In a recent episode of The Table, I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Dana Ainsworth, educator, researcher, and advocate whose doctoral work in educational leadership, policy, and justice examines what she calls the trauma-to-prison pipeline. Dana spent over fifteen years in education, including five as a high school English teacher, and she now works with educators and policymakers to help them understand the root causes of dysregulated behavior and equip them with strategies that interrupt cycles of exclusion.
This conversation gave me a lot to sit with. If you work in school leadership, I think it will do the same for you.
What Is the Trauma-to-Prison Pipeline?
Most educators are at least familiar with the phrase “school-to-prison pipeline,” the idea that certain discipline practices within schools, particularly those that rely on suspension and expulsion, push students out of classrooms and into the criminal justice system at an alarming rate. Dana’s research takes that framework and traces it further back, to the historic and systemic policies that heighten children’s exposure to trauma long before they ever step into a school building.
In 1970, the total U.S. state and federal prison population was fewer than 200,000. By 2000, that number had climbed to 1.3 million. In that same thirty-year window, out-of-school suspensions doubled. And those suspensions were, and continue to be, applied unequally: Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students for the exact same behaviors.
Dana’s argument is that these aren’t coincidences. They’re the downstream effects of policies, from redlining to school funding structures tied to local property taxes, that concentrated poverty and denied resources to entire communities. The result is that certain children arrive at school carrying stressors their nervous systems weren’t built to absorb alone. And then we penalize them for it.
The Neuroscience Behind the Behavior
One of the most clarifying things Dana offers is a grounded explanation of what is actually happening in a child’s body when they act out, shut down, or seem unreachable. This part of the conversation is worth understanding in some depth because it fundamentally reframes how we interpret behavior.
Childhood adversity, whether that’s abuse, poverty, parental instability, or chronic stress, activates neurochemical and hormonal systems in the developing brain. When those stressors become overwhelming, the body moves into what researchers call a toxic stress response. Because the brain is still forming in childhood, it essentially builds itself around the signals it’s receiving. If the message it gets repeatedly is that the world is unsafe, the vigilant, reactive parts of the brain become overdeveloped, and the parts responsible for executive functioning, impulse control, and decision-making become underdeveloped.
As Dana put it during our conversation, “The brain is taking in all the information around us, determining what it needs to equip itself with to survive in the world. So if it’s getting the message that the world is fundamentally unsafe, then those are the pieces of the brain that are going to become the most developed.”
This is why we see heightened ADHD, impulsivity, and reactive behavior in students who have come from challenging backgrounds. It is not defiance. It is biology.
Behavior Is Communication
Dana returned to this phrase more than once throughout our conversation, and I think it deserves its own space: behavior is communication.
When a student throws a pencil at the sight of a spelling test, or shuts down the moment something difficult is placed in front of them, or becomes combative in a math class, that behavior is not random, and it is rarely intentional in the way we assume. Something is being communicated. The student may feel completely unequipped to meet the challenge in front of them. They may have learned, through repeated painful experience, that challenge leads to failure. They may simply be craving connection and acting out because that is the only reliable way to get an adult’s attention.
Dana encouraged educators to practice genuine curiosity: “What possible motive was there? What motivates this student to do positive things? As soon as I stand in proximity to this child, they calm down.” That observation alone can tell you a great deal about what a student needs.
This kind of curiosity requires us to interrogate our assumptions. We live, as Dana said, in a culture that reflexively applies motive to behavior, that defaults to “they just want to be bad.” Unlearning that reflex is ongoing work, even for those of us who know better.
The Problem with Remove-and-Exclude
Traditional discipline responses, removing a student from the classroom, issuing an out-of-school suspension, and eventually expelling them, do not address the underlying need. They reinforce a message that the student is broken and unwelcome. And they dramatically increase the risk of long-term harm.
Dana was direct about the data: as soon as a student has unstructured out-of-school time, the risk of incarceration increases. Suspension removes a child from the supervised environment that might be offering them their only consistent adult relationships. It also solidifies an identity: you don’t belong here.
The alternative she describes is not permissiveness. It is redirection toward regulation. Rather than removing a student from the room because they’re escalating, what if there were a space, a breakout room, a trusted specialist, a structured pause, where they could get regulated and then return to the work? “Let’s get you into an environment that can give you those tools,” Dana said. “Let’s break down why this particular problem is causing this reaction. Let’s walk through that and really equip that student.”
That is a discipline philosophy built around development rather than compliance.
A Student Cannot Learn While Dysregulated
This point seems obvious once you hear it, but Dana named it with real urgency: a brain in a dysregulated state cannot take in new information. Full stop.
Think about the last time you sat down to write an email right after a tense meeting. Now imagine being eight years old, arriving at school after a chaotic morning at home, walking into a loud cafeteria, and being asked to sit still and learn long division.
Dana noted that schools in parts of Europe and Asia understand this and build regulation into the school day from the start. Some schools have begun implementing MTSS (Multi-Tiered Systems of Support) frameworks, though Dana is candid about the complications of implementing those with full fidelity. But even simpler structures matter: a five to ten-minute window of quiet and breathing at the start of the day, transitions that are handled with intentionality rather than urgency, lunch periods long enough for students to actually decompress.
She shared an example from a Quaker school where a ten-minute silent morning meeting is standard practice. By the time students are in class, a teacher can simply say, “Let’s take our silence,” and the room drops immediately. Because the skill has been taught. It has been practiced. It is part of the culture.
Administrators Set the Conditions
One of the most compelling moments in Dana’s workshop story involved a principal who interrupted a teacher’s pushback mid-session to say something along the lines of: ” If you did this work for just the first few weeks of school, you would be able to teach so much more effectively for the rest of the year. He was not going to fight them on that.
Dana said she almost never hears an administrator say that. And yet it is entirely true: when we invest time in regulation upfront, we recoup it many times over through a calmer, more focused classroom environment for the remainder of the year.
For administrators who are wondering where to start, Dana’s advice is practical and accessible:
- Audit your school day as a nervous system. Look at transitions, arrival procedures, lunch, and class structures. Where are stress levels rising? Where are there opportunities to bring them down?
- Start with the adults. Teachers cannot regulate a room if they are not regulated themselves. Co-regulation is real: students borrow the nervous system of the adult in front of them. Building structural support for teachers, even a ten-minute collective decompression before the day starts, can shift the entire climate.
- Read the science. Dana recommends that leaders ground themselves in the research on the developing nervous system. Understanding the why makes everything else more actionable.
- Eliminate policies that remove before they support. The default of removal should be reserved only for situations that genuinely threaten safety. Every other situation is an opportunity to build the tools a student doesn’t yet have.
Where Dana Finds Hope
I asked Dana what keeps her from despair, given the weight of this work and the current policy environment. Her answer was direct: she lives in a state of low-grade despair, and she thinks most people in education probably do too. But she does find hope.
The most diverse generation of learners in human history is now moving through our schools. And this generation, unlike any before it, has a sophisticated vocabulary for mental and emotional experience. They know what anxiety is. They talk about it publicly. They share it with each other. That is, as Dana put it, “profoundly amazing.”
The students coming up are not waiting for us to figure this out. They are developing the language and the tools themselves. Our job is to build systems worthy of them.
What You Can Do Right Now
If you are a principal, head of school, or division director listening to this conversation and thinking, I need to do something, Dana’s first recommendation is structural: think about how your school’s day is designed as an environment for nervous systems, not just for instruction.
And if you want to go deeper, Dana’s work is accessible at tomorrowhouse.co, where she offers professional development for teachers and works with administrators to build school structures with the nervous system in mind.
The research is clear. The path forward is not easy, but it is knowable. What we need now is the will to redesign our systems around what we actually know about how children learn and how they survive.
