Resisting ZeroTolerance

by
William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn

Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation
School of Education
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
PO Box 413
Milwaukee WI 53201
414-229-2716

November 21, 1999

CERAI-00-01

RESISTING ZERO TOLERANCE

William Ayers andBernardine Dohrn

Not long ago, the principalin our children’s high school announced a new policy--zero tolerance.From now on, she said, there would be no excuse for violating certain schoolrules, notably the ban on student use of drugs and alcohol. At first, theannouncement seemed harmless if a little odd – after all, there had neverbeen any murkiness or ambiguity about alcohol or drug abuse in the school.Everyone already held the same standard of behavior: kids shouldn’t drinkor do drugs. What could a zero tolerance policy possibly add? Further,drug and alcohol abuse suddenly had a new and privileged position in thehierarchy of misbehavior – fighting wasn’t on the list yet, norwere racial bigotry, disrespect, sexual assault, and a whole lot more.

Shortly after the newpolicy was implemented, we asked the principal about it. She explained that zerotolerance was simply an attempt to re-focus on existing rules, something toget the kids’ attention. "We want to clarify what we alreadydo," she explained, and she assured us that zero tolerance was acontemporary way of expressing what we already believed and practiced.

Zero tolerance policieshave by now become commonplace practically everywhere, certainly in our schoolsand increasingly in our workplaces, and the phrase has been reduced to aplatitude through overuse and misuse. Clichés are never clarifying, but acloser look at zero tolerance in practice reveals a disturbing pattern:

• A high-school boy pulls out a steak-knife in the cafeteria to peel an apple, and is expelled for weapon possession.
• A fifteen-year-old Chicago youth is assigned to bring an object from home in order to write a report for his English class; when he enters the school with a large, elaborately carved cane he is expelled for bringing a weapon to school.
• A fourth grader forgets his belt at home and is suspended for violating a school dress code.
• Another Chicago boy in a disagreement with a teacher over writing "I will not misbehave" on the board several hundred times says, "I’m going to take this to the limit," and is expelled for threatening a teacher’s life.

In criminal law there arestandards of intent, and there are presumptions of innocence as well asprocedures of due process. Zero tolerance incorporates no such standards. Whatbegan, perhaps, as clarification has morphed rapidly into Frankenstein’smonster, destroying children in its path.

Some 90 children are nowsuspended or expelled from the Chicago Public Schools each week. The vastmajority are excluded from their schools for non-violent misdeeds. Schoolseverywhere – public, private, urban, suburban, rural, and parochial –are turning into fortresses where electronic searches, locked doors, armedpolice, surveillance cameras, patrolled cafeterias, and weighty rule booksdefine the landscape. Ironically, elaborate security hardware fails to createschool safety. Recent research indicates that as schools become moremilitarized they become less safe, in large part because the first casualty isthe central, critical relationship between teacher and student, a relationshipthat is now being damaged or broken in favor of tough-sounding, impersonal,uniform procedures.

We need teachers,educators, parents, and school boards to reclaim schools as sites of learningand growth – places where incidents of misbehavior, poor choices,wrongdoing and, yes, even crimes, are generally handled within theschool setting based on principles of repairing the harm, recognizing theconsequences, and developing talents and assets. There are numerous models ofschool sanctioning that work for all but a few behaviors: old-fashionedremedies like detention halls, time out, letters of apology, contactingparents, losing school privileges; and more modern restorative justiceapproaches such as peer juries, community service, community panels, teencourts, intensive supervision. Obviously, any such system can become eithermechanical or abusive, but these remedies could be part of a context oflearning that engages youth themselves in a question of vital interest to them:What’s fair?

School-based disciplinemight become, then, a pedagogy borrowing from the common practices of manyparents and most early childhood educators, a concept that is a sharp rebuke tozero tolerance: "the teachable moment." When a group offour-year-old boys excludes the girls from the block corner, when two childrentell another, "You can’t play," when a kindergartner hitsanother child on the playground, this is recognized as a teachable moment, anoccasion for conversation, for reflection, for empathy, for reconsideration.There are consequences and sanctions, yes, but always in the service oflearning something important about the complexity of learning to live together.

This is more possible in anintimate community, a place where every child is known well by a caring adult,where parents can come together in common cause, and where teachers are fullyresponsible and accountable for the learning and growth of a manageable groupof kids. And this helps explain a growing phenomenon that began in cities butis sweeping now through rural and suburban schools as well: the small schoolsmovement is transforming big schools into smaller sites of learning. Smallschools are safer, on every measure: suicide is down, violence dramaticallyreduced, attendance and grades up, graffiti and vandalism down. In smallschools every student is known, no one gets "lost," and there is astronger parent presence. While we may be fearful of, or angry at,"other" youth we perceive as troublemakers, when they are ourchildren, or when we get to know them individually, we want second chances andopportunities to recover.

This is what all childrendeserve. And so schools cannot abdicate teaching in favor of criminalpunishment if we are in pursuit of a common, productive future. Teachers,parents, educators cannot cede their authority to police and prosecutors. We muststand with our children, saying, "We know you and we care for you; turn tous."

Now is the time forparents, teachers, citizens, and youth themselves to come together sensibly toresist zero tolerance. We begin by remembering that a child is a child, andthat teenagers are negotiating a particular stage of human development.Adolescence, of course, is a border; on the other side, adulthood. It isimpossible to think of adolescent development entirely outside the conflicts ofour own adolescence, but neither do we think of teenagers outside the contextof being here, where we are now, having made the passage with relative safety,residing now on the far shore of adulthood. Our memories are at oncehyper-intense and hazy, and growing up is in some part an act of forgetting, akind of ordinary amnesia. We wrap ourselves, then, in an illusion: we remembersome of the facts and events of our youth, but not the all-encompassingatmosphere; we forget the despair and the soaring ecstasies, the profoundloneliness, the vivid perception of adult hypocrisies, the anxiety,self-criticism and powerlessness, as well as the joy and energy and heightenedexpectations, the moments of discovery. Perhaps, most fatefully, we forget thatadolescence is by definition a time of immaturity, of experimentation, ofpredictable mistakes. No human being, after all, is experienced before beinginexperienced, wise before naive, polished before clumsy.

Adolescents need steadygrown-ups to talk to, to think with, to bounce off of. Closing the door is aform of abandonment, of neglect. Closing the schoolhouse door can become, aswell, an economic death sentence or a straight line to detention, for schoolattendance is a critical protective factor in keeping kids out of juvenile andcriminal justice systems and away from a life on the streets. In a recentnational survey, adolescents responded that the single thing they most wantedwas an adult who listened. When adults become anonymous or unavailable toteens, when adult protection ceases, adolescents are left with only theirpeers, and, then, a pseudo-maturity that heightens their vulnerability.

Children are different fromadults, and are likely to recover from misbehavior and mistakes when givenproper guidance, challenge, and support. And each child is, of course, anindividual, with particular strengths and needs. No one is entirelyunderstandable through his or her worst actions, and so adults can not give upon kids, even those who get into trouble again and again, even those who have beeninvolved in a serious offense.

The seven young men inDecatur, Ill., for example, who came together in an unsavory and typicalteenage brawl that frightened more than it harmed, are clearly distinct peoplewith dramatically different records, needs, hopes and challenges. A fairapproach, a common-sense approach, to their misbehavior would be to fashion apunishment that would teach but not cripple, educate and develop but notdestroy. But in Decatur we see another all-too-common underbelly of zerotolerance – the racialized use of the concept in practice. After all,when everyone keeps insisting, "This isn’t about race," race isthe thing it is most assuredly about.

Teenagers are intenselycurious, often idealistic, willing to work hard on projects that interest andengage them, willing to commit to a cause. Youth are easily engaged in thearts, for example, in conversations concerning the ethical; in fact thecreative power of youth acting together transformed the world in Little Rock,Birmingham, Soweto and Tien An Mien Square. Yet, it is abundantly clear thatpurposelessness and despair can result in an obsessive interest in shallowsensationalism, a substitution of consumerism for identity, and scapegoating otherswhen part of a crowd – group behaviors that we adults display intreacherous variety.

A safe environment for kidscan only be achieved as part of something comprehensive. "Safe haven"is another high-sounding idea that educators promote, but there can be no safehavens in a treacherous world. In Chicago, for example, one high school lastyear had five shootings right outside its doors. Prohibiting weapons in schooland failing to engage a larger community is a fool’s errand. While youthcrime is down by 50 percent over the past four years, and children are theprimary victims, not the major perpetrators, of violence, most youth crimeoccurs after school and outside of school, in the hours from 3 to6 p.m. If adults want to protect our youth, we will keep schools open late,fill them with exciting programs and activities, add healthy food and academicsupport, and help their working parents. If we want to protect youth, we willremove handguns from children’s environments, address the issues of familyviolence (both child abuse and domestic violence), and assure even-handedmethods of justice, not racially-disproportionate punishment for some andopportunities for others.

Zero tolerance began as aprohibition against guns. Fine, since getting guns out of kids’ hands issensible overall public policy. But gun removal, then, is an adultresponsibility, not an excuse for sending more youth into prison. If we musthave zero tolerance let it be for gun makers, gun dealers, gun owners whoencourage or allow youth access.

For almost every kind ofadolescent behavior, our response must be, it depends. It depends on thecontext and the consequences, the intention and the competence. Like mostethical questions, it may not be immediately obvious. Is it right to rat on yourfriends? It depends. Is it right to fight back for your friends or familyhonor? It depends. Dimensions of complexity, of conflicting interests, ofcultivating judgment among youth are part of the glory and challenge of workingwith adolescents.

Those fortunate youth withcaring, if flawed, families – those who are not dedicated to sheersurvival – are immersed in the developmental work of separation. Theirsis tough, heavy work, an effort undertaken to rid oneself of dependence and togain fulfillment in freedom. Their boundary crossing is a time of push andpull, letting go and hanging on, falling and catching hold. It demands anengagement with caring and competent adults. We can neither accede norwithdraw.

Zero means none or nothing.Tolerance gestures toward understanding, generosity, kindness, benevolence,justice, forgiveness. Our children need maximum understanding, sensiblestandards, benevolence, justice, and then a chance to grow beyond theirtransgressions. We need to teach tolerance, and practice it too.

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