Abstract
Laura E. Agnich and Meghan Hale on the rational, if overblown, fears reconfiguring classrooms.
School children in the U.S. are being hurt. Turn on the news, and you are likely to hear about yet another school terrorized by a gunman, students caught making homemade bombs, or kids knifing their classmates at random as they run down the hallway. It’s horrifying.
Children are being hurt, but the amount of suffering these violent acts create for U.S. students as a whole is tiny in comparison to the amount of suffering created by the policies that are supposed to be keeping our nation’s children safe.
One in a million: that’s the likelihood of a child dying at school from violence or suicide according to a study done by the U.S. Department of Education and the Secret Service. However, the devastation these exceptionally rare acts cause to families, schools, and communities cannot be overstated. In the wake of highly publicized school mass violence events, it is rational that scared parents demand school administrators “do something!” Still, even rational fears have a long history of leading to irrational overreactions.
Even rational fears have a long history of leading to irrational overreactions.
To ensure student safety, schools across the nation have adopted “zero tolerance” policies that require teachers and administrators to punish students swiftly and severely for doing anything that could be interpreted as dangerous. For instance, children have been suspended or even expelled for using their fingers to pantomime holding a handgun. In 2013, a seven-year-old Florida boy was suspended for biting his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. In 2014, a five-year-old Alabama student was forced to sign a “no suicide contract” after he pointed a crayon drawing of gun at his classmates and said, “pew-pew.” Zero tolerance policies would be more accurately named “zero consideration” policies, because they leave no room for teachers or school administrators to use their best judgment when responding to inappropriate student behavior.
At the most basic level, harsh zero tolerance policies inhibit student learning by removing students from school through the use of suspensions and expulsions. Students today are suspended at over twice the rate of the mid–1970s, with over 3.7 million students suspended in the 2009–2010 school year. Even when students keep up with homework while out of school, they are removed from the environment designed to promote their learning and achievement, without access to opportunities to learn from their teachers and peers. Research indicates that students who are removed from school for long periods of time for behavioral issues have serious troubles re-adjusting academically and socially when they go back.
In institutions focused on learning, it is strange that misbehavior is not viewed more as a “teachable moment.” Hair-trigger policies that remove students from the classroom take kids away from their teachers, school counselors, and staff at the very moment they could use the guidance and mentoring of caring adults. Finally, many children who are experiencing trauma at home act out in school. Instead of giving these students more one-on-one attention from school faculty and staff, zero tolerance policies remove them, effectively forcing them to spend all day in potentially unhealthy environments that may be the very source of their misbehavior.
The lockdown procedures in place at Lowell High School in San Francisco, CA.
Cory Doctorow via Flickr Creative Commons
Across the country, school systems are also using the traditional criminal justice system to deal with youth involved in relatively minor infractions that occur at schools. It is not uncommon for students younger than 18 to be tried as adults in criminal court, and for that infraction to go on the student’s permanent record. Once in the criminal justice system, many of these students find it hard to get back out. The time out of school and the social stigma of being labeled a delinquent can combine to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Scholars refer to this as the “school-to-prison pipeline” because, by interlocking our school system with our criminal justice system, we are making the path from the classroom to the jail cell nearly seamless.
Far from ensuring equal access to education, zero tolerance policies often make existing inequalities worse. Ample research has shown that these policies are disproportionately punitive to students in the most vulnerable social positions: racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ students, English learners, and low-income students. For instance, Black children are significantly more likely to be suspended or expelled than their White classmates when they break the rules. When schools seek to identify “problem students” or potentially dangerous “loners,” they often cast suspicion on students who have been bullied, or those who suffer with learning disabilities and mental illnesses. While behavioral threat assessment strategies like these have been shown effective in identifying students who may be suicidal or planning to harm others, the long-term impact of these policies could further stigmatize already marginalized students. Finally, it is a cruel irony that while nearly all school shootings in the U.S. are perpetrated by White males, these anti-violence measures disproportionately punish students of color.
In changing school policies, Americans have changed the school environment. To make schools safer, administrators have adopted many of the technologies used in prisons. High-tech security cameras, locked entrance and exit doors, metal detectors, and frequent locker checks are commonplace. Armed “school resource officers” patrol the campus, disciplining students and enforcing policies. It is important to remember that these officers often have little to no training in child or adolescent development, social work, or education. They are law enforcement officers, and in this role they may come into conflict with the school’s academic goals. Zero tolerance policies remove instructor and administrator flexibility and judgment; they do the same to resource officers.
Mock “active shooter” drills create preparation and paranoia simultaneously.
Maximillian Curry via Flickr Creative Commons
And what effects do these all of these safety measures have on learning for the students who aren’t being punished? Simply put, scared students do not learn as effectively as calm ones. Zero tolerance policies and prison-like security measures disrupt the teaching-learning process by increasing fear. Whether they worry about being physically assaulted, teased, made-fun of, or socially ostracized, scared kids are more likely to avoid school, perform poorly on standardized tests, receive lower grades, and report physical or psychological problems. The presence of armed security guards and metal detectors obviously heighten students’ fears, and their presence has been associated with higher levels of violence within some schools. At their worst, these policies create a “lockdown environment” in schools that can actually promote aggression and incivility among students.
Hair-trigger policies remove students from their teachers, school counselors, and staff at the very moment they could use the guidance of caring adults.
Very few of our children will ever experience mass violence, but all of them will experience the changes we have made to prevent it. The question we are left to answer is, how much overall student learning and sense of safety are we willing to sacrifice to keep kids safe from violence that is as horrifying as it is rare? As we implement more and more strict policies, punish and sequester more and more students, mass violence within schools has increased. It seems our zero tolerance policies are at best a distraction, at worst an incitement.