Zero tolerance, little wisdom

This past autumn, a school in Canon City, Colo., suspended Hunter Yelton for violating its sexual-harassment policy. His crime? Kissing a girl on the hand. Hunter is 6 years old.

Other dangerous acts that have warranted suspension in schools across the land include chomping a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, firing an imaginary bow-and-arrow and talking about shooting a Hello Kitty soap-bubble gun. In Mississippi infractions serious enough to bring in the police include wearing the wrong shoes: A 5-year-old boy's school dress code mandated black shoes — his mother used a marker to blacken his red-and-white shoes, but apparently bits of red and white could still be seen.

Wearing the wrong socks is also a no-no.

Five pupils tossing peanuts at each other in the back of a school bus ended up charged with felony assault when one of the goobers hit the driver.

Many of these students attend schools with "zero tolerance" policies, which have been around for years. Some date their inception to the federal Gun-Free Schools Act of 1990, which required schools receiving federal funds to expel pupils who brought in firearms. According to John Whitehead, founding lawyer of the Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville, Va.-based law firm focused on civil liberties, they really began proliferating after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

Like the mandatory-minimum sentences established by Congress at the height of the drug war, zero-tolerance policies in schools were intended to make sure that all bad behavior drew a uniform response. Instead, also like mandatory minimums, the responses they mandate are often wildly disproportionate to the "offenses" committed. They do little, if anything, to improve discipline and they can cause lasting harm to pupils.

In the 2009-2010 school year, at least 3.1 million of America's 49.3 million public-school pupils were suspended at least once. Research by the federal Department of Education found that black pupils were more than three times likelier to be suspended than white pupils. More than 70 percent of the pupils arrested in school or referred to police by schools were black or Hispanic. One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls had been suspended, compared with fewer than one in 10 white boys and one in 20 white girls.

Suspension rates have gone up across the board since the early 1970s, from 3.7 percent of all pupils in 1973 to 6.9 percent in 2006, but far more for blacks, for whom the change was from 6 percent to 15 percent, than for whites, whose change was from 3.1 percent to 4.8 percent.

Whether or not these suspensions were accurately tied to misbehavior in the past, they certainly can reinforce it in the future.

Studies suggest that pupils suspended in sixth grade are likelier than never-suspended pupils to receive the same punishment in eighth grade, and to drop out later.

Some schools, particularly in large cities, have started turning away from zero-tolerance laws. The American Civil Liberties Union wants federal money spent on "positive behavior supports" designed to reduce suspensions, expulsions and calls to the police.

Whitehead suggests something much simpler: Schools should complement zero-tolerance policies with some attempt to find out what the miscreant's intentions were, and they should call in the police only as a last resort, and only in cases involving real weapons.

Otherwise, he says, "you're not teaching the kid anything except fear, fear of the police, which in a free country we shouldn't do."

From the Economist magazine.