Zero-Tolerance as Thinking
5:59 pm in Education, Ethics, Montessori by Rachel Davison
I find myself constantly amazed at the lack of ethics and logic, even just plain common sense, regarding our treatment of children in society. The startling lack of judgment on the part of the Lower Merion School District (The latest headlines read:
A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday. Full Article)
and the recent tasering of a ten year old boy in Martinsville, Indiana (Full Article) are all symptoms of the same problem: I will call it “Zero-Tolerance Thinking”
By “Zero-Tolerence Thinking” I mean the tendency of adults, members of large powerful institutions such as schools and police forces, to think of people, all people, in terms of groups. We all do some version of this. It acts as an economization of time and effort in using our judgment. And it can be a useful social tool: labels allow for us to categorize our social experience, and more quickly make decision. It becomes Zero-Tolerence Thinking when, instead of sound judgment, those in a position of power and force use it to exact punishment. It becomes dangerous when instead of seeing a ten-year old boy, throwing a tantrum, police officers see a violent offender whom they must violently subdue.
How about you? How often do you do this? How often do you choose put a situation into easily definable terms, instead of thinking critically about all that parts? As teachers, co-workers, friends, have you done this (albeit on a smaller scale)?
My larger question is about the outcome when we do this to children. When we see them as a group, instead of as individuals, how does that change their understanding of self? Zero-Tolerence policies at schools create situations in which the individual child is subsumed under the rule of gross group punishment. The implicit moral is “Do not think about your actions, your desires, the particulars of your situation. They do not count, will not be taken into account when considering the consequences. Follow the rules. All of them.” Who does this policy serve? Is there anyone who feels good about it? The administrators, who usually recognize the injustice? The parents who see their child in pain? The student, who is emotionally destroyed?
The most eloquent description I have found was unsurprisingly (or surprisingly, if you aren’t as familiar with her body of work) written by Maria Montessori :
The fact that the rights of the child have been forgotten and ignored, that the child has been mistreated, even destroyed, and that moreover hsi worth, power and nature have been misunderstood, should all give humanity serious food for thought.
Maria Montessori, 1938
Very serious food for thought. And a serious call to action.
P.S. I recently came across this fantastic account of a small town lawyer and his fight to make a school board use common sense. Enjoy!
Zero-Tolerance For Zero-Common-Sense
If you practice law in a small town–and especially if you practice criminal law in a small town–chances are pretty good you’ll eventually experience the joy & thrill of appearing before some school administrators at an expulsion hearing.
And you may be thinking to yourself, that doesn’t sound too bad. What harm could come from developing a niche practice in a small town, a practice in which you might be able to help confused students (and their parents) find their way back into school to pursue their future academic and extracurricular promise?
Well, Dear Reader, the problem is YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MIND.
Welcome to the Land of Zero-Tolerance, a place much like Alice’s Wonderland, where your client gets a mad tea party instead of a hearing with due process, conducted by a school administrator who could be easily confused with the Queen of Hearts. It doesn’t take long to find out that a “policy of zero-tolerance” can be the modern-equivalent of “Off with their heads!”
Now, some solace can be found in understanding this frustration is not new. One of my favorite sages, Mark Twain, once quipped: 
“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”
So, you can’t say you weren’t warned. But that doesn’t mean it hurts any less when you bang your head against the schoolhouse wall.
I once represented a young man, who had never been in any real trouble at school, for an expulsion under a zero-tolerance statute for the offense of “possessing a firearm facsimile.” His transgression? He had made the mistake of asking to see the object another student had brought to class. It turned out it was laser-pointer in the shape of a gun. A very small gun. Like a tiny toy gun. Which he could hold in the palm of his hand and then close his fist around without anybody else knowing what it was. Which is why he stupidly asked to see it in the first place because he didn’t know what the other kid had in his hand.
The school principal said he was compelled to expel my client for a year under the law and it didn’t matter what my client’s intent was. I appealed to the school board and pointed out that the language of the statute clearly required that the “weapon facsimile” be capable of being confused with a real gun. The school board was unimpressed with my logic. After all, as one school board member commented, it could have been just like one of those tiny guns that James Bond uses.
OK, then.
Luckily, a district court magistrate–employing a shocking amount of common sense–didn’t buy the James Bond approach and overturned my client’s silly expulsion. The school board, wounded by this judicial rejection of their power, appealed.
The appellate gurus can probably predict what happened next. I made arrangements to have the little gun-shaped laser-pointer brought to the oral arguments, where I showed the Court of Appeals just how small it was and how it could be held inside a fist without any sign it was there. And the Court of Appeals judges shook their heads in approval and asked really good questions that showed just how absurd they thought the school board’s decision was.
And then they issued an opinion upholding the expulsion–because it was the school board’s decision to make–not some pushy, common-sense wielding judge.
And, not for the first time, I went insane.
So imagine the state of my mental health when coming across this item in the New York Times:
“Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.
Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.”
Please be sure to click on the link to the NY Times story to view the picture of this scary transgressor Zachary. Nefarious, ain’t he?
The NY Times correctly reports that zero-tolerance policies concerning weapons started with the tragedy at Columbine High School, here in Colorado. But the reference to Virginia Tech and the claim that the “growing debate” over whether these policies have gone too far being a recent development are not accurate. The shooting at Columbine was over ten years ago, and most of these laws were passed soon after in the typical knee-jerk fashion so loved by state legislators. The shooting at Virginia Tech is only one such awful and sickening demonstration of the ineffectiveness and futility of these laws.
But zero-tolerance policies are very effective at one thing: demonstrating the definition of “absurd.” Thus, I could barely wait for the answer when the NY Times posed the question “on the minds of residents” where Zachary lives: “Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?”
The mind-bending, psychosis-inducing answer? School board officials don’t have more discretion because, essentially, they’re too stupid. (Score one for Mr. Twain, thankyouverymuch.)
It appears “some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.” Protect the students from whom? From other students? Or from imbecile school administrators too dumb to distinguish a prank from a serious threat?
And the answer is??? Of course! It’s from imbecile school administrators:
Charles P. Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the University at Buffalo Law School who has written about school safety issues, said he favored a strict zero-tolerance approach.
“There are still serious threats every day in schools,” Dr. Ewing said, adding that giving school officials discretion holds the potential for discrimination and requires the kind of threat assessments that only law enforcement is equipped to make.
There you have it. Zero-tolerance laws are designed to protect students from school officials who possess zero-common-sense and are unable to make unbiased decisions that an average cop, who presumably has less education, makes on a daily basis.
So, while school officials might be in charge of educating our children and inculcating values like fairness, equality, and respect for authority in this nation’s future generations, we can’t trust them to tell the difference between a Cub Scout utensil exuberantly and proudly displayed by a six-year-old and a deadly weapon intended to be used to hurt somebody.
No wonder some school officials have tried to ban Mark Twain.”





