Black on Ending Zero Tolerance

My friend Derek Black of the University of South Carolina Law School has just published Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline.  Cribbing now from the New York University Press webpage: 

In the era of zero tolerance, we are flooded with stories about schools issuing draconian punishments for relatively innocent behavior. One student was suspended for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. Another was expelled for cursing on social media from home. Suspension and expulsion rates have doubled over the past three decades as zero tolerance policies have become the normal response to a host of minor infractions that extend well beyond just drugs and weapons. Students from all demographic groups have suffered, but minority and special needs students have suffered the most. On average, middle and high schools suspend one out of four African American students at least once a year. 

The effects of these policies are devastating.  Just one suspension in the ninth grade doubles the likelihood that a student will drop out. Fifty percent of students who drop out are subsequently unemployed. Eighty percent of prisoners are high school drop outs. The risks associated with suspension and expulsion are so high that, as a practical matter, they amount to educational death penalties, not behavioral correction tools. Most important, punitive discipline policies undermine the quality of education that innocent bystanders receive as well—the exact opposite of what schools intend.  

Ending Zero Tolerance answers the calls of grassroots communities pressing for integration and increased education funding with a complete rethinking of school discipline. Derek Black, a former attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, weaves stories about individual students, lessons from social science, and the outcomes of courts cases to unearth a shockingly irrational system of punishment. While schools and legislatures have proven unable and unwilling to amend their failing policies, Ending Zero Tolerance argues for constitutional protections to check abuses in school discipline and lays out theories by which courts should re-engage to enforce students’ rights and support broader reforms.

 

Comments

[Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King]

Thanks, just went to Barnes and Noble.com. Got free shipping too! Good thing I attended grammar and high school during the 70s and 80s. We brought water guns and Boy Scout knives to school. We had dirt clod fights and Burn Outs openly smoked cigarettes. I recall going to the 7-11 across the street and getting a Raligh Lites belt buckle free from the long haired dude working the register. The principal and I were on a first name basis. Police were never ever involved and a "detention" was exactly like the Breakfast Club. Kind of fun, actually. Good thing, too. I would have never become the high faluten two bill retail theft lawyer I am today.