FREEDOM AT ISSUE Local high schools are looking for ways to curb and
prevent crime, drug and alcohol use on campus. An increasingly popular
weapon is a policy called "zero-tolerance," meaning any breach of a
specific rule results in expulsion, suspension or transfer to another
school. The policy approach made the headlines last month when a Corona
del Mar senior was suspended after police found what could have been
marijuana in a plastic bag in his car, during a traffic stop.

Does the punishment fit the crime? Does it have the intended effect?

Are there larger issues to consider regarding the public education system?

ZERO TOLERANCE ADDS UP TO LITTLE SENSE

Schools fight drugs and violence by overstepping their mandate

A zero-tolerance policy for drugs,to put it plainly, makes zero sense as a
general policy for schools. While it can do some good here and there, it is
not a panacea and its establishment helps to highlight, in yet another
instance, the trouble with public education.

These policies, mostly involving drugs and weapons, are growing in
popularity; school officials contend the approach reduces crime on campus
as well as instances of drug or alcohol abuse. The typical punishment for
an infraction is automatic expulsion, suspension or transfer to another
school.

The most recent example occurred at Corona del Mar High School, when senior
Ryan Huntsman was caught by a police officer, off campus, with trace
amounts of a substance purported to be marijuana in a plastic bag in the
car's glove box.

The officer cited Huntsman for playing his car stereo too loudly and sent a
copy of the report to school officials. The Newport-Mesa Unified School
District suspended Huntsman for five days and ordered him transferred to
another school, under its zero-tolerance policy, the Register reported.

Huntsman took the district to court and on March 3 an Orange County
Superior Court Judge ordered the Newport-Mesa Unified School District to
allow Huntsman to stay enrolled at Corona del Mar until a March 17 court
hearing to determine whether the district acted properly when the student
was suspended.

Huntsman's lawyer abased his argument on the fact the school should not
have relied solely on the police report and the overriding issue was a
denial of due process to Huntsman, not the zero tolerance policy.

While the due process concern is a real one, the zero tolerance policy
itself and its proliferation among public schools should be held up for
close scrutiny.

I would like to examine the issue on two levels - first, understanding the
larger context of how Americans have come to view public education and
then, the role of a policy such as zero tolerance within that context. I
will seek to show that citizens come to accept such intrusive, even
inhumane, policies as an outgrowth of how they have come to accept public
education as the end-all answer to instruction.

During its long history, the Register has been known to have little
patience for public education. Many, even among friends and associates of
the paper, have wondered, quietly or out loud, whether this stance isn't
rather dogmatic, even simply dogged, given how well entrenched that
institution is in our midst, how vital it seems to many who work in it.

Most people are too used to the practice of government robbing Peter in
order to help some cause of Paul, a cause they find appealing and thus the
robbery seems to them kind of neagligible or benign - as if the robber were
some dying person in desperate need of water or food. Nor do most people
seem to mind very much that they are being forced to send their children to
schools over the operations of which they have hardly any say. Nor do folks
want to think much about the fact that more personal involvement in the
education of their children may be obligatory, instead of farming the
matter out to politicians and bureaucrats and rarely thinking about how
their kids are brought up as far as their knowledge of the world is
concerned.

Nor do most people realize that in the history of this country, even before
its independence from England, public education was not a give. It became
public policy mainly in order to resist the open admission policies of
private schools. Yes, public education was born, in part, because local
city fathers didn't much like having white kids going to school with blacks
and native Americans.

There is something remote for most folks about considering such matters,
not to mention thinking about alternatives to state-run educational
institutions. Similarly, for many Europeans the idea that telephone and
broadcast services could be private seemed ridiculous a few years back, as
it did for most of the people of the Soviet Union that farming and other
industries could be left to private enterprise.

So that is the larger picture. If those basic, general points don't cut
much ice with folks, how about something as near to our front yards as
setting drug policies for schools that treat everyone as if he or she were
exactly like everyone else?

That is what the zero-tolerance policy amounts to now being implemented in
high schools across California, such as Corona del Mar High School, where
students are prohibited to have on them even a trace of, for example,
marijuana, even off campus where school officials would normally have no
say as to how kids should behave themselves.

Parents, in turn, have no choice as to the policy to be followed in the
schools to which they send their children because there simply is no choice
about schooling one's kids. They must go, it is the Law!

And how about that ruling last week, about schools having to assign
minority authors along with the authors of great literature - as this has
come to be identified through the trial and error process of decades and
decades of literary judgment? Why should such reading be imposed on all
students? What does "minority" have to do with literary excellence, anyway?
Maybe for some students such a reading assignment will be of benefit, very
likely not for all. But the political management of education requires that
every student be treated alike, so such policies are absurdly generalized.

Here is where it may become clear to some that private schooling is a
superior alternative for the education of their children: There can be
diversity in the policies of private schools; not all must adhere to the
dictates of the government and its often irrelevant regulations as far as
education is concerned.

It is in most cases pretty irresponsible for parents to tolerate drug use
by their children. But wheather drug abuse should impel them to pull their
kids out of school should be, unless the child is becoming a menace to
others, something for them to decide and not necessarily to be commandeered
by school officials. Different schools might have different tolerance
levels, suited to different children, families, neighborhoods and cultural
traditions.

In the case of the Corana del Mar student, Ryan Huntsman, there is a good
deal of controversy about whether he even ingested marijuana, never even
mind whether such a deed need disqualify him from attending school and
making headway in his various educational endeavors.

By following the practice of establishing universal policies in an area
where attention to differences and nuances is absolutely necessary, our
public school administrators are showing how misguided the institution of
public education really is. They are demonstrating in this and many less
notorious instances that state-run education fails to do what is perhaps
most important in education, address the needs and aspirations of students
as individual human beings who cannot be interchanged with others for
administrative convenience or even some more noble purpose (e.g.,"war" on
drugs).

Yes, it will seem to many that public education is simply a fixture of our
society and it is pointless to argue with it, just try to make it work. But
by its strong ties to the state, this institution renders improvement
impossible in most cases (except where it goes against its very nature as a
political entity). They will be like those who cannot think beyond their
own experience to a better alternative, who are conservative in the worst
sense of that term, stuck in the past not because the past often teaches us
but because they refuse to use their creative intelligence.

Zero-tolerance is needlessly broad, intolerant, inhumane policy in most
cases. In some cases, of course, it may serve a needed purpose. It is its
generalization to all students at all schools that makes zero sense.