(With readers' comments from October 2009 at the end)
by Henry A. Giroux
[This article is drawn from Henry A. Giroux's book, "Youth in a Suspect Society," which has just been published by Palgrave/McMillan. This is the second in a series of articles that will address issues raised in the book.]
The shift to a society now governed through crime, market-driven values and the politics of disposability has radically transformed the public school as a site for a civic and critical education. One major effect can be seen in the increasingly popular practice of organizing schools through disciplinary practices that closely resemble the culture of prisons.[ 1] For instance, many public schools, traditionally viewed as nurturing, youth-friendly spaces dedicated to protecting and educating children, have become one of the most punitive institutions young people now face - on a daily basis. Educating for citizenship, work and the public good has been replaced with models of schooling in which students, especially poor minority youth, are viewed narrowly either as a threat or as perpetrators of violence. When not viewed as potential criminals, they are positioned as infantilized potential victims of crime (on the Internet, at school and in other youth spheres) who must endure modes of governing that are demeaning and repressive. Jonathan Simon captures this transformation of schools from a public good to a security risk in the following comment:
Today, in the United States, it is crime that dominates the symbolic passageway to school and citizenship. And behind this surface, the pathways of knowledge and power within the school are increasingly being shaped by crime as the model problem, and tools of criminal justice as the dominant technologies. Through the introduction of police, probation officers, prosecutors and a host of private security professionals into the schools, new forms of expertise now openly compete with pedagogic knowledge and authority for shaping routines and rituals of schools.... At its core, the implicit fallacy dominating many school policy debates today consists of a gross conflation of virtually all the vulnerabilities of children and youth into variations on the theme of crime. This may work to raise the salience of education on the public agenda, but at the cost to students of an education embedded with themes of "accountability," "zero tolerance" and "norm shaping."[2]
As the logic of the market and "the crime complex"[ 3] frame a number of social actions in schools, students are subjected to three particularly offensive policies, often defended by school authorities and politicians under the rubric of school safety. First, students are increasingly subjected to zero tolerance laws that are used primarily to punish, repress and exclude them. Second, they are increasingly subjected to a "crime complex" in which security staff using harsh disciplinary practices now displace the normative functions teachers once provided both in and outside of the classroom. Third, more and more schools are breaking down the space between education and juvenile delinquency, substituting penal pedagogies for critical learning and replacing a school culture that fosters a discourse of possibility with a culture of fear and social control. Consequently, many youth, especially poor minorities in urban school systems, are not just being suspended or expelled from school but also have to bear the terrible burden of being ushered into the dark precincts of juvenile detention centers, adult courts and prison.
Once seen as an invaluable public good and laboratory for critical learning and engaged citizenship, public schools are increasingly viewed as a site of crime, warehouses or containment centers. Consequently, students are also reconceived through the optic of crime as populations to be managed and controlled primarily by security forces. In accordance with this perception of students as potential criminals and the school as a site of disorder and delinquency, schools across the country since the 1980's have implemented zero tolerance policies that involve automatic imposition of severe penalties for first offenses of a wide range of undesirable, but often harmless, behaviors. Based on the assumption that schools are rife with crime and fueled by the emergence of a number of state and federal laws such as the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, mandatory sentencing legislation and the popular "three strikes and you're out" policy, many educators first invoked zero tolerance rules against kids who brought firearms to schools - this was exacerbated by the high-profile school shootings in the mid-1990's, the tragic shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, and the more recent shootings at Virginia Tech. But as the climate of fear increased, the assumption that schools were dealing with a new breed of student - violent, amoral and apathetic - began to take hold in the public imagination. Moreover, as school safety become a top educational priority, zero tolerance policies were broadened and now include a range of behavioral infractions that encompass everything from possessing drugs or weapons to threatening other students - all broadly conceived. Under zero tolerance policies, forms of punishments that were once applied to adults now apply to first graders. Students who violate what appears to be the most minor rules - such as a dress code violation - are increasingly subjected to zero tolerance laws that have a disparate impact on students of color while being needlessly punitive.
The punitive nature of the zero tolerance approach is on display in a number of cases where students have had to face harsh penalties that defy human compassion and reason. For example, the recentl high-profile case of Zachary Christie, a 6-year old first grader who received a 45-day suspension because he brought to school his favorite Cub Scott camping utensil, which can serve as a knife, fork and spoon. Rather than be treated as a young boy who made a simple mistake, he was treated by the school as a suspect who deserved to be punished. It seems that the only thing being punished in this case was informed reason and critical judgment. Because of the national publicity the case received, school officials modified their decision and allowed the boy to return to school.
Most children who confront these harsh disciplinary procedures are not so lucky. One typical example includes the case of an 8-year-old boy in the first grade at a Miami elementary school who took a table knife to his school, using it to rob a classmate of $1 in lunch money. School officials claimed he was facing "possible expulsion and charges of armed robbery."[ 4] In another instance that took place in December 2004, "Porsche, a fourth-grade student at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, elementary school, was yanked out of class, handcuffed, taken to the police station and held for eight hours for bringing a pair of eight-inch scissors to school. She had been using the scissors to work on a school project at home. School district officials acknowledged that the girl was not using the scissors as a weapon or threatening anyone with them, but scissors qualified as a potential weapon under state law."[ 5]
It gets worse. Adopting a rigidly authoritarian zero tolerance school discipline policy, the following incident in the Chicago Public Schools system signals both bad faith and terrible judgment on the part of educators implementing these practices. According to the report "Education on Lockdown," in February 2003, a 7-year-old boy was cuffed, shackled and forced to lie face down for more than an hour while being restrained by a security officer at Parker Community Academy on the Southwest Side. Neither the principal nor the assistant principal came to the aid of the first grader, who was so traumatized by the event he was not able to return to school.[ 6]
Traditionally, students who violated school rules and the rights of others were sent to the principal's office, a guidance teacher or another teacher. Corrective discipline in most cases was a matter of judgment and deliberation, generally handled within the school by the appropriate administrator or teacher. Under such circumstances, young people could defend themselves, the context of their rule violation was explored (including underlying issues, such as problems at home, that may have triggered the behavior in the first place), and the discipline they received was suited to the nature of the offense. In other words, teachers and school administrators did what they were supposed to do: listen, exercise judgment and discrimination, and then decide how to handle an infraction. Today, in the age of standardized testing, thinking and acting, reason and judgment have been thrown out the window just as teachers are increasingly being deskilled and forced to act as semi-robotic technicians good for little more than teaching for the test and serving as a reminder that we are arriving at a day when the school curriculum will be teacher-proof. This loss of autonomy results in the sabotaging of critical education and the rise of a culture of security that now defines schools through the narrow optics of measurement and discipline.
Today, as school districts link up with law enforcement agencies, young people find themselves not only being expelled or suspended in record rates, but also being "subject to citations or arrests and referrals to juvenile or criminal courts."[ 7] Students who break even minor rules, such as pouring a glass of milk on another student or engaging in a school yard fight, have been removed from the normal school population, handed over to armed police, arrested, handcuffed, shoved into patrol cars, taken to jail, fingerprinted and subjected to the harsh dictates of the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
How educators think about children through a vocabulary that has shifted from hope to punishment is evident in the effects of zero tolerance policies, which criminalize student behavior in ways that take an incalculable toll on their lives and their future. As the nationally syndicated journalist Ellen Goodman points out, zero tolerance has become a code word for a "quick and dirty way of kicking kids out" of school.[ 8] This becomes clear as cities such as Denver and Chicago - in their eagerness to appropriate and enforce zero tolerance policies in their districts - do less to create a safe environment for students than to simply kick more young people out of the public school system. These are not the young people who attract the dominant media, but poor white, brown and black kids who increasingly are seen as disposable. For example, between 2000 and 2004, the Denver Public Schools experienced a 71 percent increase in the number of student referrals to law enforcement, many for nonviolent behaviors. The Chicago school system in 2003 had over 8,000 students arrested, often for trivial infractions such as pushing, tardiness and using spitballs. As part of a human waste management system, zero tolerance policies have been responsible for suspending and expelling black students in record high numbers. For instance, "in 2000, blacks were 17 percent of public school enrollment nationwide and 34 percent of suspensions." And when poor black youth are not being suspended under the merger of school security and law and order policies, they are increasingly at risk of falling into the school-to-prison pipeline.
As the Advancement Project points out, the racial disparities in school suspensions, expulsions and arrests feeds and mirrors similar disparities in the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
... in 2002, black youths made up 16 percent of the juvenile population but were 43 percent of juvenile arrests, while white youths were 78 percent of the juvenile population but 55 percent of juvenile arrests. Further, in 1999, minority youths accounted for 34 percent of the US juvenile population but 62 percent of the youths in juvenile facilities. Because higher rates of suspensions and expulsions are likely to lead to higher rates of juvenile incarceration, it is not surprising that black and Latino youths are disproportionately represented among young people held in juvenile prisons.[9]
The city of Chicago, which has a large black student population, implemented a take-no-prisoners approach in its use of zero tolerance policies. The racially skewed consequences are visible in grim statistics which reveal that "on average, more than 266 suspensions are doled out ... during the school year." Moreover, the number of expulsions has "mushroomed from 32 in 1,995 to 3,000 in the school year 2003-2004,"[ 10] most affecting poor black youth.
As the culture of fear, crime and repression dominate American public schools, the culture of schooling is reconfigured through the allocation of resources used primarily to hire more police, security staff and technologies of control and surveillance. In some cases, schools such as the Palm Beach County system have established their own police departments. Saturating schools with police and security personnel has created a host of problems for schools, teachers and students - not to mention that such policies tap into financial resources otherwise used for actually enhancing learning. In many cases, the police and security guards assigned to schools are not properly trained to deal with students and often use their authority in ways that extend far beyond what is either reasonable or even legal. When Mayor Bloomberg in 1998 allowed control of safety to be transferred to the New York Police Department, the effect was not only a boom in the number of police and school safety agents but also an intensification of abuse, harassments and arrests of students throughout the school system.
One example of war-on-terror tactics used domestically and impacting schools can be seen in the use of the roving metal detector program in which police arrive at a school unannounced and submit all students to metal detector scans. In "Criminalizing the Classroom," Elora Mukherjee describes some of the disruptions caused by the program:
As soon as it was implemented, the program began to cause chaos and lost instructional time at targeted schools, each morning transforming an ordinary city school into a massive police encampment with dozens of police vehicles, as many as sixty SSAs [School Security Agents] and NYPD officers, and long lines of students waiting to pass through the detectors to get to class.[11]
As she indicates, the program does more than delay classes and instructional time: it also fosters abuse and violence. The following incident at Wadleigh Secondary School on November 17, 2006, provides an example of how students are abused by some of the police and security guards. Mukherjee writes:
The officers did not limit their search to weapons and other illegal items. They confiscated cell phones, iPods, food, school supplies, and other personal items. Even students with very good reasons to carry a cell phone were given no exemption. A young girl with a pacemaker told an officer that she needed her cell phone in case of a medical emergency, but the phone was seized nonetheless. When a student wandered out of line, officers screamed, "Get the fuck back in line!" When a school counselor asked the officers to refrain from cursing, one officer retorted, "I can do and say whatever I want," and continued, with her colleagues, to curse.[12]
Many students in New York City have claimed that the police are often disrespectful and verbally abusive, stating that "police curse at them, scream at them, treat them like criminals, and are on 'power trips.'... At Martin Luther King Jr. High School, one student reported, SSAs refer to students as 'baby Rikers,' implying that they are convicts-in-waiting. At Louis D. Brandeis High School, SSAs degrade students with comments like, 'That girl has no ass.'"[ 13] In some cases, students who had severe health problems had their phones taken away and when they protested were either arrested or assaulted. Mukherjee reports that "A school aide at Paul Robeson High School witnessed a Sergeant yell at, push, and then physically assault a child who would not turn over his cell phone. The Sergeant hit the child in the jaw, wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him, removed him from school premises, and confined him at the local precinct."[ 14] There have also been cases of teachers and administrators being verbally abused, assaulted, and arrested while trying to protect students from overzealous security personnel or police officers.
Under such circumstances, schools begin to take on the obscene and violent contours one associates with maximum security prisons: unannounced locker searches, armed police patrolling the corridors, mandatory drug testing, and the ever-present phalanx of lock-down security devices such as metal detectors, X-ray machines, surveillance cameras, and other technologies of fear and control. Appreciated less for their capacity to be educated than for the threat they pose to adults, students are now treated as if they were inmates, often humiliated, detained, searched and in some cases arrested. Randall Beger is right in suggesting that the new "security culture in public schools [has] turned them into 'learning prisons' where the students unwittingly become 'guinea pigs' to test the latest security devices."[ 15]
Poor black and Latino male youth are particularly at risk in this mix of demonic representation and punitive modes of control, as they are the primary object of not only racist stereotypes but also a range of disciplinary policies that criminalize their behavior.[ 16] Such youth, increasingly viewed as a burden and dispensable, now bear the brunt of these assaults by being expelled from schools, tried in the criminal justice system as adults, and arrested and jailed at rates that far exceed their white counterparts.[ 17] While black children make up only 15 percent of the juvenile population in the United States, they account for 46 percent of those put behind bars and 52 percent of those whose cases end up in adult criminal courts. Shockingly, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, "[a] jail or detention cell after a child or youth gets into trouble is the only universally guaranteed child policy in America."[ 18]
Students being miseducated, criminalized and arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in lockdown schools that resemble prisons is a cruel reminder of the degree to which mainstream politicians and the American public have turned their backs on young people in general and poor minority youth in particular. As schools are reconfigured around the model of the prison, crime becomes the central metaphor used to define the nature of schooling while criminalizing the behavior of young people becomes the most valued strategy in mediating the relationship between educators and students. The consequences of these policies for young people suggest not only an egregious abdication of responsibility - as well as reason, judgment and restraint - on the part of administrators, teachers and parents, but also a new role for schools as they become more prison-like, eagerly adapting to their role as an adjunct of the punishing state.
As schools define themselves through the lens of crime and merge with the dictates of the penal system, they eliminate a critical and nurturing space in which to educate and protect children in accordance with the ideals of a democratic society. As a central institution in the youth disposability industry, public schools now serve to discipline and warehouse youth, while they also put in place a circuit of policies and practices to make it easier for minority youth to move from schools into the juvenile justice system and eventually into prison. The combination of school punishments and criminal penalties has proven a lethal mix for many poor minority youth and has transformed schools from spaces of youth advocacy, protection, hope and equity to military fortresses, increasingly well-positioned to mete out injustice and humiliation, transforming the once-nurturing landscapes that young people are compelled to inhabit. Rather than confront the war on youth, especially the increasing criminalization of their behavior, schools now adopt policies that both participate in and legitimate the increasing absorption of young people into the juvenile and adult criminal justice system. Although state repression aimed at children is not new, what is unique about the current historical moment is that the forces of domestic militarization are expanding, making it easier to put young people in jail rather than to provide them with the education, services and care they need to face the growing problems characteristic of a democracy under siege. Wars abroad not only take a toll in needless loss of lives, but also divert valuable resources from expanding public goods, especially schools and the quality of lives of the young people who inhabit them. As minority youth increasingly become the object of severe disciplinary practices in public schools, many often find themselves vulnerable and powerless as they are thrown into juvenile and adult courts - or, even worse, into overcrowded and dangerous juvenile correctional institutions and sometimes adult prisons.
Under this insufferable climate of increased repression and unabated exploitation, young people and communities of color become the new casualties in an ongoing war against justice, freedom, social citizenship and democracy. Given the switch in public policy from social investment to a policy of testing, measurement and punishment that President Obama and Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan seem willing to support, it is clear that schools will continue to be the object of malign neglect, viewed less as a public good than a public pathology. Moreover, as government policy continues to push for high-stakes testing, militarizing schools and addressing educational reform through the support of charter schools, it is clear that young people for whom race and class loom large have become disposable and will be the first to be neglected and eventually punished. After all, these are the young people who are viewed as needing more resources, services and in the end lower test scores.
According to the fact that schools today are viewed as instruments of production and adjuncts of the corporation, they are judged largely through that which can only be quantified. Consequently, public schools and the values and principles through which they were organized have more in common with factories and prisons than with an education that prepares people to be knowledgeable, compassionate and critically engaged citizens. How much longer can a nation ignore those youth who lack the resources and opportunities that were available, in a partial and incomplete way, to previous generations? And what does it mean when a nation becomes frozen ethically and imaginatively in providing its youth with a future of hope and opportunity? Under such circumstances, it is time for parents, young people, educators, writers, labor unions and social movements to take a stand and to remind themselves that not only do young people deserve more, but so does an aspiring democracy that has any sense of justice, vision, and hope for the future.[ 19]
Notes:
[ 1] For an excellent analysis of this issue, see Christopher Robbins, "Expelling Hope" (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008); Valerie Polakow, "Who Cares for Our Children" (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007); William Lyons and Julie Drew, "Punishing Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American Public Education" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Henry A. Giroux, "The Abandoned Generation" (New York: Palgrave Press, 2004). For an excellent documentary film on zero tolerance and lockdown practices in public schools, see "The War on Kids" (2009). Online at: http://www.thewaronkids.com/
[ 2] Jonathan Simon, "Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 209.
[ 3] This term comes from David Garland, "The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
[ 4] Yolanne Almanzar, "First Grader in $1 Robbery May Face Expulsion," New York Times (December 4, 2008), p. A26.
[ 5] Advancement Project in partnership with Padres and Jovenes Unidos, Southwest Youth Collaborative, "Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track" (Chicago: Children & Family Justice Center of Northwestern University School of Law, March 24, 2005), p. 11.
[ 6] Advancement Project, "Education on Lockdown," p. 33.
[ 7] Advancement Project, "Education on Lockdown," p. 7.
[ 8] Ellen Goodman, "'Zero Tolerance' Means Zero Chance for Troubled Kids," Centre DailyTimes (Tuesday, January 4, 2000), p. 8.
[ 9] Advancement Project, "Education on Lockdown," pp. 17-18.
[ 10] Advancement Project, "Education on Lockdown," p. 31.
[ 11] Elora Mukherjee, "Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools" (New York: American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties, March 2008), p. 9.
[ 12] Mukherjee, "Criminalizing the Classroom," p. 6.
[ 13] Mukherjee, "Criminalizing the Classroom," p. 16.
[ 14] Mukherjee, "Criminalizing the Classroom," p. 16.
[ 15] Randall R. Beger, "Expansion of Police Power in Public Schools and the Vanishing Rights of Students," Social Justice 29:1 (2002), p. 120.
[ 16] Victor M. Rios, "The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration," in Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives, ed. Marable, Steinberg, and Middlemass, pp. 40-54.
[ 17] For a superb analysis of urban marginality of youth in the United States and France, see Loic Wacquant, "Urban Outcasts" (London: Polity, 2008).
[ 18] Children's Defense Fund. "America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline," Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund, 2007. p. 77.
[ 19] There are an increasing number of groups fighting the growing school-to-prison pipeline, including the crucial work being done by the Children's Defense Fund under the leadership of Marian Wright Edelman and labor organizers such as Manuel Criollo, who works with the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, California, to end the destruction of the social welfare state and rise of a prison, punishment and incarceration state. Under an initiative called the Community Rights Campaign, he and the Center are working with groups in California and in other states to end the school-to-prison pipeline and promote the broad work of educational justice. Their current campaign theme is called "Not down with the Lock Down" and their demands include:
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. This article touches on a number of themes taken up in his newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?," which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. His forthcoming books include "Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror" and "Politics After Hope: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy," both of which will be published by Paradigm Publishers in January 2010. His homepage is www.henryagiroux.com.
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Tue, 10/20/2009 - 20:33 — NYCartist (not verified)
NYC assemblyman study notes kids going to prison from 7 NYC districts, more from those areas than any other. NYPD has illegal stop and frisk (see www.nyclu.org), keeps photos of kids. There is a fear of the children of color by the authoritarian police and administration (Bloomberg's Admin. is continuing Rudy G. policing policies). Schools should be teaching critical thinking. Every time I hear kids who were illegally arrested become activists, I think it's an unintentional consequence. I have a prison pen-pal: the young are going into prison and can't read. This week is the once-again annual commemoration of the October 22 Coalition Against Police Brutality of those killed by police around the US.
Tue, 10/20/2009 - 22:03 — Anonymous (not verified)
There's also the 21 southern states whose schools still use a paddle and have laws granting themselves immunity from prosecution when they cause injury to a child that requires medical attention.
Tue, 10/20/2009 - 22:17 — Dick (not verified)
There is a glaring misuse of statistics which runs through Mr. Giroux's editorial. Comparing a particular group's representation in the school population to that group's representation in the population of those being punished and concluding (or implying) that a difference represents discriminatory behavior is not only fallacious; it is also the kind of misrepresentation which is used to justify zero-tolerance rules in the first place. The more accurate comparison would be to compare the percentage of offenses commited by a segment of the school population with the percentage being punished. Perhaps the conclusion would be the same, but at least it would be a legitimate one. Zero tolerance is specifically intended to preclude judgment on the part of school administrators, who can then be free of any accusation of bias or prejudice (perhaps based on the same faulty statistical analysis). It's fear of litigation and the social and financial stigmata of failing to be politically correct which are the prime drivers of zero tolerance rules.
Tue, 10/20/2009 - 23:08 — J. Boyce (not verified)
However distinguished Henry A, Giroux may be, he demonstrates in this short piece that he suffers from the shortsightedness of weak scholarship. Mr Giroux and I are almost the same age (he is 4-1/2 years older). Most biographies of Mr Giroux are nearly silent on his formative years, but they give little indication that he grew up in a neighbourhood like mine or attended schools like mine. Those schools were "the most punitive institutions [I]face[d] - on a daily basis". I do not remember any "[e]ducating for citizenship, work and the public good". In fact, my one and only "Civics" class in high school stressed the fact that we were lucky to get any education at all and should be good citizens because people better than us allowed us to get a good education! We were always treated as "poor ... youth, ...{and viewed narrowly either as a threat or as perpetrators of violence". And sorry, but we were not " poor minority youth". We were mostly just poor white trash. I never knew a school that was not "link[ed] up with [local] law enforcement agencies". That's just the way it was in our neighbourhood. And I suspect that was common in poorer neighbourhoods and schools all over America in the 1950s and 1960s. Let's face it, "free" education came late to America. And when it did, those educators (mostly not from the poorer classes) who were assigned to teach in schools where the poor (and, logically, the dumb) lived, were neither too thrilled to be there nor really committed to educating kids that they viewed as little more than animals (or criminals...notice the similarity of the words?). You did not have to be "minority" to get a Folsom Prison education; you just had to be poor. From what I hear and have had the rare opportunity to see (far few visitors are allowed on "campus" these days, more due to child molestation than terrorism!!) little has changed in my grandchildren's schools. At least in my hometown. Poor kids are just lucky to get an education; they ought to be sweeping floors, cleaning houses, picking cotton and doing what their betters tell them to do. No wonder I and many of my contemporaries rebelled against this, got our own educations (the fools gave us libraries and even taught us how to use them!) and became doctors, lawyers, diplomats and academics. OK, some of us sweep floors, clean houses, and fix cars (not too much cotton grows in Washington State!). But we've lost few old friendships as a result; we all know where we came from. And my point, from 3,ooo miles away from the nearest American shore, from the security of "diplomatic immunity": I can say that school has ALWAYS been "a prison" for the poor; but it's being that way is not the "excuse" Giroux wants to make it for what ails some American youth. Anyone can claim that "being White" made it different for me and my contemporaies. Maybe it did. And maybe it didn't. But we all lived through a prison school system that treated me (although I was certainly one of their "best and brightest") along with every kid that grew up in my neighbourhood as likely criminals lucky to get any education at all and, in the 1960s of our high school years, as most excellent fodder for the military. School "career advisors" were the deciding factors in the eventual deaths of many of my contemporaries in Viet Nam. You take what you can get from your educators and you fashion your own knowledge. One wonderful professor, once I got to college, told me when I was dumbfounded by his exam, "If you can't directly answer the question, just write everything you know that might be relative." I barely passed the course (got a "D"), but learned the lesson that it's what you learned and can apply that really counts in life, not the facts you can scurry up for an exam. Few people who get to be teachers are really stupid. Their brains are there to pick. We did that. Kids can do that today. I suspect that "prison schools" have far less to do with the "failures" of American education to "educate" minority youth than do other external to the education system (and which Giroux choose to gloss over in this directed diatribe. While not coming out and saying so, Giroux seems to accept and promote the ancient concept of educators as "in loco parentis". As desparate as a poor kid gets from time to time, it's real clear that these teachers are not parents. Nor should they be. And their behaviour and teaching styles are NOT new and NOT the reflection of contemporary fears (although they may be influenced by them). Rather, they reflect an inherent "class consciousness" in America's so-called "classless society" to treat the poor as stupid, as objects variously of comedy or derision, and, most especially, as objects of fear. Giroux's failure to see this constant pattern in American education is a reflection of poor scholarship. It also reflects the shortsightedness of scholars and politicians who view the world through the lenses offered by their privileged positions. Unashamedly signed with my real name Jsmes Boyce Farges, France formerly Spokane, Washington
Tue, 10/20/2009 - 23:40 — Murray Suid (not verified)
Mr. Giroux brings together many facts, but often ignores the context that might explain them. For example, he writes that "in 2000, blacks were 17 percent of public school enrollment nationwide and 34 percent of suspensions." What might cause this discrepancy? It could be racist administrators, in which case we need to replace or reeducate those running the schools. Or the discrepancy might result from black students misbehaving more frequently than white students. I don't know the answer, but I think it's irresponsible for the author to toss out facts in a way that could lead readers to false conclusions and then to ineffective solutions. Regarding the overall picture of the schools: Where I live--in rural West Marin, California--the schools do not feel at all like prisons. This is a rural area where more than half the students are Latinos and minorities. Schools in urban areas might be more prison like, but my intuition tells me that Mr. Giroux is focused more on the axe he wishes to grind than on facts. I know this: If the schools in my town were as repressive as the schools Mr. Giroux describes, the masses would be up in arms--parents, teachers, and concerned citizens. How come the parents of the schools Mr. Giroux writes about are not complaining?
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 00:29 — Anonymous (not verified)
Another version of Zero Tolerance that frightens already frightened and guilt-ridden parents? "KIDS WILL BE KIDS," "GO WITH THE FLOW," and other forms of Russian Roulette Dr. Mike Bradley's eNewsletter Message Date: October 12th 2009 http://www.docmikebradley.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/docmikebradley/20091012133422/
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 00:35 — Anonymous (not verified)
Discipline has always been valued in schools by administrators, parents, teachers, and administrators. In some inner city schools it has been impossible to teach because discipline has been lacking-thus the drive to employ harsh measures to stifle disorder. In a way, swift and harsh punishment is cheaper than other methods of controlling human behavior. Small classes, for example, make teaching less an exercise in control and more an experience nurturing young minds, but hiring more teachers costs serious money (not to mention building more decent classrooms). Learning experiences away from the classroom can build interest and widen horizons, but money for those experiences is not there either. Hands-on laboratories help science students to understand difficult concepts, but that costs money, too, as well as introducing the possibility of accidents and misbehavior. Special programs for students with behavioral problems similarly absorbs money as does a counseling program that can help deal with antisocial behavior. Like testing, policing kids is cheap. Real educational reform is not cheap and I despair we will ever allot the resources that are required.
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 00:41 — Deborah (not verified)
I was fired after 27 years in public education for talking like this article. My superintendent told me, I was scaring people by such talk. But, it's true and sad.
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 01:18 — Luis (not verified)
As a Chicago Public Schools teacher in a high needs school on the South Side in his third year, what the author fails to address is the state of many of the students we try to teach: unruly, hostile, aggressive, etc. My sympathies for what got them there: lack of good parenting, institutionalized racism, drug usage, etc., but the fact is they are (and I would have choked if I had heard myself three years ago say this) wild and out of control. Even so, the author is right, the ultimate solution is not to increase security guards, implement zero tolerance rules, etc. It is my firm belief that the solution lies in introducing long term models of restorative justice; integrate emotional well-being classes into the curriculum; provide nutritious food to these poor students who are "jacked up" on what chemicals they get from what is passed off as food by the public schools; increasing counseling staff; and continue providing head start programs (not cut them off). This would be a good start in solving getting us back to some degree normalcy. And in the end, parents must be trained to do their jobs, seeing that they aren't doing so is so painfully obvious. On introducing long term models of restorative justice and emotional well-being, I've manage to integrate these components into my curriculum, and let me say, it works like a charm. Students are motivated, have "come around", performing, etc. But what's more, they are actually getting the concept of what I was taught in high school for education to mean with the Latin motto non pro schola, sed pro vita (meaning, not for school, but for life). But good luck on getting any of this from Washington, er, CPS.
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 01:27 — Saint Charlie (not verified)
As a student, I am witness to the incredible paranoid punishments used daily by our wonderful school systems. The so called "Zero Tolerance" is flawed easily, and I simply reply with the fact that you cannot reply and respond to various situations with the same response. In my school, they will react the same to you if you bring in a toy cap gun as if you brought in a real AK-47. Somehow any lecture, any rally, any speech, somehow turns into a criticism of how we are horrible little children who need to act our age. My vice principal began talking about the importance of washing our hands due to H1N1, and it somehow turned into a rant about how she'll take away our bathroom rights if we don't clean up our act. The truly pitiful things is, few teachers are their own. A majority of teachers and administrators are that of a mold, a mold that is either a stern, over-discplinary individual who most likely belongs in the Marines, or a fake-happy person who lays a sarcastic undertone, slyly mocking you with a hint of regret and the thought of "How did I get here?". The few, and I mean VERY FEW, teachers, who break that mold, are either punished by administration or reported by overprotective parents. If you try and fight the oppression and zero-tolerance, they flood you with templated letters, recordings, and meetings. Nothing can be accomplished, because they simply don't care. If you push too hard, then they bitterly retaliate in ways that can ruin the students future. The only way to truly fight them is to bring it to the media, because they will crumble before the criticizing eyes of millions in order to maintain the tainted pride they maintain by enforcing archaic and idiotic rituals.
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 02:32 — Anonymous (not verified)
I teach in an urban system where many of our schools are so plagued by violence and disruption that little learning is taking place. There is a fight (usually several) every day in my school, the kids hit each other, run through the halls, sit in class listening to mp3 players, talk and text on cell phones and throw food in the cafeteria. Students are rarely suspended or even penalized for violent behavior. Principals in our district are not allowed to suspend students without the approval of the superintendent, who feels that our obligation is to keep students in school, even when they are violent and disruptive. I fear daily for the safety of my students. While I do not support zero tolerance, the schools described in this article are most likely not plagued with daily violent behavior, as at my school. And I would much rather work in a school where rules are enforced rather than ignored.
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 04:17 — Anonymous (not verified)
Why is this a misuse of statistics? Schools are a part of our society, and the same rules that have for years been applied outside of schools are not being applied inside them. And the dynamic is often used with other statistics, say like comparing the rate of spousal abuse in a low income area in Chicago with the rate of spousal abuse among low income people in the country.