Fin, from Literacy with an Attitude blog#6

        2016 NPS Finals - House Slam - Ashley Davis & Oompa "Simon Says"

Education was never given fairly. At the end of segregation and the start of integration, we watched as schools in Arkansas closed just to stop students of color from coming into white schools. Then when it came to communities, many of the ghettos were built due to redlining, and that also affected education because the school you go to is usually the closest one to your home. That is a great thing for wealthy communities to be placed in schools near the home but for low-income communities the disparities were huge. So now a student came from the ghettos, attended schools with very few white people, and has a stigma for disobedience and lack of respect. This leads to over-policing BIPOC communities and focusing on the wrong things. We often want to focus on and blame the behavior for the case of it all but we very rarely ever ask or figure out what caused it and how can we fix it. 

    This poetry slam is a good connection to the reading because we focus on policing behavior and forget to educate our students or we want an easy way out when we can't "control" them. which just helps the school-to-prison pipeline. We spent so much time educating them on "the right way to be" that we didn't allow them to grow as readers, we trained them for prison.