CDF's Marian Wright Edelman: Zero tolerance policies are a failing idea

In her "Child Watch" column, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund draws attention to an exceptionally timely topic -- the over-reliance on counterproductive zero tolerance policies and the resulting school-to-prison pipeline. In addition to Edelman's column, we encourage you to learn more about this issue by visiting the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice's "Redirecting the School to Prison Pipeline" project.


Marian Wright Edelman's Child Watch® Column: 
Zero Tolerance Discipline Policies: A Failing Idea
Release Date: August 5, 2011

Many school children in America are on summer break right now, but here’s a pop quiz about discipline policies in our nation’s schools that’s just for grownups:

Would you suspend a student from school for four months for sharpening his pencil without permission and giving the teacher a “threatening” look when asked to sit down?

Would you expel a student from school for the rest of a school year for poking another student with a ballpoint pen during an exam?

Would you expel a student from school permanently because her possession of an antibiotic violated your school’s zero-tolerance drug policy?

Would you call the police, handcuff, and then expel a student who started a snowball fight on school grounds?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions because they sounded too unfair to be the result of an actual policy, give yourself a failing grade. All four are real examples of zero tolerance school discipline policies in Massachusetts—and there are thousands of stories like these throughout that state and across the country. Suspended and expelled students are at greater risk of dropping out of school and dropping into the prison pipeline, and using automatic suspensions and expulsions for minor infractions often has a major negative effect on a child’s entire future.

Read the rest of Edelman's column here.

VOYCE: The high price of zero-tolerance policies

Today’s guest blogger, Stephanie Mayo, is a student leader with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, an organizing collaborative for education justice led by students of color from seven communities throughout the city of Chicago. Feeling powerless to make positive changes at her middle school, she joined VOYCE two years ago because she saw the group as a force for including the student voice in local education reform. Through VOYCE, she is working to make sure that students have a say in the education policies that affect their lives.

By Stephanie Mayo

VOYCE Student Leader

Albany Park Neighborhood Council

Every day, we students experience overly harsh school discipline measures in action, and see the effect that this approach – known as zero tolerance – has on us and our school culture. Because zero tolerance relies on multi-day suspensions, expulsions, and arrests for even minor or first-time offenses, it is a barrier to building the trusting relationships with school staff that we students need to succeed.

We are glad that school administrators across the nation are finally realizing that zero tolerance does not work, especially in light of the results of the recent study from Texas that examined the impact zero tolerance policies are having on student success.

With research showing proof that being suspended and/or expelled increases a student’s chance of dropping out and being incarcerated, it’s time to stop using suspensions and expulsions to address inappropriate behavior and instead support more effective ways to prevent and respond to misconduct. We don’t need to be arrested, pushed out onto the street, and watched every day by police cameras. We need college counseling, restorative justice, peer and adult mentorship, and mental health supports.

Truly serious problems with school safety, like bringing a gun to school, happen only when young people fall through the cracks of our education system. Zero tolerance doesn’t close the cracks in the system — it just makes them wider by pushing young people onto the streets and into prisons.

In addition to being ineffective, zero tolerance is also expensive.

For example, in 2011 Chicago Public Schools spent $51.4 million on security guards but only $3.5 million on college coaches. And even while they are claiming to have a $600 million budget shortfall, CPS is also considering signing a $100 million, three-year contract to place police in our schools. Spending more and more money on the school-based police officers, metal detectors, and surveillance cameras needed to enforce zero tolerance only prevents the system from investing money on social services that would actually benefit the mental health and engagement of students in schools.

The impact of this uneven spending is that all the students in my school know the security guards and police officers, but we have no idea if our school even has a social worker.

At my school, there is only one college counselor to serve a class of more than 300 seniors, which prevented me and my friends from getting the individual attention we need. The lack of college counselors also results in a huge number of students not applying to college at all.
If our public schools devoted more funding to improving the relationships students have with their teachers and school staff, our students would do better in school. Safe spaces, challenging coursework, strong relationships, high expectations, and relevance to students’ lives are the keys to creating an encouraging environment that promotes academic excellence.

Not our idea of "school reform"

In his most recent blog post for the Campaign for America’s Future, Jeff Bryant focuses on troubling trends in what is passing for education reform, including “school discipline policies gone wild.” Bryant writes that “school poverty, punishment and teacher experience are combining to create prison-like apartheid schools that condemn young people to low education attainment and greater risk of dropping through the cracks.” He adds “government defunding” as another troubling trend that is sweeping the nation and cause for concern for all who want to see the country restore itself as a world-class leader in education.

Jeff Bryant's blog -- which we are reprinting here in part and including a link to the fuller text -- was originally published on Campaign for America’s Future website, OurFuture.org, at http://www.ourfuture.org

By Jeff Bryant

Ask yourself if this is the type of school you'd like for your son or daughter:

* At one charter school, an array of 48 "infractions"-- such as "Lying/falsehood” and "Sleeping in class" -- will get students suspended or expelled.

* At another charter, students and parents are warned that "cutting class, school, detention and related mandatory school events can lead to suspension or expulsion. Other offenses that warrant out-of-class dismissal include possession of electronics and printed text deemed vulgar or profane … items confiscated can be held by the school permanently, irrespective of costs and fees."

* Another threatens parents that "a child with 12 unexcused absences for the year can lead to the school reporting the parent to the Louisiana Department of Social Services."

* And one more, a KIPP charter school, mandates that "five or more instances of the student being tardy or absent can result in a $250 fine, an official police report, a summons to perform 25 hours of community service by the parent, guardian or child or permanent removal from the school."

These examples of school discipline policies gone wild are from a stunning new article in The American Independent. [1]Reporter Mikhail Zinshteyn explains how three trends -- student poverty, punishment, and teacher experience -- are combining to create prison-like apartheid schools that condemn young people to low education attainment and greater risk of dropping through the cracks.

What's even more disturbing, however, is to see how this trend for New Orleans schools is being writ large across the nation.

Read the rest of Jeff Bryant's blog here. 

No tolerance for zero tolerance policies

By Tina Dove

Director, National OTL Campaign

It’s a simple fact that schools must be safe environments for teachers to teach and children to learn. But zero tolerance policies that force out students for minor infractions defy common sense. Our kids need to be in school, not at home or on the streets during school hours getting into more trouble. 

Relying on zero tolerance policies – which are disproportionately meted out against minority and poor children – robs teachers, administrators and parents of the chance to help children learn from their mistakes and keep them engaged in the classroom, instead of idling at home or in the streets.

In New York City alone, students spent more than 16 million hours serving suspensions  between 1999 and 2008, according to the report, “Education Interrupted: The Growing Use of Suspensions in New York City’s Public Schools,” published earlier this year. 

And yet, after years of high-profile examples of zero-tolerance policies gone awry, many school systems continue to enforce such counterproductive measures in vain attempts to show the world they are doing something – even if it’s often the wrong thing – to deal with discipline on school grounds.

In a recent news article, The Baltimore Sun’s Liz Bowie reported about two situations involving students who were suspended after mistakenly – by all accounts, not maliciously – possessing items that school officials considered to be weapons.

In one case, two high school lacrosse players were suspended for several days because they were carrying a pen knife and lighter, which they said they used to fix their lacrosse sticks. In another recent case, a 16-year-old girl who was suspended is being referred to juvenile authorities and could be charged with possession of a weapon on school property after a former friend told school officials that the girl was carrying pepper spray – which her mother had given her to protect herself while walking to school in the dark morning hours after the teen had been threatened. In the pepper spray case, the girl was told by school officials not to contact her teachers and wasn’t able to keep up with classwork. 

These zero tolerance responses leave no room for school administrators and teachers to use their own common sense to handle such situations, and take a toll on already beleaguered judicial systems.

In an article that Steven C. Teske – a juvenile court judge in Georgia who is using research data to try to change the way school systems handle disciple issues – recently wrote for the Atlantic Philanthropies website, he cites U.S. Department of Education research that indicates that nationally more than 3 million students each year are suspended and nearly 100,000 more are expelled, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Thousands are arrested and referred to juvenile court for disciplinary problems that were previously handled in school. Most are boys.  Most are African-Americans.  

As Teske, who was quoted in the Baltimore Sun’s article last week, said, zero tolerance “goes against the objective of schools, and that is to graduate students.”