Did you know that when a poor, urban student gets in a fight at school, or brings a Coke to class, that student is most likely to be ticketed by a police officer--and asked to report to court instead of the principal’s office? Due to the rise in zero-tolerance discipline policies and the pressure of NCLB testing, law enforcement is being brought into poor and/or urban public schools to handle discipline issues that were once the domain of the school’s leadership. Young people, most often youth of color, are issued tickets by police officers for engaging in a scuffle or abusing school rules and report to a judge, receiving a fine or other punishment like suspension or expulsion. Not surprisingly, a large percentage of students who are ticketed, suspended or expelled in this way end up in the criminal justice system later on. It's an epidemic so profound that the federal government has actually named it the ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’

But a dynamic school in St. Paul, Minnesota, puts a crack in that pipeline in a new way.

The High School of Recording Arts (HSRA), aka Hip-Hop High, has no classrooms, no teachers, and no principal. They only have a project-based curriculum completely focused on hip-hop music and all aspects of hip-hop culture. Instead of desks lined in a classroom, there’s a state-of-the-art recording studio with students learning the intricate maneuvers of a recording engineer or producer or they’re behind the mic working their poetry into a hip-hop song. Other students focus their studies on hip-hop entrepreneurship, or blending hip-hop with social activism to help struggling students just like themselves. HSRA turns students’ lives around, giving them the freedom to pursue passions relevant to their lives and to succeed on their own terms.  

Instead of suspending or expelling troubled kids and bringing them one step closer to incarceration, Hip-Hop High uses a community-based learning environment that gives students something they might be missing in their own lives: a family-like feeling of belonging and security. Instead of teachers, HSRA assigns each student an adviser, who works closely with the student to develop coursework that is pertinent to their particular needs. But it’s actually more than that. The students’ advisers develop close relationships with the kids, helping them articulate a dream for themselves, and then giving them the tools to help them reach their goals.

How do they do it? How does Hip-Hop High create an environment so positive and successful out of such adverse circumstances? Educator Sam Seidel, author of Hip-Hop Genius, an in-depth look at the school and its success, says the secret lies within one of the original tenets of hip-hop itself: the ability to take an existing paradigm and flip it on its head. At HSRA, “Students are not seen as problems to be solved or empty vessels waiting to be filled,” he writes. “They are valued as thinkers, artists and entrepreneurs.”

Seidel notes that while many of HRSA’s students have been involved with the justice system, after arriving at the new school, they are able “to become creators of their own artwork, businesses and futures.” He says HSRA “is interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline in a way that far more schools need to.”

What if we looked to schools like Hip-Hop High for the reforms our public schools so desperately need? What if we gave today’s students not another standardized test or flavor-of-the-day reform, but the specialized tools to find their own inner genius instead? What might those schools look like? And, most importantly, what kind of new pipeline might we create?

By Holly Korbey

Illustration by Meat+Bones