Zero Tolerance for Zero Tolerance
Brian Doherty | August 10, 2006, 12:25pm
Bizarre and senseless tyranny can make kids unsettled, the American Psychological Association concludes, after its study of the effects of "zero tolerance" policies in schools that treat, for example, aspirin as punishable as cocaine, or a plastic knife as punishable as a gun. An excerpt from USA Today's account:
There are growing signs that zero-tolerance policies are steering more teens into the juvenile justice system, says Russell Skiba, an Indiana University educational psychologist. "Things that used to be handled by principals land kids in juvenile detention," he says. The report also mentions racial disparities; minorities are expelled more often than whites for comparable offenses.
Principals who want to be flexible "may be caught in a catch-22," says Richard Flanary of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. If school boards set rigid policies, principals who defy them risk losing their jobs. "Then they're bashed in the press for overreacting to kids' misbehavior."
And rightly so. The school boards have the power to end the catch-22; while it shouldn't have taken the conclusions of a bunch of egghead psychologists to show them how stupid and counterproductive such policies can be, I hope it helps toward that end.
phord | August 11, 2006, 12:41am | #
Wine Commonsewer unfortunately reveals his place at the root of why public schools in the U.S. now suck so very, very hard: because everyone thinks their own kid is a harmless, adorable little imp who couldn't hurt a fly, and anybody who tries to discipline him is an evil authoritarian who must be fired. The near-criminalization response comes from parents yelling at schools that they're tired of having their kids take crap off of your perfect little angels. etc. etc.
On the contrary, no-one knows a child's shortcomings like his parent. A halfway decent parent will not make excuses for bad behavior, but will try to teach their kids the proper way to treat others. You're right that some parents refuse to face up to their children's bad behavior, and certainly their own lack of responsibility rubs off on the kids. I know, cuz I'm a teacher and I see it all the time. But this is a matter is individual morality, isn't it? Some people take responsibility and some don't. To say "that's what all kids/parents are like" is to deny the role individuals have in making their own decisions, good and bad, and to resort to the kind of lazy categorical thinking that libertarians rightly mock when it comes from the doctrinaire Left and Right.
By the way, we're talking about kids here, not miniature adults, and treating kids as small, defective versions of adults is a lot closer to the "root of why public schools in the U.S. now suck so very, very hard" than a parent protecting his kid from a brutal, stupid educational apparatus. An elementary school is not "work" like you and I experience it, and it is absurd to claim that there is some sort of equivalent standard for children's and adult behavior. (When's the last time you saw a lawyer carry her papers in a Hello Kitty backpack?)
I'll say it again: we are treating childhood like a punishable offence. When I was a kid if you screwed up too much you'd get strapped across the palm of the hand --
which hurts like a motherfucker -- but at the same time there was a lot more latitude for dealing with smaller offences. This makes sense, because kids are still kids, and you can teach them all you want but they'll still do dumb things, and you need a bit of wiggle room in the system to account for that. "Zero tolerance" is stupid and cruel because it doesn't respect that principle, and so it doesn't respect kids. It envisions them in the same way zeroentitlement does, as nasty little homunculi that ideally would just go away but, failing that, can be ground slowly into paste and molded into replicas of our own impressive selves.
"Why is it that we are all born originals and die copies"? I don't know who said that.
Wicks Cherrycoke | August 11, 2006, 8:56am | #
Response to rm2muv:
Why is it that every discussion about schools ends up with at least one public school teacher whining about how hard they work, how little they get paid, how little they are respected...and the inevitable comment about lawyers?
If you are all dissatisfied with your lot in life, if you believe that school board members are all blathering idiots, etc., why do you not do what lawyers do: Form your own firms, or in your case, private schools. You could then establish your own curriculum, set your own rules, make your own decisions, keep all the profits for yourselves, and prove to the world just how brilliant and wonderful you really are.
Of course, that might require working more than ten months per year, taking risks, putting your personal credit on the line, and encountering the hazards that any other business owner encounters. It also means walking away from statutory tenure (which no lawyer or insurance agent has), statutory pensions, mandatory ten sick days per year, statutorily guaranteed holidays, and a statutory pension -- not to mention what in New Jersey is statutorily-mandated paid leave to attend the annual teachers union convention in Atlantic City, all at the taxpayers' ever-increasing expense. However, being the hard working, dedicated and caring professionals you all perpetually claim to be, that should be a minor sacrifice.
But I suppose that I am doing nothing more than implicitly supporting school choice, which you and your fellow caring professionals will have nothing to do with. Hey, if your local lawyer could statutorily mandate that everybody in town use his services every year for thirteen straight years whether they wanted to or not, he wouldn't surrender that monopoly either.
And no, this is not a reaction to some imaginary childhood slight. It is a reaction to my latest property tax bill.
