Since our inception, Advancement Project has worked to end harsh and unfair school disciplinary measures that are pushing children of color off of an academic track and on to a track to prison.  Our most recent project relating to this issue, Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track, is a multi-year, multi-site youth and adult organizing effort to end the unwarranted criminalization of children by their schools. Currently, we are in year 4 of this campaign, which is implemented in partnership with community groups in Denver, CO, Chicago IL, and Palm Beach County FL.  Through participatory research, analysis of school discipline data and policies, and effective communication strategies we documented the problem in these school districts and published our findings in a subsequent joint report entitled Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track, released in March 2005.

The goals of the project are:  

• To document and expose the precise nature of school policies that practice zero tolerance to children of color, putting them on the jailhouse track in three geographically distinct locations;
• To strengthen the capacity of the youth involved in this work to become engaged citizens and agents of change;
• To develop and implement school discipline reform on the local level that will serve as models for other communities; and
• To impact the national conversation about this issue in order to provide a context for broader reforms.