education community to interrogate how integration and the forced separation of
teachers from students who shared ways of being, knowing, as well as core values
were disrupted. Schools focused on appearing to be equitable and just while focusing
on roles as opposed to relationships. Black youth moved from spaces where they were
surrounded by a safety net of loving, caring teachers who knew and understood
them, their families, and their values to hostile environment, where their intellect
and humanity were consistently questioned and challenged. More specifically, schol-
ars are challenging the education research community to consider the Brown v. Board
of Education ruling and what must happen in literacy instruction in order to ensure
that another 50 years does not pass in vain (Ball, 2006).
Issues of inequity are not relegated to the American educational system or to the
juvenile justice system. In fact, countries are replicating America’s juvenile policies
without empirical evidence that these policies work. Next, we explore the ways in
which American juvenile justice practices have far-reaching implications abroad.

EXPLORING (IN)JUSTICE: THE GLOBALIZATION OF

THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE
Although schools are not the sole factor in cultivating these values, they form part
of America’s potential to foster democratic engagement in all its citizens (Noguera,
2003a). A focus on personal responsibility, which is undoubtedly important yet not
paramount, has discouraged juvenile courts from contextualizing young peoples’
160     Review of Research in Education, 35

lives against the backdrop of poor and underserved schools and communities in the
United States and abroad. In fact, the notion of youth justice in the context of the
United States has been replaced with, “Look out kid, it’s something you did”
(Dohrn, 2000).
Asserting that “public policies make and unmake young lives,” Polakow (2000,
p. 2) and others have uncovered the ways in which the school-to-prison pipeline is
inextricably linked to eradicating social programs and emphasizing the privatization
of public failures (Meiners, 2007; Muncie, 2005). Eradicating social problems was
part and parcel of focusing on personal responsibility and scholars have argued that
neoliberal agendas, defined later in this section, undermine public education for
youth in urban schools (Fine & Ruglis, 2009; Lipman, 2008). As the United States
earned its reputation as the “most avid incarcerator” or the “incarceration nation,” it
may not be surprising that it is the only developed country that did not sign the
1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. This document underscores in
its preamble that “. . . the child should be fully prepared to live an individual life in
society . . . and in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equal-
ity, and solidarity.” Dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality, and solidarity are often
nonexistent as urban schools struggle with fewer resources, including trained and
credentialed teachers, books, and physical space (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Kozol,
1991, 2005).
The disappearance of youth justice has also demonstrated “transatlantic replica-
bility” (Muncie, 2005, p. 39). In a study examining the globalization of neoliberal
policies in the shaping of youth and juvenile justice, Muncie asserts that young
people all over the globe are being governed “through” crime and disorder (p. 40).
Muncie defines neoliberal policies as “the privatizing of the state sector” and in the
context of youth justice the “commodifying of crime control.” Lipman (2008) asserts
that neoliberalism is

an ensemble of economic and social policies that promote the primacy of the market and individual self-
interest, unrestricted flows of capital, deep reductions in the cost of labor, sharp retrenchment of the
public sphere, and withdrawal of government from providing social welfare. (p. 45)

For example, youth and juvenile justice systems in the United Kingdom and
Canada have become increasingly Americanized by focusing on youth who are “at
risk” for committing crime. In the context of the United States, there has been a
strategic shift in the ways youth/juvenile justice has been viewed in the 1970s, where
it experienced a more social focus. However, in the aforementioned 1980s, there was
a shift from examining contexts of crime to the crime itself. This purposeful move-
ment to focus on “deeds rather than needs,” according to Muncie (2005), creates a
“double jeopardy” for young people who he argues are “sentenced for their back-
ground as well as their offence” (p. 38).
For example, Spain adopted the “model of responsibility” in 1992 as part of its
Juvenile Court Reform Act of 1992 (and ratified it in 2000). Although this model was
supposed to create a “balance between education and punishment,” Alberola and
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     161    

Molina (2008) argue that the act favors the English No more excuses more than the
U.N. Rights of the Child. Other European countries’ discourse of youth culture mirror
the United States’ characterization of youth as becoming increasingly more dangerous
and delinquent. Although France has many options available to magistrates and pros-
ecutors (Wyvekens, 2008), questions have been raised about the number of immigrant
and minority youth who are considered “suspects” in French cities (Terrio, 2009).
Following the October 2005 riots that ensued after Paris police shot and killed two
French youth of North African ancestry, Terrio conducted an ethnography and archival
study of the Paris juvenile courts. Terrio interrogates the “delinquency of exclusion”
(p. 13). This term, coined by former juvenile judge Denis Salas “was a category con-
flated with disadvantaged Muslim youth, both French citizens and immigrants, spa-
tially rooted in stigmatized urban and suburban places” (p. 13).
Even in studies examining the globalization of American incarceration policies
and practices, there is not much focus on the experiences of girls in the juvenile
justice system. In the following section, we look at the gendering of the school-to-
prison pipeline and the ways in which scholars are framing issues with girls and
incarceration.

GENDERING AND RACE-ING THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE

Girls and woman are the fasting growing population in detention centers, jails,
and prisons (Dohrn, 2000; Gadsden, Jacobs, Bickerstaff, Park, & Kane, 2008). In
fact, the juvenile justice system includes “young people who are disproportionately
minority, under-educated, and female” (Fine & McClelland, 2006, p. 303).
Although remaining largely invisible from the discussion of juvenile justice, girls
represent one in four youth arrests in the United States (Dohrn, 2000). Girls and
women of color, in particular, are experiencing a “global lockdown” (Sudbury, 2005)
as they are overrepresented in jails and prisons in countries such as Italy (Angel-
Ajani, 2005) and even Australia (Kina, 2005). In 2008, the Pew Center on the States
released its report “1 in 100: America behind bars,” which asserted that America
incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country; not only are 1 in 100
Americans in jails, in prisons, on probation, or on parole, but Black women’s incar-
ceration rate has reached the 1 in 100 mark as well.
Black girls in particular are being “celled” more than their White counterparts
(Fisher, 2008; Winn, in press) in spite of the fact there is “no new crime wave”
among this group (Richie, 2005). Girls are often charged for less serious crimes than
boys or what are sometimes referred to as “contempt citations,” including running
away (Dohrn, 2000; Simkins, Hirsch, Horvat, & Moss, 2004). Additionally, girls
are subject to “double standard paternalism/harshness” as well as “loss of freedom”
(Dohrn, 2000, p. 173). In other words, girls are not supposed to commit crimes or
get in trouble; therefore, once they enter the system they are punished for their gen-
der as well as their offense. This punishment is sometimes cloaked under the title of
being neutral or unbiased when it comes to gender. “Gender-neutral” policies and
practices in detention centers, jails, and prisons have translated into harsh handling
162     Review of Research in Education, 35

of women and girls as a form of punishment for women’s desire to be seen as equal
to men. A lack of programs designed specifically for girls means girls often do not
have opportunities to engage in any positive or meaningful experiences while incar-
cerated that will prepare them for lives beyond bars (Chesney-Lind, 1997; Dohrn,
2000; Fisher, 2008; Fisher, Purcell, & May, 2009; Simkins et al., 2004). Simkins
et al. argue, “Unlike boys, the formation of a girl’s mature identity must also include
meaningful and stable relationships with adults” (p. 58).
Because many of the new arrests of girls are taking place in schools (Simkins
et al., 2004), it is imperative to consider the ways in which the school-to-prison
pipeline has been gendered. According to Simkins et al., the incarcerated girls inter-
viewed in their study had already “experienced a lifetime’s worth of abuse” by the
time they entered middle and high school (p. 60). Simkins and her colleagues also
found that girls who struggled with suspensions, expulsions, truancy, and being held
back a grade were contenders for the school-to-prison pipeline. High school proved
to be the most difficult transition, thus making ninth grade a pivotal year.
Additionally, for girls who have already become entangled in the juvenile justice
system, life outside of school consumed them, making coursework and the possibil-
ity of participating in a school community an afterthought. Girls often worried
about safe and adequate housing, family, and meeting basic needs (food, toiletries,
and transportation). Studies that have included interviews of adjudicated girls have
demonstrated how girls can point to changes occurring in their lives around their
middle school years where school became increasingly difficult (Fisher, 2008; Richie,
2005, Simkins et al., 2004). These “changes” occurred during adolescence as girls
became prey for sexual abusers. Some scholars argue that the omission of sexuality
education from the school curriculum (Fine & McClelland, 2006) and forums to
discuss these issues can make girls more vulnerable to unhealthy relationships that
contribute to poor decision making.
A factor that has largely been ignored when considering the burgeoning numbers
of girls in the juvenile justice system is that most incarcerated girls and women report
having been physically and sexually abused at different points in their lives (Fine &
McClelland, 2006). Abstinence only until marriage (AOUM) curriculum or the
omission of any sex and sexuality education further marginalizes girls who were
abused by silencing their histories of abuse and forcing them to internalize anger,
rage, and profound guilt. “As a form of social control on girls, and disproportionately
Black and Latino girls,” according to Fine and McClelland, “juvenile detention fails
to remedy the original problems and serves instead to criminalize and diminish the
education, economic, and health outcomes of the young women” (p. 304). Many
girls and women have found themselves “compelled to crime” (Richie, 1996) follow-
ing a history of being physically and sexually abused. More recently, scholarship
has examined the assault on queer Black youth and Black girls in particular in
the juvenile justice system (Richie, 2005). As these girls refuse to embrace heteronor-
mative values found in their schools, they are often targets of zero-tolerance and
gender-neutral policies enacted on urban youth. Once they are incarcerated, girls are
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     163    

typically detained in facilities that house boys as well. Few programs and opportuni-
ties, if any, address their needs.
One common thread in studies of incarcerated women and girls is that through-
out the process of arrest and detainment they are seldom, if ever, asked to tell their
stories. In fact, scholars who interview the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated
are often the first to record their perspectives. Perhaps even more compelling is the
fact that when these narratives are finally shared, the incarcerated or formerly incar-
cerated often lack the tools and critical literacy skills needed to question their experi-
ences (Meiners, 2007; Winn, 2010). This inability to name and challenge the
school-to-prison pipeline often means that “potentially revolutionary evidence” gets
omitted (Meiners, 2007, p. 140).

TOWARD A PEDAGOGY OF POSSIBILITY: CHANGING

THE POWER DYNAMIC
Disrupting and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline requires research and
action challenging the connections between schools and prisons and illuminating the
school practices that halt the movement of students to prisons. Emerging scholarship
seeking to challenge the school/prison nexus and offer teachers and teacher educators
a way to understand their roles in creating a safety net for urban youth, and adjudicated
youth in particular, is promising (Fisher, 2008; Fisher et al., 2009; Kinloch, 2009;
Winn, in press; Yang, 2009). Some of the central features of such practices include
providing students with opportunities to exercise agency in their learning, engage in
research with adult allies, write for a variety of purposes, and perform original writing
as they prepare for lives beyond high school. In this final section, we review emerging
scholarship that has the potential to restore the right to be literate and that repositions
marginalized youth as deserving and worthy of a robust education.
Yang (2009) argues the achievement gap is indeed a “mirror image” to the punish-
ment gap; in other words, students who receive the most punishment in schools are
often those who are not excelling in their academic work. Yang is careful not to use
the word “discipline” as a substitute for “punishment.” In his work with teachers,
administrators, and school communities seeking to revisit policies and practices that
contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, Yang (2009) posits,

I am not ideologically opposed to suspensions; rather, I ask educators to prove that their discipline system
is inclusionary. Crudely speaking, more discipline should result in more achievement. (p. 51)

Yang (2009) recommends programs that support students in developing self-

discipline—or a set of practices a young person will undoubtedly need throughout
his or her K–12 experience and beyond. Two pathways leading to this notion of self-
discipline, argues Yang, include “a framework for differences in discipline across
classrooms” and a model of practitioner inquiry “through which we might develop
discipline in the particulars of our different learning spaces” (p. 53). Yang’s work has
implications for small learning communities and schools that underscore the power
164     Review of Research in Education, 35

of relationships as opposed to roles and titles. Young people need self-discipline;

however, this discipline must be developed through habits of the mind and personal
goal setting as opposed to law enforcement and school security.
Fisher (2008) examines the school-to-prison pipeline through the narratives of
formerly incarcerated girls who use playwriting and performance to challenge and
acquiesce to the schools that left them behind, institutions that detained them, and
the communities as well as families who at times misunderstood them (Fisher, 2008;
Fisher et al., 2009; Winn, in press). These narratives were collected over the course
of 3 years (2006–2009) from formerly incarcerated girls in the Girl Time playwriting
and performance summer program. As a participant observer in the Girl Time pro-
gram, Fisher co-taught playwriting workshops to incarcerated girls with a team of
women-teaching artists in regional youth detention centers (RYDCs). RYDCs, in
theory, are transitional facilities in which youth who have been arrested are detained
as they await juvenile court dates, placements (e.g., to group homes or foster care),
or release to their families. However, many young people get stuck in the RYDC
maze until their fate is decided, creating a tenuous environment where children and
youth are dealing with many unknowns. In the urban southeast where this study
took place, these facilities may hold 200 youth with most space reserved for boys.
Although youth attend school in these facilities, there are few opportunities for other
kinds of learning enrichment beyond Bible study classes. Girl Time is one of the only
teaching and learning experiences focused on girls and providing literacy-centered
activities such as reading, writing, and public speaking. Fisher (2008) found from her
study, including three cohorts of formerly incarcerated girls in Girl Time’s intensive
summer theater program, that they used playwriting and performance as tools to
reintroduce themselves to their peers, families, social service workers, and the public.
Writing and performing in plays also became tools for these girls, who are primarily
African American and aged 14 to 17 years, to redefine lives that have been “betwixt
and between” incarcerated and liberated lives (Winn, in press). Furthermore, the
process of writing and building an ensemble—as opposed to the product or polished
performance—is an opportunity for girls to experience dialogue through the charac-
ters they play and can serve as a rehearsal for dialogue that they often hope will ensue
as a result of their newly acquired understanding of particular relationships (Fisher,
2008; Fisher et al., 2009). Producing youth writing—especially the writings of incar-
cerated youth—is, of course, not new. Student Press Initiative (SPI) has published
the poetry and prose of incarcerated youth on Rikers Island (Horizon Academy
Students, 2006). Similar to Fisher’s (2008) study, Gordon and Stovall (2009) argue
that the writing process invites incarcerated youth to define and redefine themselves
through their work. However, most of the youth writing in SPI anthologies has been
collected from incarcerated boys. Girl Time’s work not only provides a potential
pathway toward disrupting the pipeline but also focuses on the needs of girls.
Participants cited playwriting and the ability to demonstrate that they were more
than their incarceration records as having a profound impact on their self-image,
healing relationships with family; and building bridges with teachers, probation
officers, and community members who attend their public performance. Additionally,
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     165    

public performances provide a forum where formerly incarcerated girls get to “talk
back to their audiences (educators, Department of Juvenile Justice personnel, and
families) about what they learned throughout the process.
Increasingly, scholarship is illuminating the ways in which urban youth are rede-
fining themselves and using critical literacy skills to interrogate their environment.
For example, Kinloch’s (2009) study with two Harlem youth, Phillip and Khaleeq,
re-centers the young lives of African American males. Kinloch, Phillip, and Khaleeq
examine their lived experiences during the political gentrification in their Harlem
neighborhood through critical readings of race and space. Critical readings of race
and notions of space in the context of Kinloch’s study challenge stereotypes about
Harlem and the people, primarily Black and Latino, who have called Harlem home
prior to the most recent wave of gentrification. From their blocks in Harlem to the
walls of a major university, Phillip and Khaleeq learned to “take a stand” by question-
ing and challenging their disappearing rights in their own neighborhood (Kinloch,
2009, p. 178). This participatory action research group began as a writing workshop
covering a range of topics but ultimately focusing on the Harlem community.
Kinloch and her students made the city and specifically Harlem their classroom.
Much like Fisher’s (2005a, 2005b, 2007; Winn & Ubiles, in press) study of youth
poets and their teachers in the Power Writing community in the Bronx, Kinloch
wanted these young people to know that they had access to their city, neighborhood,
and the cultural institutions they housed. Phillip and Khaleeq attended tenants’
association meetings with Kinloch to learn and eventually interrogate the language
of gentrification in Harlem. Kinloch’s mentoring followed these boys—now young
men—to college, and their reflections on this participatory action research experi-
ences were also published with Kinloch’s study. Kinloch’s strategy, an important way
to think about disrupting the pipeline through helping young people cultivate criti-
cal literacy skills, was listening to young people:

One specific way I sought to better understand the issues Phillip and Khaleeq were confronting was by
listening to their perspectives. For instance, I listened to them discuss how the mass media portray Black
males as dangerous, the increasing incarceration of youth, and adult activism and youth political rights.
(p. 179)

Morrell’s (2008) ethnographic work with urban high school students documents the
multiple literacy practices of his students, such as reading varied texts on sports and
fashion, watching movies or listening to music and then critically evaluating lyrics,
writing notes and e-mails, and constructing poems and songs to share with others.
Morrell (2008) asserted,

Their non-school lives were saturated with sophisticated literacy practices; and this was true for even the
most underperforming students. To label these pupils as illiterate bordered on irresponsible; to say that
their literacies were not valued placed the onus squarely on the dominant institution responsible for the
devaluing as it also pointed toward a viable plan of action for my curriculum and pedagogy. (p. 92)
166     Review of Research in Education, 35

Part of the pedagogy of possibility is creating learning environments that are

“hybrid” and include multiple literate forms necessary for students and teachers to
achieve critical literacies. Students have a right to their own literate practices and the
mainstream academic literate practices needed for college and job success; to deny
either is to impede students from developing the rich literate identities that are right-
fully theirs.
For six consecutive summers, Morrell (2008) cofacilitated a critical research
seminar for youth attending underresourced and underperforming schools.
Collaborating with K–12 teachers, this group of 25 to 30 students “designed and
carried out their own projects, usually investigating issues related to educational
equity and youth empowerment . . .” (p. 117). Again, writing in this context focused
on agency and change, including “writing for personal understanding and writing for
social change” (p. 118). Morrell’s project was more than the learning experiences that
prepared them for life after high school graduation. Through public speaking at
forums and conferences and publishing scholarly papers, students were able to influ-
ence state legislation and “most importantly acquire much needed skills for academic
advancement, professional membership, and civic engagement” (p. 122).
Similarly, Gutiérrez (2008) has conducted empirical research on a long-term
project serving students from migrant-farmworker backgrounds. Housed on the
University of California, Los Angeles campus, the Migrant Student Leadership
Institute (MSLI) provides a space “in which students begin to conceive who they are
and what they might be able to accomplish academically and beyond” (p. 148).
Writing is also central to the MSLI and specifically the concept of “testimonio” or
rendering of people’s understanding of themselves and their social worlds. Gutiérrez’s
analysis of one testimonio in particular revealed “how poverty, discrimination,
exploitation, anti-immigrant sentiment, language ideologies, and education and
social practices gone awry complicate current understanding in the learning sciences
about learning and development” (p. 149).
Also based in California, Ginwright’s (2010) study of radical healing demon-
strates the ways in which youth, and African American youth in particular, can
develop ways of knowing and being that give them power and agency over their lives.
Arguing that youth who grow up in “urban conditions” such as joblessness, a drug
economy (and specifically a “crack cocaine economy”), lack of historical connection,
and racism need to experience radical healing (e.g., agency, awareness—both politi-
cal and social, resistance, hope and optimism, personal transformation, and the abil-
ity to struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism). As a scholar and
youth advocate with 15 years of experience working with urban youth in Oakland,
California, Ginwright (2010) examined the “educational and organizational pro-
cesses and practices that promote youth healing and agency” (p. 27). One of these
practices was the creation of a youth camp, Camp Akili, which worked with cohorts
of 100 youth referred by county probation offices, local high schools, churches, and
other community-based organizations. Camp Akili had three goals: “to provide
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     167    

structured activities that develop and enhance political awareness, to provide par-
ticipants with opportunities that encourage and promote psychological and physical
wellness, and to provide hands on experiences that are intended to stimulate learning
about activism and leadership” (Ginwright, 2010, p. 81). This 5-year study found
that experiences such as Camp Akili—like many of the aforementioned studies,
“recalibrates what is possible for [young people’s] lives and their communities.”

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Throughout this chapter, we examine the policies, such as miseducation, diploma
denial, and the discipline or punishment gap, that contribute to what has been
referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline. In this pipeline, particular youth learn
that their lives are disposable and that detention centers, jails, and prisons have
somehow become an expected part of their life cycle. We assert that specific practices
that focus on collaborating with youth to foster critical literacy, such as students
performing their writing, students conducting research with adult allies, and stu-
dents having forums where their voices, ideas, and lived experiences can be heard,
will disrupt and potentially dismantle such a pipeline.
Agency is the common thread in the case studies presented throughout this
review. Inviting youth to sit at a metaphorical table where they can be engaged in
their education, and learn how to read, write, speak, and thus act for themselves,
while providing opportunities for youth to view themselves as worthy and deserving
participants in community and civic engagement is critical. We argue that the right
to be literate, and the right to be critically literate in particular, must be the right of
all children and youth.
Educational research should consider focusing on youth-centered research much
like those studies discussed in the final section of this chapter. Youth Participatory
Action Research (YPAR) projects as well as studies that include the voices of youth
could illuminate how youth are experiencing literacy, education, and school-to-
prison pipeline issues in their school communities. More studies grounded in socio-
cultural learning theories examining classrooms using multiple and critical literacies
should also be a focused line of inquiry in forthcoming scholarship. Finally, studies
of classrooms and schools that promote academic rigor and create a culture of college
readiness as opposed to focusing on punishment and surveillance can offer a vision
for schools hoping to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

References
Advancement Project. (2000, June). Opportunities suspended. Retrieved from http://www
.advancementproject.org/sites/default/files/publications/opsusp.pdf
Alberola, C. R., & Molina, E. F. (2008). Continuity and change in the Spanish juvenile justice
system. In J. Junger-Tas & S. H. Decker (Eds.), International handbook of juvenile justice
(pp. 325–348). New York, NY: Springer.
168     Review of Research in Education, 35

Anderson, J. (1988). The education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press.
Angel-Ajani, A. (2005). Domestic enemies and carceral circles: African women and criminal-
ization in Italy. In J. Sudburys (Ed.), Global lockdown: Race, gender, and the prison-industrial
complex (pp. 3–18). New York, NY: Routledge.
Apple, M. W. (2001). Educating the “right” way: Markets, standards, god, and inequity. New
York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer.
Au, W. (2007). High-stakes testing and curricular control: A qualitative metasynthesis.
Educational Researcher, 36, 258–267.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Balfanz, R., & Legters, N. (2004). Which high schools produce the nations dropouts? Where are
they located? Who attends them? Baltimore, MD: Center for Research on the Education of
Students Placed At Risk. Retrieved from http://www.csos.jhu.edu/crespar/techReports/
Report70.pdf
Ball, A. (Ed.). (2006). With more deliberate speed: Achieving equity and excellence in education—
realizing the full potential of Brown v. Board of Education. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ball, A., & Lardner, T. (2005). African American literacies unleashed: Vernacular English and the
composition classroom. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Ballenger, C. (1999). Teaching other people’s children: Literacy and learning in a bilingual class-
room. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Barrow, R., & Milburn, G. (Eds.) (1990). A critical dictionary of educational concepts: An
appraisal of selected ideas and issues in educational theory and practice (2nd ed.). New York:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community.
London, England: Routledge.
Bell, J. (2000). Throwaway children: Conditions of confinement and incarceration. In
V. Polokow (Ed.), The public assault on American’s children: Poverty, violence and juvenile
injustice (pp. 157–187). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Bereiter, C. (1980). Development in writing. In L. W. Gregg & E. R. Steinberg (Eds.),
Cognitive processes in writing (pp. 73–93). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black-Americans from
the Civil War to World War II. New York, NY: Double Day.
Bloom, B. S. (Ed.). (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives, the classification of educational
goals—Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York, NY: McKay.
Chesney-Lind, M. (1997). The female offender: Girls, women, and crime. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Children’s Defense Fund. (2007). America’s cradle to prison pipeline. Washington, DC:
Author. Retrieved from http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=c2pp_
report2007
Civil Rights Project. (2000). Opportunities suspended: The devastating consequences of zero toler-
ance and school discipline policies. Retrieved from http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/
research/k-12-education/school-discipline/opportunities-suspended-the-devastating-
consequences-of-zero-tolerance-and-school-discipline-policies
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social
futures. London, England: Routledge.
Darling-Hammond, L. (1997). The right to learn: A blueprint for creating schools that work. San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Securing the right to learn: Policy and practice for powerful
teaching and learning. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 13–24.
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     169    

Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: The
New Press.
Dixson, A. (2008). “Taming the beast”: Race, discourse, and identity in a middle school
classroom. In S. Greene (Ed.), Literacy as a civil right: Reclaiming social justice in literacy
teaching and learning (pp. 125–147). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Dohrn, B. (2000). Look out kid, it’s something you did: The criminalization of children. In
V. Polakow’s (Ed.), The public assault on American’s children: Poverty, violence and juvenile
injustice (pp. 157–187). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Dorfman, L., & Schiraldi, V. (2001). Off balance: Youth, race & crime in the news. Retrieved
from http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/media/media.html
Duncan, G. A. (2000). Urban pedagogies and the celling of adolescents of color. Social Justice,
27, 29–42.
Duncan, G. A. (2009, April). Toward the abolition of the school-to-prison pipeline. Paper pre-
sented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, San Diego.
Dyson, A. H. (1993). Social worlds of children learning to write in an urban primary school.
New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Engëstrom, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity theoretical approach to developmental
research. Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit Oy.
Fecho, B., & Skinner, S. (2008). For what it’s worth: Civil rights and the price of literacy. In
S. Greene (Ed.), Literacy as a civil right: Reclaiming social justice in literacy teaching and learn-
ing (pp. 87–106). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Fine, M., & McClelland, S. I. (2006). Sexuality and desire: Still missing after all these years.
Harvard Educational Review, 76, 297–338.
Fine, M., & Ruglis, J. (2009). Circuits and consequences of dispossession: The racialized
realignment of the public sphere for U.S. youth. Transforming Anthropology, 17, 20–33.
Fisher, M. T. (2005a). Literocracy: Liberating language and creating possibilities. English
Education, 37, 92–95.
Fisher, M. T. (2005b). From the coffee house to the school house: The promise and potential
of spoken word poetry in school contexts. English Education, 37, 115–131.
Fisher, M. T. (2007). Writing in rhythm: Spoken word poetry in urban classrooms. New York,
NY: Teachers College Press.
Fisher, M. T. (2008). Catching butterflies. English Education, 40, 94–100.
Fisher, M. T. (2009). Black literate lives: Historical and contemporary perspectives. New York,
NY: Routledge.
Fisher, M. T., Purcell, S. S., & May, R. (2009). Process, product, and playmaking. English
Education, 41, 337–355.
Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Westport, CT:
Bergin & Garvey.
Gadsden, V., Jacobs, C., Bickerstaff, S., Park, J., & Kane, S. (2008, March). Health and educa-
tion: Addressing risk and community health disparities through interdisciplinarity. Paper pre-
sented at the American Educational Researchers Association Annual Meeting, New York,
NY.
Gallagher, K. (2007). The theatre of urban: Youth and schooling in dangerous times. Toronto,
Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Gillborn, D., & Youdell, D. (2000). Rationing education: Policy, practice, reform, and equity.
Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.
Gilliam, W. S. (2005). Prekindergarteners left behind: Expulsion rates in state prekindergarten
systems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Child Study Center.
Gilliam, W. S., & Shahar, G. (2006). Preschool and child care expulsion and suspension: Rates
and predictors in one state. Infants & Young Children, 19, 228–245.
170     Review of Research in Education, 35

Ginwright, S. (2010). Black youth rising: Activism and radical healing in urban America. New
York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Giroux, H. A. (1987). Introduction: Literacy and the pedagogy of political empowerment. In
P. Freire & D. Macedo (Eds.), Literacy: Reading the word and the world (pp. 1–29).
Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Good, C. V., & Merkel, W. R. (Eds.). (1973). Literacy. Dictionary of education. New York, NY:
McGraw-Hill.
Goody, J., & Watt, I. (1963). The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 5, 304–345.
Gordon, E., & Stovall, D. (2009, November). Curriculum-based publication projects. Why?
How? What? Paper presented at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual
Convention, Philadelphia, PA.
Greene, J. C. (1994) Misperspectives on literacy: A critique of an anglocentric bias in histories
of American literacy. Written Communication, 11, 251–269.
Greene, S. (2008). Introduction. In S. Greene (Ed.), Literacy as a civil right: Reclaiming social
justice in literacy teaching and learning (pp. 1–25). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Greene, S., & Abt-Perkins, D. (2003). How can literacy research contribute to racial under-
standing? In S. Greene & D. Abt-Perkins (Eds.), Making race visible: Literacy research for
cultural understanding (pp. 1–31). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Gregory, A., Skiba, R. J., & Noguera, P. A. (2010). The achievement gap and discipline gap:
Two sides of the same coin. Educational Researcher, 39, 59–68.
Gutiérrez, K. D. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research
Quarterly, 43, 148–164.
Gutiérrez, K. D., Ali, A., & Henríquez, C. (2010). Syncretism and hybridity: Schooling,
language, and race and students from non-dominant communities. In M. W. Apple, S. J.
Ball, & L. A. Gandins (Eds.), The Routledge international Handbook of the sociology of educa-
tion (pp. 358–369). New York, NY: Routledge.
Gutiérrez, K. D., Baquedano-Lopez, P., & Tejada, C. (1999). Rethinking diversity: Hybridity
and hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 6, 286–303.
Gutiérrez, K. D., Rymes, B., & Larson, J. (1995). Script, counterscript, and underlife in the
classroom: James Brown versus Brown v. Board of Education. Harvard Educational Review, 65,
445–471.
Gutiérrez, K. D., & Vossoughi, S. (2010). Lifting off the ground to return anew: Mediated
praxis, transformative learning, and social design experiments. Journal of Teacher Education,
61, 100–117.
Harada, V. H., Kirio, C., & Yamamoto, S. (2008). Project-based learning: rigor and relevance
in high schools. Library Media Connection, 26, 14–18.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Horizon Academy Students (2006). Killing the sky: Oral histories from Horizon Academy, Rikers
Island (Vol. 2). New York, NY: Student Press Initiative at Teachers College.
Jordan, J. (1989). Moving towards home: Political essays. London, England: Virago.
Kina, R. (2005). Through the eyes of a strong black woman survivor of domestic violence: An
Australian story. In J. Sudbury (Ed.), Global lockdown: Race, gender, and the prison-industrial
complex (pp. 67–72). New York, NY: Routledge.
Kinloch, V. F. (2005). Revisiting the promise of students’ rights to their own language:
Pedagogical strategies. College Composition and Communication, 57, 83–113.
Kinloch, V. F. (2009). Harlem on our minds: Place, race, and the literacies of urban youth. New
York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kinloch, V. F. (2010). To not be a traitor of Black English: Youth perceptions of language
rights in an urban context. Teachers College Record, 112, 103–141.
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     171    

Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities. New York, NY: Crown.

Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of a nation. New York, NY: Crown.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2005). Literacy practices in diverse classroom contexts. In T. L.
McCarthy (Ed.), Language, literacy, and power in schooling (pp. 127–133). Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). 2006 Presidential address: From the achievement gap to the edu-
cation debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7),
3–12.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2009a). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field
like education? In E. Taylor, D. Gillborn, & G. Ladson-Billings (Eds.), Foundations of
critical race theory in education (pp. 17–37). New York, NY: Routledge.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2009b). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children
(2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Larson, J. (2003). Negotiating race in classroom research: Tensions and possibilities. In
S. Greene & D. Abt-Perkins (Eds.), Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural under-
standing (pp. 89–106). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Lee, C. D. (2001). Is October Brown Chinese? A cultural modeling activity system for under-
achieving students. American Educational Research Journal, 38, 97–141.
Lee, C. D. (2006). Every good-bye ain’t gone: Analyzing the cultural underpinnings of class-
room talk. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19, 305–327.
Lee, C. D. (2007). Culture, literacy, and learning: Taking bloom in the midst of the whirlwind.
New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Lewis, A. (2008). Even sweet, gentle Larry? The continuing significance of race in education.
In S. Green (Ed.), Literacy as a civil right: Reclaiming social justice in literacy in literacy teach-
ing and learning (pp. 69–86). New York: Peter Lang.
Li, G. (2008). Culturally contested literacies: America’s “rainbow underclass” and urban schools.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Lipman, P. (2008). Education policy, race, and neoliberal urbanism. In S. Greene (Ed.), Literacy
as a civil right: Reclaiming social justice in literacy teaching and learning (pp. 125–147).
New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Lunsford, A., Moglen, H., & Slevin, J. (Eds.). (1990). The right to literacy. New York, NY:
Modern Language Association of America.
Mahiri, J. (2000/2001). Pop culture pedagogy in the end(s) of school. Journal of Adolescent &
Adult Literacy, 44, 382–386.
McCarty, T. L. (Ed.). (2005). Language, literacy, and power in schooling. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
McCarty, T. L., Romero-Little, M. E., & Zepeda, O. (2006). Native American youth dis-
courses on language shift and retention: Ideological cross-currents and their implications
for language planning. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9,
659–677.
McGrew, K. (2008). Education’s prisoners: Schooling, the political economy, and the prison indus-
trial complex. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
McHenry, E., & Heath, S. B. (1994). The literate and the literary: African Americans as writ-
ers and readers—1830-1940. Written Communication, 11, 419–444.
Meiners, E. R. (2007). Right to be hostile: Schools, prisons, and the making of public enemies.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Mintrop, H., & Sunderman, G. L. (2009). Predictable failure of federal sanctions-driven
accountability for school improvement—and why we may retain it anyway. Educational
Researcher, 38, 353–364.
Morrell, E. (2008). Critical literacy and urban youth: Pedagogies of access, dissent, and liberation.
New York, NY: Routledge.
172     Review of Research in Education, 35

Moses, R. P., & Cobb, C. E. (2001). Radical equations: Civil rights from Mississippi to the
Algebra Project. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Muncie, J. (2005). The globalization of crime control—the case of juvenile justice: Neo-
liberalism, policy convergence and international conventions. Theoretical Criminology, 9,
35–64.
Nasir, N. S., & Hand, V. M. (2006). Exploring sociocultural perspectives on race, culture, and
learning. Review of Educational Research, 76, 449–475.
National Association of the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational
Fund. (2005). Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. Retrieved from http://naacpldf
.org/files/publications/Dismantling_the_School_to_Prison_Pipeline.pdf
Nicholas, S. (2005). Negotiating for the Hopi way of life through literacy and schooling. In
T. L. McCarty, (Ed.), Language, literacy, and power in schooling (pp. 29–46). Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Noguera, P. A. (2003a). City schools and the American dream: Reclaiming the promise of public
education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Noguera, P. A. (2003b). Schools, prisons, and social implications of punishment: Rethinking
discipline practices. Theory Into Practice, 42, 341–350.
Olson, D. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing.
Harvard Education Review, 47, 257–281.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London, England:
Routledge.
Paley, V. (1979). White teacher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Parenti, C. (2008). Lockdown America: Police and prisons in the age of crisis. London, England:
Verso.
Pew Center on the States. (2008). One in 100 behind bars in America 2008. Washington, DC:
Pew Charitable Trusts.
Plaut, S. (Ed.). (2009). The right to literacy in secondary schools: Creating a culture of thinking.
New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Poe-Yamagata, E., & Jones, M. A. (2000). And justice for some: Differential treatment of minor-
ity youth in the justice system. Washington, DC: Building Blocks for Youth.
Polakow, V. (Ed.). (2000). The public assault on American’s children: Poverty, violence and juve-
nile injustice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Rapping, E. (2003). Law and justice as seen on TV. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Richie, B. (1996). Compelled to crime: The gender entrapment of battered black women. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Richie, B. (2005). Queering antiprison work: African American lesbians in the juvenile justice
system. In J. Sudbury (Ed.), Global lockdown: Race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex
(pp. 73–85). New York, NY: Routledge.
Rickford, J. R., & Rickford, R. J. (2000). Spoken soul: The story of Black English. New York,
NY: John Wiley.
Roth, W., & Lee, Y. (2007). Vygotsky’s neglected legacy: Cultural-historical activity theory.
Review of Educational Research, 77, 186–232.
Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (2001). Unpackaging literacy. In E. Cushman, E. R. Kintgen, B. M.
Kroll, & M. Rose (Eds.), Literacy: A critical sourcebook (pp. 123–137). Boston, MA:
Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Siddle Walker, V. (1996). Their highest potential: An African American school community in the
segregated south. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Simkins, S. B., Hirsch, A. E., Horvat, E. M., & Moss, M. B. (2004, Winter). The school to
prison pipeline for girls: The role of physical and sexual abuse. Children’s Legal Rights
Journal, 24, 56–72.
 Winn, Behizadeh: The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education     173    

Smitherman, G. (1986). Talkin’ and testifyin’: The language of Black America. Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin.
Smitherman, G. (1999). Language and culture. In G. Smitherman (Ed.), Talkin that talk:
Language, culture, and education in African America (pp. 11–15). London, England:
Routledge.
Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Sudbury, J. (2005). Introduction: Feminist critiques, transnational landscapes, abolitionist
visions. In J. Sudbury (Ed.), Global lockdown: Race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex
(pp. xi–xxviii). New York, NY: Routledge.
Szwed, J. F. (1981). The ethnography of literacy. In M. F. Whiteman (Ed.), Writing: The
nature, development, and teaching of written communication (pp. 13–23). Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Terrio, S. (2009). Judging Mohammed: Juvenile delinquency, immigration, and exclusion at the
Paris Palace of Justice. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
UNESCO Education Sector. (2004). The plurality of literacy and its implications for policy and
programmes. Paris, France: Author.
Vanneman, A., Hamilton, L., Baldwin Anderson, J., & Rahman, T. (2009). Achievement gaps:
How Black and White students in public schools perform in mathematics and reading on the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NCES 2009-455). Washington, DC: National
Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of
Education.
Winn, M. T. (2010). Our side of the story: Moving incarcerated youth voices from margins
to center. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 13, 313–325.
Winn, M. T. (in press). Betwixt and between: Literacy, liminality, and the celling of Black
girls. Race, Ethnicity, and Education.
Winn, M. T., & Ubiles, J. R. (in press). Worthy witnessing: Collaborative research in urban
classrooms. In A. Ball & C. Tyson (Eds.), Studying diversity in teacher education. Washington,
DC: American Educational Research Association.
Wyvekens, A. (2008). The French juvenile justice system. In J. Junger-Tas & S. H. Decker
(Eds.), International handbook of juvenile justice (pp. 173–186). New York, NY: Springer.
Yang, W. K. (2009, September). Discipline or punish? Some suggestions for school policy and
teacher practice. Language Arts, 87, 49–61.