Bad Ideas in Discipline

Zero Tolerance: Public Education’s Worst Discipline Policy?

CAREFUL! Grandpa has a weapon!

A True Story.Twenty years ago I was an assistant principal at a middle school when a neglected, dirty little boy named “Johnny” was brought to my office by a teacher one morning immediately after the first bell.

“He has a big knife in his book bag,” She said adding a few details, and hurried off for the beginning of school.

According the teacher, Johnny made no effort to hide his “weapon,” but stood at the perimeter of the playground alone, as usual. When the bell rang, he put the knife in his tattered book bag and entered the school, but a teacher caught a glimpse of the implement, grabbed Johnny by the nape of his neck, and brought him to my office, where he cooperated by emptying his book bag on my floor.

“I didn’t do nothing,” he announced angrily as the contents of his book bag scattered revealing two yo-yos, six pointless pencils, a stick of gum, about two-dozen acorns, assorted paperwork, and a mortally wounded roach. No textbooks, but in the middle of the detritus there was the offending weapon, which for lack of a better name would be called “the knife.”

Johnny was a chubby, disheveled kid who “got by” with barely passing marks. He was an only child of illiterate parents. His father, a local junk collector, was in his mid-sixties and looked much older due to his permanently scruffy beard and and several missing front teeth.

“Sam” was married to, Arlene, a woman thirty years younger, but they were separated. 

Johnny lived with his father most of the time. I had met with Child Protective Services about the "family," and they were concerned, and while poverty was clear Johnny was clothed, fed, and happy at home. Johnny and Sam lived in a small, drafty mobile home near the school. Sam drank often and was not shy about showing up at school under the influence. He would drop in to talk about what a problem Johnny was and complain that “He ain’t got no sense,”or he would come to take Johnny home when his son had one of his frequent stomach aches.

The offending “weapon” was a cheap kitchen knife with a four or five inch wooden handle fastened to a flimsy, thin blade with two flat, brass rivets. The blade was worn down substantially and had a rounded point from misuse, leaving it incapable of penetrating Jello.

Johnny picked it up and handed it to me as I asked him why he has brought the knife to school.

“It ain’t much of a knife,” Mr. Craft, he said, “I used it to cut sticks in the woods and build forts, but it don’t cut no more. I can’t even whittle with it.”

“Why did you bring it, Johnny? You know there are serious rules about weapons on campus?” 

“Crap! It ain’t no weapon. I was just seeing if I could cut a path through the grass in the field I have cross, but it won’t cut nothin’ now. I guess that’s why my Daddy let me have it.”

As I inspected “the knife,“ I noticed green streaks of chlorophyll left by grass. I pulled the blade across the palm of my hand – it barely made a mark. It was a knife, but it was less of a weapon than a dull pencil. I tossed it into my “contraband drawer” reserved for various objects which for one reason or another had been surrendered by students – mostly toys that had been the source of a classroom distraction.  I sent him back to class after telling him that I would call for him later.

Soon I would hold Johnny’s fate in my hands. A knife would almost certainly result in expulsion, unless it was a pocket knife with a blade less than two and one-half inches long. One of our students had been expelled two years before for bringing a pocket knife with a three-inch blade to show to friends – it was a gift from his grandfather. The length was arbitrary, of course. Actually, a pocket knife would was clearly more dangerous than Johnny’s benign tool.

Making my rounds that morning, I thought of my childhood days spent playing in the woods and building forts like Johnny. I recalled simpler times when drugs were not an issue, and many of my friends proudly carried gifts from their fathers – big pocket knives – to school.  I had once owned a two-foot long machete purchased from an Army surplus store when I was nine years old, and I wore it out chasing imaginary adversaries in the wooded area near our home. I had to build forts just as Johnny had.

This is NOT a Weapon!

Discipline Should not Be Arbitrary.

I paced at school. Zero tolerance!? It sounded then, and still does sound, antithetical to my Christian beliefs. The year before, I had taken a gifted fifth grader – a model student – to the district hearing officer for bringing his father’s huge and well-honed hunting knife to school. He had been threatened by three larger boys and brought the knife for self-defense. He was expelled. The hearing officer had no choice under the policy, but it didn't feel right to me, as the knife never left the boy’s book bag. Had it not been seen by a teacher doing her job, the incident would likely have passed. The same year I reported another student who, for no particular reason, snuck up behind a classmate waiting for a ride home after school and knocked him cold by striking him over the head with an eighteen-inch crescent wrench. The victim required stitches, and the perpetrator was suspended for two weeks – a crescent wrench is not a weapon.

Years earlier at another school I broke up a fight in the hall between two sixth grade girls, but I was too late to prevent one girl from stabbing the other in her eye with a sharp pencil. Fortunately, the needle- sharp pencil missed her eyeball, entering the bottom of the eye socket and causing a painful and bloody injury.The attacker was suspended for three weeks.

The clear truth is that a weapon can be a toy and lots of other things can be weapons. Whether or not something is a weapon depends largely on intent. One gets no time deducted from a prison sentence if he knocks out multiple teeth with a baseball bat instead of brass knuckles. The most commonly used weapon in schools, in my experience, is the human hand.

Of course, the pivotal issue is whether or not zero tolerance policies improve school safety. The answer is “not likely.” Research on the issue is difficult. There has been a national downward trend in violent acts for decades, but it is difficult to attribute that to zero tolerance policies, which address only five percent of school discipline problems. In fact, expulsion from school puts students at a greater risk for dropping out. One of the factors common to criminals is disengagement from school. Also, the number of school shootings and resulting fatalities continues to increase.

Enough! I called Johnny in and told him that he was being suspended for two days for another disruption of the school environment. I would have to keep his knife. He took the news well, as he always did when he was in trouble and enjoyed time off.  Johnny would not perceive expulsion as punishment – never have I known a kid less enamored of education. He had no close friends at school and was frequently reported for disrupting class. His greatest pleasures were helping his inebriated father collect junk and playing alone in the woods with his mongrel dog.  

I had violated district policy. I took a risk to keep a student in school, and under similar circumstances, I would do it again. To me, sending Johnny home for the rest of the year was immoral and dangerous to him. In my judgment, the knife was not a weapon and the safest place he could be was school. Johnny was harmless and had no record of violent behavior. He needed any bit of education we could give him. He didn’t need to be at home with his an alcoholic father.

I made a judgment call. That’s what administrators do – every day! If education cannot rise above policies that are antithetical to character development and which eliminate the need for judgment, our schools will suffer.

Whenever I hear of zero tolerance being enforced in schools I visualize Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry glaring at the the bad guy. Harry stands taller and wears his distinctive disarming sneer, and he is, of course, saying, “Go ahead! Make my day!” But the "bad guy"is a four-foot tall elementary student and Harry is portrayed by a principal soaring over the terrified child who holds a prize pistol from a Cracker Jacks box in a trembling hand.

I agree that weapons – real weapons – have no place in school. I don’t own a gun. I am opposed to drugs, legal or illegal, being carried around by students at school. But administrators are hired to make tough decisions. Let them do it!