Being a teacher is an astounding responsibility. Sadly, however, at no other time in Hilderbrand Pelzer III’s career has educational work been so difficult for teachers. Their resolve and dedication are tested every day. Despite teachers’ strong commitment to helping children succeed in school, teaching is demanding work. Instead of instructing children in reading, writing and solving math problems, teachers face challenges that make many of them rethink their chosen profession.

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This keynote presentation will explore challenges that teachers face, focus on the support they need to turn these challenges into opportunities for growth, reconnect them to the reasons they entered the profession, explore ways to regain their strong commitment to furthering the academic achievement of students, reignite their self-confidence and discuss what a good teacher is expected to do to help students improve their lives through education.

The white school buses and the prisoners who rode them served as a constant reminder of why Hilderbrand Pelzer III became a principal. Because many people would never consider educating incarcerated students or even working in a correctional setting, Pelzer’s compelling story and courageous actions will inspire educators to embrace their potential to affect positive change in their educational organizations, districts, schools, and classrooms, and to overcome the daunting array of challenges in education.

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This keynote presentation will explore the experience, the indispensable mental perspective, and the impact of leading a school that cultivated a strong educational culture across Philadelphia’s six major correctional facilities. The lessons learned by Pelzer about the challenges facing correctional educators and their students are invaluable to school leaders. He shows school leaders how to foster strategic leadership practices that leverages the organization’s key resources in its quest to transform teaching and learning for their students.

How do you reform and improve education for incarcerated youth? According to a report from the United States Departments of Education and Justice, Guiding Principles for Providing High-Quality Education in Juvenile Justice Secure Care Settings, “Providing high-quality education in juvenile justice secure care settings presents unique challenges for administrators, teachers, and staff who are responsible for the education, rehabilitation, and welfare of youths committed to their care.” Most would agree that providing high-quality education in juvenile justice secure care settings is a worthy if daunting objective for juvenile justice practitioners and correctional educators. Unfortunately, false assumptions about school capacity in secured settings is preventing significant progress. In an effort to provide high-quality education for incarcerated youth in Philadelphia’s correctional facilities, Hilderbrand Pelzer III created the research-grounded Juvenile Focused Correctional Education School Model, which overcame a number of legal, logistical, and educational challenges.

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This keynote presentation will walk through the model’s framework, emphasizing the evidence-based practices that have made the model successful and that align to the guiding principles that underpin this approach. He recommends features of the model and strategies that can be replicated in other secured and correctional settings (and schools facing educational challenges). 

When Hilderbrand Pelzer III was the principal of a Philadelphia public school inside Philadelphia’s six major correctional facilities, he often witnessed a sad occurrence that he had seen play out repeatedly throughout his career as an educator: students who could not read. Illiteracy was the single common weakness among his incarcerated students. While there is no hard evidence of prison officials having used reading scores to predict the number of prison beds they would need, there is an undeniable connection between literacy skills and incarceration.

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This keynote presentation will expand the conversation to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline theory by steering focus away from school discipline policies to the teaching of reading, which has to be fixed, and the many teachers who struggle with teaching reading. Additionally, the presentation will elicit feelings about the school-to-prison pipeline; confront actions and practices that daily fail to reach, teach and engage thousands of students; explore ways to transform relationships with students who face difficulties and who start at an academic disadvantage; and share real-life insights on the incarcerated side of the school-to-prison pipeline.

The cost of failing to meet the needs of black male students hit Hilderbrand Pelzer III years ago, when he was principal of a Philadelphia public school that served Philadelphia’s six major correctional facilities. One day, Pelzer met a former student from a public high school that he had led several years earlier. He remembered that he had repeatedly suspended the young man from school for skipping class as he learned that his former student had never graduated from high school and was now an inmate. Pelzer felt his actions as a principal had contributed to the young man’s circumstance. Black boys’ educations are often hampered by stereotypes that they are “dumb, deprived, dangerous, deviant, and disturbed.” Thus, black boys are more often identified for special education and referred for behavioral health services while their behaviors may be criminalized.

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This keynote presentation will explore examples of adult actions that cause black boys to become victims of the low expectations of teachers and school leaders, who fear young people’s behavior that dares adults to teach them; focus on the development of teachers’ knowledge about black boys’ behaviors; and explore positive ways to transform educators’ relationships with black boys in a way that will lead to success and achievement.