Cracking Down on Kids
Zero tolerance should cover clear and serious offenses only
The obvious way to reform zero tolerance policies is to narrow the list of offenses that draw automatic suspensions and expulsions. Pushing and shoving aren't violence. Idly doodling a Confederate flag isn't racial intimidation. This expansion of language and allegedly grave offenses is what discredited the campus codes. ZT policies should cover clear and serious offenses involving weapons, violence, threats and harassment, bomb scares, drugs and alcohol, and cheating. In other matters, teachers and principals should be left to exercise discretion and common sense. Damon wants schools to talk to students about the moral basis of rules, how they make sense in terms of protecting student freedom to learn and enjoy school. Adolescents, he says, want predictability, clarity, and authority figures who stand for something and believe what they say.
The trivialization of zero tolerance policies is one of those social disasters jointly sponsored by the right and the left. Many on the right want a return to the no-nonsense principal-knows-best ethic of the old days. The left, still afflicted by the Sixties mentality of disdain for standards and rules, has developed a surprising taste for draconian punishment as a way of coping with the mess its no-rules ethic helped to create. (If you doubt this, look at the PC codes and sexual harassment law.) Fear of litigation and fear of making judgments about decent behavior are both involved in the rise of the zero tolerance mindset. It's far easier to hide behind bureaucratic procedures and just look up the correct punishment in a manual. But this is no way to run a school.
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