School House Hype

By Carrie Ching, AlterNet
Posted on April 1, 2000, Printed on May 27, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/84/school_house_hype

At the beginning of this school year, five students in Mississippi were throwing peanuts at one another on a bus. A peanut accidentally hit the white female bus driver, who pulled over to call the police. The bus was diverted to the courthouse, where the students -- all African-American males -- were questioned and arrested for felony assault. The Sheriff told a local newspaper: "[T]his time it was peanuts, but if we don't get a handle on it, the next time it could be bodies." The students were suspended from school, their bus privileges withdrawn. Although the criminal charges were later dropped when an attorney intervened, all five young men -- juniors and seniors at the time -- have since dropped out of school.

Scenarios like this have not been uncommon in the years following the Jonesboro, Arkansas school shooting in 1998. The highly publicized series of school shootings, culminating with the Columbine tragedy last spring, have fueled a punitive crackdown on students around the country. School administrators and teachers have begun to see in their own students a lurking evil -- believing that at any moment their schoolyards might become the site of the next violent tragedy. The use of metal detectors and surveillance in schools has gone up, communication and tolerance have plummeted.

But according to a new report called "School House Hype: Two Years Later" this punitive response is not only failing to prevent violence, it may be significantly backfiring.

The study, conducted by the Justice Policy Institute, a criminal policy watchdog organization, and the Children's Law Center in Kentucky, shows that -- contrary to public opinion -- juvenile crime rates are going down, both inside and out of schools. During the 1998-99 school year -- the year of the Columbine shootings -- the National School Safety Center reported a 40 percent decline in school-associated violent deaths from the previous year. The rate for the '98-99 year was 26 percent below the average for the previous six years.

"With 52 million students enrolled in America's public schools, this means that last year, there was a one in two million chance of being killed at school," said the report. According to FBI arrest data, juvenile homicides dropped 56 percent between 1993 and 1998, and there was a 30 percent decline in overall juvenile crime.

The report -- released by the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice on April 12, just before the first anniversary of the Columbine incident -- draws on data from the National School Safety Center, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice. "The data reminds us that our young people are neither school-house assassins nor the kids on the other side of the yellow tape, weeping over the deaths of their classmates," said Justice Policy Institute Director Vincent Schiraldi. "Our kids are the ones playing soccer, going to dances and doing the other normal things kids do. They don't need us to turn their schools into prisons, they need our support to live healthy, happy lives."

Despite overwhelming evidence that violence by young people is not a major threat, 62 percent of the participants in polls conducted by USA Today, CBS News and Hart and Teeter Research believe that juvenile crime is on the rise.

Many, including students like Seth Collins, a junior at a high school in Detroit, blame the media for creating the wave of paranoia. "The problem was extremely overblown," Collins told the Detroit News. "All the coverage just gave kids more ideas. They wouldn't have had those otherwise." To address this trend, the School House report recommends that journalists need to contextualize high-profile incidents of violence within the larger picture of decreasing juvenile crime. "Most Americans report they get most of their information about violence from television," the authors state. "As it turns out, the media has been a very poor teacher."The lessons learned from the overblown media coverage of school violence have manifested not only in public polls, but have moved dangerously into classrooms, courthouses and Congress. From Berkeley, California to Versailles, Kentucky, many schools have chosen a drastic approach to combating the imaginary threat by conducting "crisis drills" in which students, teachers and law enforcement teams act out scenarios of violent outbreaks. A high school in Pennsylvania went so far as to bring in helicopters to evacuate those playing the "wounded." "Any school that isn't preparing its students and staff for this possibility is being foolish," a Virginia high school principal told the Washington Post last fall.On a legislative level, "school security" and "juvenile crime" became the buzzwords of 1999. Last May, the Senate passed "The Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Accountability and Rehabilitation Act of 1999," a piece of legislation that allowed for the increase in penalties for juvenile offenders and the construction of more juvenile detention facilities. Within its text, the bill's authors made the unfounded statement: "The tragedy in Jonesboro, Arkansas, is, unfortunately, an all too common occurrence in the United States." Since 1996, roughly two-thirds of state legislatures have enacted some sort of juvenile crime measure. Among other things, they have repealed the confidentiality of juvenile court records, increased penalties for young offenders and lowered minimum-age requirements for certain degrees of punishment. This past March, voters in California passed a draconian youth crime initiative by a margin of 62 percent. On a more local level, most schools have taken the "secure building" approach. School administrators around the country have spent thousands installing metal detectors, surveillance cameras and door locks, hiring extra security guards, conducting personal searches and keeping student "profile" records. According to security experts, the school safety industry -- which barely existed a few years ago -- exploded in the weeks following the Columbine tragedy. It now accounts for a major portion of the $38 billion U.S. security business.But many students feel such over-zealous security measures are unnecessary and unfair. At a roundtable forum sponsored by the National Association of Attorneys General last October, students voiced their concerns to a panel of school administrators and top law enforcement officials. Yasser, a sophomore at a Massachusetts high school, questioned the requirements that students wear ID cards at all times and carry clear plastic book bags. "When I get up to go to school in the morning, I don't want to feel like I'm going to a correctional facility," he told the panel. Other students addressed the enforcement of strict new dress codes, which they felt infringed on their personal freedom.Once implicated or caught for breaking the rules, students who "misbehave" in the post-Jonesboro world are finding themselves handcuffed, in court or behind bars. It seems the days of lectures in the principal's office and detention are over. In Arlington, Virginia, two 10-year-old boys were suspended for three days for putting soapy water in a teacher's drink. At the teacher's urging, police charged the boys with a felony -- which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. In Texas, a 13-year-old wrote a story about shooting up a school for a "scary" Halloween class assignment. He was referred to the principal, who immediately called the police. The child spent six days in juvenile detention before the courts confirmed that no crime had been committed. Both cases were eventually dropped.Most criminal charges against students have disintegrated once in the courts. But with the increase of suspensions and expulsions on a national level, young people are beginning to feel the sting. In 1997, 3.1 million students were suspended from school -- most for non-violent, non-criminal acts. In the last two years, the number of students punished severely for petty acts has increased dramatically -- with a series of high-profile cases snatched up by the media. Last September, a senior at an Ohio high school was expelled because a child's plastic cap gun was found in the back seat of his car -- a toy left behind by his friend's kid brother. At a high school in the Chicago-area, a 17-year-old junior shot a paper clip with a rubber band at a classmate, hit a cafeteria worker instead and was expelled from school.While suspension rates have been steadily increasing for all students in the last two decades -- almost doubling since 1974 -- the disparity in student suspension rates by race is alarming. A study conducted by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights estimates that on a national level, African American students are suspended at roughly 2.3 times the rate of Caucasian students. An extreme example is the Union High School District in Phoenix, Arizona where African-American students comprise just 4 percent of the student population, yet are suspended 22 times the rate of white students. Racial discrimination against African American, Latino and/or disabled students in suspensions and expulsions was found to exist in most major cities, including Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston. While critics may argue that such a disparity exists because minority and disabled students simply misbehave more often, a study conducted by the Applied Research Center of Oakland, California suggests otherwise. The study cites incidents in which students around the country have been disciplined according to new zero-tolerance policies, and compares the levels of punishment enforced according to race. In one case, Martin, a young African-American student in Providence, Rhode Island was suspended when he offered to help his teacher dislodge a diskette stuck in his computer with a collapsible key chain knife. "Would Martin have been suspended if he were white?" questioned Terry Keleher, co-author of the report. "Quite possibly. On the other hand, a white student in Danville, Vermont was neither suspended nor expelled when he explained that he'd brought a loaded shotgun to school because it was hunting season."Jason Ziedenberg, senior policy analyst with the Justice Policy Institute, agrees that minority students are clearly bearing the brunt of new zero-tolerance school policies. "Whether they are black or white, kids shouldn't be punished for their mistakes by taking away their education," he said.Ironically, the 3 million students suspended or expelled every year create a much larger problem than the threat posed by school violence. In many states, schools are not required to provide expelled students with alternative education in the form of home schooling or placement in an alternative school. For kids who don't receive assistance in finding alternative schooling, this can mean falling behind in their education, and eventually giving up completely. And for those who fall through the cracks of state institutions, the prospects can be grim. Studies published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Journal of Public Health found that young people who were not in school were more likely to be involved in physical fights, to carry weapons, to become homeless and more likely to smoke, drink and use and abuse other drugs. Furthermore, there is evidence that the punitive reflex many school administrators have developed may come back to haunt them. According to research conducted by the Department of Special Education at the University of Maryland, the militant approaches taken at many schools may not be the safe solution they are intended to be. Researchers found that students at schools which attempted to create a "secure building" through surveillance, intimidation and force felt less safe than at schools where the rules and consequences for misbehavior were simply emphasized and enforced fairly. "Creating an unwelcome, almost jail-like, heavily scrutinized environment may foster the violence and disorder that school administrators hope to avoid," wrote the authors of the School House report. "Where disorder exists, students tend to engage in more acts of self-protection and live in a heightened state of fear."While many school officials have reported the fear of their own legal liability as a motivation behind the tightened security and stricter punishments at their schools, a legal analysis by the Children's Law Center in Kentucky shows that school administrators are rarely held accountable for student violence by state or federal courts. Some students have become acutely aware of this priority among administrators. "They say it's supposed to be safer for us," a high school junior in California told the Ventura County Star. "But I think it's so they can sleep better at night."Yet students who sue their schools for being unfairly suspended or expelled have been supported by state courts in Washington, Virginia and Florida. "Ironically, school systems may have more to fear from a liability standpoint for disciplining students too quickly and on insufficient grounds," said Kim Brooks, executive director of the Children's Law Center and co-author of the School House report.

In the end, the most convincing arguments in opposition to the widespread crackdown on students come from the students themselves. Rather than being alienated and policed, most students simply want to be heard and respected. "They're treating us like delinquents," a 15-year-old California student told the Ventura County Star. "They're always telling us to be unique and special when they're treating us like we're not."

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