Commentary:
By Anna Wong

When Steve Jobs passed away, I was admittedly surprised by the public outpour surrounding his death. This not only from people who knew him personally, but also from my friends, who told me how much his life influenced theirs. “My iPhone is the first thing I pick up in the morning and the last thing I touch before I go to bed,” they declared.

I decided to read his bio. Turns out Steve was quite the rebel when he was young. He made “bring your pet to school day” posters, convinced kids to give him their bike lock combinations then switched the locks on everyone’s bikes, and set off an explosive underneath his teacher’s chair. When the school complained, his father would say, “Look, it’s not his fault. If you can’t keep him interested, it’s your fault.” Fortunately, he attended schools that accommodated his childish behavior and rebellion rather than criminalizing it.

I work at an organization called the W. Haywood Burns Institute. Our mission is to protect and improve the lives of youth of color, poor youth, and the well-being of their communities. We work to ensure fairness and equity throughout the juvenile justice system by reducing the adverse impacts of public and private youth-serving systems.

What does this work have to do with Steve Jobs and his story?

If Jobs were attending a typical urban public school today, chances are high that he would have been suspended, expelled, or at least, put on a track aimed at failure rather than success. In Oakland, California—where I live—schools primarily serve poor youth of color. If students act like Jobs did, they are labeled with attention deficit disorder, medicated, or charged as delinquents. Even students who behave are rarely recognized as gifted or talented. This is not to say Jobs’ behavior didn’t merit a response from the adults in his life. Here is what happened to Jobs. He was placed in the advanced class in fourth grade. His teacher, “a spunky woman named Imogene Hill,” watched him for a few weeks and figured out how to reach him. In his words,

“After school one day, she gave me this workbook with math problems in it, and she said, ‘I want you to take it home and do this.’ And I thought, ‘Are you nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of these giant lollipops that seemed as big as the world. And she said, ‘When you’re done with it, if you get it mostly right, I will give you this and five dollars.’ And I handed it back within two days.”

Most people can relate to the idea that we all come to crossroads in our lives. We make decisions that take us in one direction or another, but when we are children, decisions are made for us. The adults in Steve’s life decided he was special. His father challenged the school to engage him to his full potential. His teacher learned what it took to motivate him.

This approach should become the norm in our schools and in every child-serving system. Not just for the exceptional Steve Jobs of the world, but for all children—even if their faces do not fit our biases about where potential lies. For too many students, today’s schools resemble prisons more than they do learning laboratories.

Youth of color comprise 38 percent of the youth population in the U.S., yet nearly 70 percent of those confined. The vast majority of brown and black children who fill detention are driven to the justice system from other youth-serving systems (http://www.csub.edu/~danderson_facile/docs/Week8_1.pdf) which neglect to provide appropriate support or services. They are arrested, charged and incarcerated more than White youth for similar conduct. Few are the violent offenders that dominate news headlines. Once in detention, we spend over $200 per night locking them in a place that, research shows (http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/06-11_REP_DangersOfDetention_JJ.pdf) , has a negative impact on their life outcomes. This is morally unacceptable and fiscally unsustainable.

The 2010 census shows that 12 states and D.C. now have white populations below 50 percent among children under age five. At current growth rates, seven more states will flip to “majority minority” among small children in the next decade. As a society, we cannot afford child-serving systems that do not support every child to reach their full potential. Schools are critical, as they are the conduit for ensuring liberal democracy, a sense of shared citizenship, and the reproduction of a sustainable middle class.

We should be working to ensure youth are learning, employable and connected to their families and communities. Now that we know the harmful and racialized impact of zero tolerance policies, schools should eliminate them and return to utilizing child misbehavior as teachable moments. Restorative justice practices, where the goal is to repair harm and to restore victim and offender, have also been shown to have a strong positive effect in reducing violence, decreasing suspensions and expulsions, and creating a safe and respectful learning environment in a number of places around the country, including Oakland. In Juvenile Justice, detention should be used only as a last resort for the small fraction of youth who are real and serious threats to others’ safety. Instead, we should invest resources into their schools and communities so that they are places of opportunity rather than places where some young people of color succeed “in spite of” their surroundings.

Every child should have the opportunities that Jobs had to become the person that he became. He says, “I learned more from [Imogene] than any other teacher, and if it hadn’t been for her I’m sure I would have gone to jail.”

Anna Wong is the Policy & Research Associate at the W. Haywood Burns Institute, where she analyzes data and assists local jurisdictions in developing strategies to reduce racial and ethnic disparities within their juvenile justice systems.