respect for their elders. Perhaps the most depressing finding was that nearly 60 percent of the survey pool said that when the younger generation grows up, it will not make the world a better place, and might even make it worse.
In the late 1990s, my work as a journalist started pulling me toward reporting on education, youth, and juvenile justice. The kinds of widespread attitudes on display in the Public Agenda report were dramatically at odds with both my own interactions and experiences with children and teenagers living in New York City and with the true data on youth achievement and crime. I began noticing with greater frequency stories from newspapers all over the country that to my mind seemed freakish. A five-year-old being arrested for bringing a butter knife to school. A teenage girl suspended for bringing Midol to school for her menstrual cramps. A kindergartner suspended for having herbal cough drops that school administrators feared had illegal substances in them. Six-year-olds strip-searched in a classroom when a few dollars went missing from the teacher’s desk. These were the kinds of stories that in another time would have been relegated to the section on “bizarre news,” the infrequent and titillating man-bites-dog stories.
But I noticed that these stories were no longer rare, and the reactions to them were not shock and dismay but more likely affirmative and approving from people who reflected the attitudes captured in the Public Agenda report. At the time, state and federal lawmakers were in a frenzy about juvenile crime and were revising statutes to allow prosecutors to try juveniles as adults for certain felonies. Taken together the cultural, social, and political currents were running against youth, especially poor and minority kids in urban areas, who were perceived as the greatest threat. But after the Columbine High School tragedy in 1999, all youth came to be seen as “public enemy number one,” and the criminalizing trends in juvenile justice that were swirling in the 1990s were by then flooding into public schools. Ironically, as the public’s preoccupation swelled, the real trajectory of school violence and juvenile crime began to subside after reaching a peak in the early 1990s.
After reporting and writing about the criminalizing trends affecting our children and youth, with zero tolerance discipline as a main focus, I realized that the phenomenon was too extensive to be captured in a few articles. There was the need for a book to dissect the many and varied ways that children were being hurt and the way that the very foundation of our public school system was being undermined by what I came to view as a “lockdown” approach to security and safety. While it was evident that schools must grapple with issues of violence and safety, it also became clear as I conducted my research that the public’s perception of school violence and youth behavior was seriously out of whack with reality. A school shooting like that at Columbine was tragic but extremely rare, and students were and remain safer at school than in their own homes and communities. For example, accidental gun deaths in their homes and neighborhoods claim between one hundred and two hundred young people nineteen years and younger every year. Hysteria, not clear-eyed analysis, has colored the public’s understanding and, regrettably, tainted media coverage of school violence. The climate of fear has created ripe conditions for imposing unprecedented restrictions on young people’s rights, dignity, and educational freedoms. Zero tolerance has triggered a process that pushes the most vulnerable and academically needy students out of the classroom and into harm’s way—what many now call the school-to-prison pipeline. Failing schools breed failing students and place them at risk of falling into the juvenile justice system, especially as policing and the practices of that system increasingly make their way into the schoolhouse. Indeed, it is that two-way flow between the schoolhouse and the jailhouse that I try to expose with reporting and research that shows how the philosophy and practices of the criminal justice system seep into and undermine the very foundations of our public school system. I also highlight the entrenched interests—political and economic—that together have promoted and profited from the transformation of our schools into prisonlike institutions where children are treated like suspects. These interests have clout and will pose a challenge to those seeking change.
But there is hope and a growing movement to end the zero tolerance, lockdown approach to public school safety. This book also profiles the students, educators, psychologists, legal advocates, and community organizers who envision a different way to provide safe and secure schools, a way that restores public schools to their principal function as places of learning where mistakes and misbehavior are opportunities to teach, and the disciplinary process is integral to education, not an impediment to it.
1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOOL VIOLENCE
The next Friday, Danny again had a long list of offenses chalked up against him, whispering and giggling, mainly; and after school he was dragged into the outside hall to be beaten into another week of physical misery. This time the teacher had her own switches . . . and she wore out three of these on him. As she reached for the fourth, the boy stepped back and pulled his knife from his pocket.
“If you hit me again—I’ll cut you to pieces,” he shouted, opening the long blade and squaring himself for a finish fight.
For an instant the teacher stood dumbfounded. She raised her whip and took a step forward, but insanely angry as she was, she saw something in the boy’s eyes that fortunately arrested her step . . . after a moment’s hesitation, she backed into the school room and closed the door.
—From the memoir Sod and Stubble: The Story of a Kansas Homestead by John Isle
Long before the term school violence entered popular parlance, before metal detectors became fixtures at the schoolhouse door, before the Lockdown High approach to school safety gained currency, conflict and violence of one sort or another were part of this country’s education system. Prone as we are to nostalgia about our history, schools of the past are imagined as Norman Rockwell havens of quaint custom and benign behavior, in vivid contrast to the perception of today’s schools as drug- and weapon-riddled hellholes where teachers daily risk their necks and worthy children can’t get an education.
But for as long as there have been public schools—district schools or the common schools of early American educational history—there has been chaos and control, crime and punishment in the classroom as teacher and student have waged their power struggles and defined their roles. The rhythm of switch and ferule—even the cat-o’-nine-tails—provided the meter by which the early schoolmaster or -mistress imparted the three Rs and obedience to misbehaving youngsters. Challenging the master’s supremacy was likewise common practice among older students like Danny who dared to teach the teachers a lesson about the limits of their authority. The jackknife, found in the pockets of many a farm boy, was as common in some schoolhouses, no doubt, as McGuffey’s Readers.
The dialectic of dissent and discipline in classrooms has always existed because the schoolhouse, while a safer haven for children than most places, has never been immune to the turmoil and changes swirling outside its doors. But more than that, the genesis of the public school system was as a solution to the upheavals that characterized the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The industrializing nation witnessed growing social tumult and economic quakes as factory supplanted farm and rural areas hemorrhaged population to incipient urban enclaves. The order and authority that once derived from strong family and community networks frayed. Schools would be institutions of control and socialization, turning a potentially disruptive population into productive, law-abiding citizens.
Efforts at the state and local levels to create common schools were propelled as much by fears of social disorder and burgeoning crime as by high-minded ideals about forging an educated citizenry. This was especially true in cities of the northeast, where immigrants from Ireland and Germany streamed during the mid-1800s, joining displaced farm families and youths. Education reformers of the time, such as Horace Mann, were clear in their philosophy. At an 1842 convention of school superintendents in Utica, New York, which Mann attended, the prominent civic leader Rev. Alonzo Potter stated his philosophy for supporting public schools: “Resolved, That the best police for our cities, the lowest insurance
