ZERO TOLERANCE, ZERO SENSE

Two documents have just crossed my desk. One is a report on how "zero
tolerance" policies, instituted in the name of helping children, are in
fact making it more difficult to raise self-reliant children who believe
the adult world is interested in justice. The other is Laura Sessions
Stepp's just-released book on how we might do a better job of guiding our
children through adolescence.

The first will make news and could help correct some damage done by what
might be called policies of exasperation: "three strikes" legislation,
mandatory minimum sentences and similar "zero tolerance" approaches that
take discretion out of the hands of people thought to be too lenient.

The second merely makes sense--but a kind of sense informed by personal
experience, solid research and in-depth observation of a fascinating range
of youngsters bumbling their way through early adolescence.

The news is in "Opportunities Suspended: The Devastating Consequences of
Zero Tolerance and School Discipline Policies," the product of the shared
efforts of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the Rainbow-PUSH
Coalition and the Advancement Project. You've heard some of the more
egregious applications of zero tolerance: children suspended for sharing
Midol, or asthma medication (during an emergency!), for bringing toy guns,
nail clippers and scissors to school, for throwing peanuts on a school
bus--even for pointing an index finger in age-old cops-and- robbers fashion
and going "bang."

"Opportunities Suspended" examines these incidents, aggregates data from a
variety of sources and reaches a number of conclusions, including the
unsurprising but significant one that black and brown children are far more
subject to suspensions and expulsions than their white counterparts.

But this is not a civil rights tract; it is policy analysis. Students
suspended unnecessarily are naturally more likely to fall behind
academically and thus become candidates for dropping out of school and
indulging in far more serious behavior than the thing that led to the
suspension in the first place.

Moreover: "Zero tolerance policies by their nature do not provide guidance
and/or instruction. Frequently, because these policies focus directly on
harsh forms of punishment, which are inherently unjust, they breed distrust
in students toward adults, and nurture an adversarial and confrontational
attitude."

Stepp reaches much the same conclusion in "Our Last Best Shot" (Riverhead
Books), a book that documents the lives of a dozen children in three
locales: Los Angeles, Durham, N.C., and Ulysses, Kan. (pop. 6,000).

While the focus of the book is the relationships between children and
parents, one of the youngsters she spends time with-a middle-school boy in
Durham--provides a case study of the malign impact of zero tolerance.

Mario was suspended for possession of an unloaded gun. One of his buddies
somehow had acquired a tarnished .38, and through a series of circumstances
only a screenwriter could come up with, the gun winds up in Mario's locker.
Then someone tells the school authorities.

Mario, who has never been in trouble with school authorities before, is
thrown out of school for a year. Despite pleas to the school board from his
mom and dad, he is given neither tutor nor books nor any way to make up his
work. The final insult? The boy who owns the gun is suspended for just a
half-year.

Stepp, a Washington Post colleague and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist,
says adolescents ages 11 to 15 are the group most likely to be snared by
zero-tolerance laws. If these kids make one bad mistake at school, they can
be removed from the very influences that might help them get straight:
friends, teachers and counselors. Perhaps worse for their social
development, "They can be punished without due process just as they are
beginning to understand and accept adult standards of fairness."

Mario will be all right, thanks to the intervention of community activists.
But he might have chucked it all in frustration. He knows he did something
stupid, though even now he can't tell you why he did it.

I suspect the people who brought us zero tolerance would be equally
hard-pressed to tell you why they did it. But the mounting evidence--much
of it in these two works--ought to tell them that what they did is wrong.
It is wrong because it is so mindlessly, heartlessly unfair. And it is
doubly wrong because, although it is intended to instill respect for
society's rules, it breeds contempt for the law.