Dismantling the Pre-School to Prison Pipeline Through Black Literacy and Education for Transformation: Recommendations for school leaders, parents and policymakers

Literacy has been weaponized against Black families and children since the first Europeans began kidnapping Africans for the purposes of enriching themselves through chattel slavery. This study is an examination of how that weaponization of literacy has evolved, manifesting in our contemporary world as a system of interlocking oppressions that we shorthand here as the "Pre-School to Prison Pipeline."While the challenges we identify, document, and analyze in this paper are ancient, we propose realistic solutions, all of which revolve around the need for increased effectiveness and investment in literacy and educational opportunity for Black children.The African continent and the many peoples who live in its diaspora have always enjoyed rich literary traditions. While those traditions were upended by enslavement, obfuscated by the plantation, constrained by Jim Crow, and further marginalized by an ever-expanding system of mass incarceration, there has never been a moment in that history when the candle of our great literacy traditions was extinguished.This paper examines the various tools that oppressors have used to suppress Black literacy; the ways in which Black families have resisted that suppression; and the policies, practices, changes, and investments that we need now to ensure that our children, and their children, can thrive, no matter what the future holds