The failure of zero tolerance

A nationwide crackdown on students has resulted in outrageous punishments that disproportionately affect minorities.

By Johanna Wald

Aug. 29, 2001 | As children return to school this month, they can expect to face some uninspired teachers, an occasional moment of lunchroom humiliation and onerous piles of homework. That they knew. What they also face, and may be unaware of, is suspension, banishment and encounters with the police, under new zero tolerance disciplinary policies with extraordinarlily broad definitions of offensive or dangerous behavior.

For example, students older than 13 who attend public school in Mississippi are now subject to the educational equivalent of a "three strikes" law. Passed by the Legislature last spring, this bill allows for the expulsion of a student deemed to have been "disruptive" in class three times over the course of a year. A state NAACP executive board member was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that her 17-year-old son, who had a cold, was kicked out of class after taking a tissue off his teacher's desk without permission. Under the new statute, that act could constitute strike one. "If this rule were in effect this year, he wouldn't be graduating," she said. "He'd be on strike seven."

A 17-year-old honors student in Arkansas begins his senior year with an even more ominous cloud over his head. His college scholarship is in danger because of a 45-day sentence to an alternative school. His offense? An arbitrary search of his car by school officials in the spring revealed no drugs, but a scraper and pocketknife that his father had inadvertently left there the night before when he was fixing the rearview mirror. Despite anguished pleas of extenuating circumstances by the desperate father, the school system has so far adamantly insisted that automatic punishments for weapon possession in school are inviolate.

In a sense, though, this student should consider himself fortunate. At least he wasn't arrested. In a similar incident in Florida, an 18-year-old National Merit scholar was pulled out of class, handcuffed, charged with a felony and banned from her graduation. A police officer had passed by her car and spotted a kitchen knife lying in the passenger seat. She had left it there accidentally after using it the weekend before to open boxes. Although no one disputed her explanation, her principal, citing the need for "fairness," declined her request for leniency.

How did we get to the point where such innocent mistakes and minor misdeeds have become grounds for expelling and arresting students? Where did the infiltration of a criminal justice mentality in schools become so blatant as to subject students to "three strikes" laws? And why do these practices continue to be justified in the name of fairness and school safety?

The short answer, in an increasingly fractious national debate over these questions, can be summed up by the following phrase: "Zero Tolerance Run Amok."

Like many policies that go disastrously awry, the original impulse behind the creation of zero tolerance statutes was a reasonable one. First enacted by state legislatures and eventually by Congress in 1994, these measures were aimed at dangerous students who brought guns to school. Over the past seven years, however, disciplinary policies mandating severe punishments -- usually suspensions, expulsions and, increasingly, referral to law enforcement -- have been expanded in many school districts to cover a broad canvas of student behaviors, including possession of all weapons (which can include everything from real fireams to beepers, "gun-shaped" medallions and nail clippers), drugs (not just marijuana and cocaine but Midol, asthma medication, and Certs), and alcohol (mouthwash qualifies), along with threats, truancy, tardiness, and vague, catch-all categories like "insubordination" and "disrespect. "

At its most extreme, evocation of zero tolerance has resulted in an 11-year-old being hauled off in a police van for packing a plastic knife in her lunchbox to cut chicken; a 14-year-old held in an adult jail and charged with "strong-armed" theft for stealing $2 from his classmate; a fifth-grader expelled for a year for hiding razor blades from a friend he thought might use them to harm another; a fourth grader suspended for wearing a Tweety Bird chain on his neck; and, in a tale that would be comic if it weren't true, a 6-year-old cited for "sexual harassment" for running out of the bath naked in his own home to tell the bus driver to wait for him.

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