The War Against Boys (8 page)

But in many schools the policy has been taken to absurd extremes. More often than not, it is boys who are suffering. Here are a few recent examples of zero tolerance at work.

• 2011: Ten-year-old Nicholas Taylor, a fifth grader at the David Youree Elementary School in Smyrna, Tennessee, was sentenced to sit alone at lunch for six days. His crime? Waving around a slice of pizza that had been chewed to resemble a gun.

• 2010: David Morales, an eight-year-old in Providence, Rhode Island, ran afoul of zero tolerance when, for a special class project, he brought in a camouflage hat with little plastic army men glued on the flap.

• 2009: Zachary Christie, six, of Newark, Delaware, excited to be a new Cub Scout, packed his camping utensil in his lunch box. The gadget, which can be used as a knife, fork, or spoon, prompted school officials to charge him with possession of a weapon. Zachary faced forty-five days in the district's reform school but was later granted a reprieve by the school board and suspended for five days.
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It is tempting to dismiss these cases as aberrational. They are not. Punishing minor cases is not an unfortunate lapse: it is the heart of the policy. In defense of the schools, Jennifer Jankowski, a special education director at the school where Cub Scout Zachary Christie was suspended, explained to a reporter that “if Zachary or another student had been hurt by the knife, the district would have taken the blame. . . . There's more to the school's side than just us being mean and not taking this child's interests into account.”
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She is right of course, but it is still hard to see why common sense cannot be factored into the mix. School officials should be permitted to consider the student's motives, past behavior, and seriousness of the offense. But, of course, such discretion violates the take-no-prisoners logic behind zero tolerance.

Under the zero-tolerance regime, suspension rates have increased dramatically. In 1974, 1.7 million children in grades K–12 were suspended from the nation's schools. By 2007, when the K–12 population had increased by 5 percent, the number of suspensions had nearly doubled to 3.3 million—nearly 70 percent of them boys.
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In 2007, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 32 percent of boys in grades 9 through 12 had been suspended compared with 17 percent of girls.
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School suspensions, more than other punishments like detention, alternative classrooms, or community service, appear to accelerate a student's disengagement from school. Not only do students fall further behind in their studies, many of them enjoy what is often an unsupervised vacation from school. Also, if students perceive a punishment to be excessive, capricious, and unjust, this weakens the bond between them and the adults who are supposed to be their mentors. According to psychologists James Comer and Alvin Poussaint, suspensions can make it “more difficult for you to work with the child in school—he or she no longer trusts you.”
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There is not a lot of research documenting a
direct
correlation between suspension and school failure, but one recent study by two economists, Marianne Bertrand (University of Chicago) and Jessica Pan (National University of Singapore) should give anyone pause. After controlling for reading and math scores, race, gender, and birth year, Bertrand and Pan quantified the damage: “We observe a negative relationship between school suspension and future educational
outcomes.”
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For example, a single suspension lowers a student's chances of graduating from high school by 17 percent and the likelihood of attending college by 16 percent.
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With so many boys at risk of academic failure, it would seem that suspensions should be reserved for the most egregious cases.

Zero tolerance was originally conceived as a means of ridding schools of violent predators and drug users. Who could object to that? But careful reviews of the policy show that most students are suspended for minor acts of insubordination and defiance.
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No one is suggesting that such misconduct go unpunished. But there are many other ways to correct bad behavior besides suspension—ways shown to be much more effective.
⁴⁰
Preventive programs appear to work best. In 2009, 2,740 at-risk Chicago boys in grades seven through ten took part in a life skills/ethics program called Becoming a Man: Sports Edition. Most of them had low grade point averages, had missed many weeks of school, and more than one third had been arrested. A carefully designed two-year University of Chicago study found that by the end of the program, their grades and school engagement had improved, prospects for graduation brightened (by as much as 10 percent to 23 percent). Compared to a control group, arrests diminished by 44 percent.
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In 2008, a task force for the American Psychological Association (APA) published a thorough review of literature on the efficacy of zero-tolerance policies. “Despite a 20-year history of implementation,” the report concluded, “there are surprisingly few data that could directly test the assumptions of a zero-tolerance approach to school discipline, and the data that are available tend to contradict those assumptions.”
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Put another way, they found no evidence that it worked. But the evidence that it harmed boys was unequivocal. Not only are young boys being shamed and treated as deviants for bringing the wrong toys to school, but suspension may be correlated with school disengagement, poor achievement, and dropping out.
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The APA authors also noted that fears of school violence have been greatly exaggerated. While all violence is unacceptable, “the evidence does not support an assumption that violence in our schools is out of control or increasing.”
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But might it be that zero-tolerance policies had themselves suppressed school violence? The APA found no evidence for that. After controlling for socioeconomic
factors, the task force found that schools with zero-tolerance policies had more behavior problems than those using other methods. School climate was worse, not better, under zero tolerance. Furthermore, far from making punishment more predictable and fair, the policy was applied unevenly—with African American boys most severely affected. The authors also found a negative correlation between the use of suspensions and academic achievement.
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These uniformly negative findings raised a question: what had prompted schools to adopt such a draconian policy in the first place?

To understand the evolution of zero tolerance, and the increasingly harsh treatment of even minor behavioral infractions among young boys, we need to recall the widespread fear of youth violence that prevailed in the mid-1990s. On January 15, 1996,
Time
magazine ran a cover story about a “teenage time bomb.” Said
Time
, “They are just four, five, and six years old right now, but already they are making criminologists nervous.”
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The “they” were little boys who would soon grow into cold-blooded killers capable of “remorseless brutality.” The story was based on alarming findings by several eminent criminologists, including James Q. Wilson (then at UCLA). Wilson had extrapolated from a famous 1972 study of the juvenile delinquency rate among young people born in Philadelphia in 1945 and estimated that within five years—by 2010—the nation would be plagued by “30,000 more muggers, killers and thieves.”
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John J. DiIulio Jr., then a professor in Princeton's Department of Politics, invoked Wilson's findings and coined a chilling cognomen for the rising violent horde:
superpredators
.
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DiIulio believed that deteriorating social conditions were making matters much worse: Refining Wilson's definitions and extrapolations, he forecasted that “by the year 2010, there will be approximately 270,000 more juvenile superpredators on the streets than there were in 1990.”
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In a 1996 book, DiIulio and two coauthors, William J. Bennett and John P. Walters, proclaimed: “America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘superpredators'—radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys . . . the youngest, biggest, and baddest generation any society has ever known.”
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The fear of rising youth violence translated easily into fear of rising school violence, with support from additional research. Dewey Cornell, a forensic psychologist and professor of education at the University of Virginia, reports in his 2006 book,
School Violence: Fears Versus Facts
, “The perception that schools were dangerous seemed to be confirmed by a widely publicized report on school problems.”
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According to the report, when teachers in 1940 had been asked about “top problems in school,” they had listed chewing gum, running in halls, and not putting paper in the wastebasket. Asked the same question in the 1990s, teachers listed rape, robbery, and assault. The story of the contrasting lists and the contemporary school jungle culture entered the media echo chamber and was repeated thousands of times.

Then, in the late 1990s, the fears were horribly realized. In 1997, teenage boys murdered schoolmates in Bethel, Alaska; West Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; and Stamps, Arkansas. The bloody crescendo came in 1999, in the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado. Seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered twelve classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves. They had planned the assault for more than a year, hoping to kill at least five hundred schoolmates and teachers with bombs they had placed around the school (which failed to detonate).

Suspicion of the masculine gender quickly went generic, extending to all boys. “The carnage committed by two boys in Littleton, Colorado,” said the
Congressional Quarterly Researcher
, “has forced the nation to reexamine the nature of boyhood in America.”
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Michael Kimmel, professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, explained that the Littleton shooters were “not deviants at all,” but “over-conformists . . . to traditional notions of masculinity.”
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The public was ready for tough defensive measures, and zero-tolerance policies fit the bill. But there was a problem with the picture of escalating school violence and the approaching superpredators: it was not true. At the very moment that DiIulio, Wilson, and other crime experts were predicting a superpredator surge, youth crime was beginning to plummet to historic lows. Criminologists are still at a loss to explain it. Between 1994 and 2009,
the juvenile crime rate fell by 50 percent. A 2009 bulletin of the US Department of Justice noted that, “Contrary to the popular perception that juvenile crime is on the rise, the data reported in this bulletin tell a different story.”
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Here are a few highlights of the DOJ report:

• Compared with the prior twenty years, the juvenile murder arrest rate between 2000 and 2009 has been historically low and relatively stable.

• The 2009 rape arrest rate was at its lowest level in three decades.

• The 2009 juvenile arrest rate for aggravated assault was at its lowest since the mid-1980s.
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Could it be that youth violence diminished because fear of the superpredators led to harsher policies and more arrests? The best evidence we have says no. Rates of juvenile crimes in states with high arrests were not significantly different from those with low arrests.
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What about school violence? The American Psychological Association task force study found no evidence that zero-tolerance policies had made schools more peaceable. More generally, rates of violent crime in school were low before zero tolerance and are even lower today
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(see
Figure 11
).

Figure 11: Percentage of Students ages 12–18 Who Reported Serious Violent Victimization at School During the Previous Six Months

Source: Indicators of School Crime and Safety, US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2010, “One percent [of students] reported violent victimization, and less than half of a percent reported a serious violent victimization.”
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School shootings are ghastly, mortifying events and extremely rare. Dewey Cornell, in his study of school violence cited earlier, considered the number of school murders between 1994 and 2004 and did the math: “The average school can expect a student-perpetrated homicide about once every 13,870 years.”
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Rates of serious school violence were even lower between 2004 and 2010.
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Following the December 2012 slaughter of twenty first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, a Gallup poll found that 60 percent of women and 43 percent of men thought it “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that a similar shooting could happen in their own community.
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The reactions were no doubt shaped by the particularly demented and horrifying nature of shooter Adam Lanza's deed, the national soul searching that ensued, and the fear of copy-cat incidents. It does no disrespect to the victims to note that homicidal school violence was a rare aberration in the 1990s when criminologists predicted the arrival of a horde of superpredators—and it is even rarer today.