Abstract
Octavia Bradley was a smiling, sweet, teacher’s-pet when I knew her as a seventh grader over twelve years ago.1 One day she was caught in the bathroom in possession of illegal drugs, and within a few weeks she had been expelled from school for a year. Octavia claimed that she was holding the drugs for some friends. I don’t know if this was true or not. I do know that as her teacher, my opinion of Octavia as an unusually kind and intellectually curious student who strove to do well in school despite receiving little support or guidance at home did not play a role in the district’s decision to expel her. It was not even solicited.
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Russell Skiba and M. Karenga Rausch. “Zero Tolerance, Suspension, and Expulsion: Questions of Equity and Effectiveness.” In Handbook of Classroom Management: Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues edited by Carolyn Everston and Carol Weinstein (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006): 1063–1089, 1065.
Many states and school districts, for example, mandate suspension and/or expulsion for drug possession and any form of violence, while others require these penalties for behaviors such as tardiness anddisruptive behavior. See Alicia Insley, “Suspending and Expelling Children from Educational Opportunity: Time to Reevaluate Zero Tolerance Policies.” American University Law Review 50, (October 2001): 1039–1073;
Jennifer Sughrue. “Zero Tolerance for Children: Two Wrongs Do Not Make a Right.” Educational Administration Quarterly 39.2 (April 2003): 238–258.
Sandra Feldman. “Let’s Stay the Course” (February 2000), http://www.aft.org/presscenter/speeches-columns/wws/2000/0200.htm (accessed January 30, 2008);
Michael Schreiner. “Bold Steps Build Safe Havens.” School Business Affairs 62.11 (November 1996): 44–46. EJ 535 678; Al Shanker., “Zero Tolerance,” Where We Stand, American Federation of Teachers (1997), http://www.aft.org/presscenter/speeches-columns/wws/1997/012697.htm (accessed January 27, 2008); See also, Kay S. Hymowitz. “‘Zero Tolerance’ Is Schools’ First Line of Defense.” Newsday (April 18, 2001): A31; Website of National School Safety and Security Services http://www.schoolsecurity.org/trends /zero_tolerance.html. (retrieved March 31, 2011).
Jill DeVoe et al. Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2003, NCES 2004–004/NCJ 201257 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education and Justice, 2003).
American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force. “Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools? An Evidentiary Review and Recommendations,” American Psychologist 63 (2008): 852–862; Skiba and Rausch. “Zero Tolerance, Suspension, and Expulsion.”
Harvard Civil Rights Project. Opportunities Suspended: The Devastating Consequences of Zero Tolerance and School Discipline Policies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2000), esp. 10–13.
Harvard Civil Rights Project. Opportunities Suspended; David Richart, Kim Brooks, and Mark Soler. Unintended Consequences: The Impact of “Zero Tolerance” and Other Exclusionary Policies on Kentucky Students (Washington, DC: Building Blocks for Youth, 2003); Skiba and Rausch. “Zero Tolerance, Suspension, and Expulsion.”
Opportunities Suspended, Advancement Project. “Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track” (March 2005) http://www.advancementproject.org/reports/FINALEOLrep.pdf (retrieved January 31, 2008); See also, Brooks and Soler, UnintendedConsequences; Johanna Miller, et. al. Education Interrupted: The Growing Use of Suspensions in New York City’s Public Schools (New York: New York Civil Liberties Union and Student Safety Coalition, 2011); NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. “Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” http://www.naacpldf.org/content/pdf/pipeline/Dismantling_the_School_to_Prison_Pipeline.pdf; (retrieved March 28, 2008), 1.
Daniel Losen and Russell Skiba. Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2010), 2–3.
Black males are twice as likely as white males to drop out of high school, and the achievement gap between black males attending schools in large cities and white males in public schools across the nation is particularly large: Black males in large cities who did not qualify for free or reduced lunch scored on average the same as white males across the country who did qualify for free or reduced lunch. Black youth are also far more likely than their white peers to enter the juvenile justice system. For example, African Americans made up only 16 percent of the youth population but 45 percent of juvenile arrests. Sharon Lewis, et. al. A Call for Change: The Social and Educational Factors Contributing to the Outcomes of Black Males in Urban Schools (Washington, D.C.: Council of Great City Schools, 2010), http://www.cgcs.org/cgcs/Call_For_Change.pdf (retrieved March 31, 2011), 3, 5; NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. “Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” 7.
Advancement Project. “Education on Lockdown,” 7–9; Skiba and Rausch. “Zero Tolerance, Suspension, and Expulsion,” 1074–1075; R. J. Skiba, Michael, R.S., Nardo, A.C., and Peterson, R. “The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment,” Urban Review, 34, (2002): 317–342.
Ibid., 1070; M. Karenga Raush and Russell Skiba. Unplanned Outcomes: Suspensions and Expulsions in Indiana (Bloomington, IN: Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, 2004), http://www.indiana.edu/-ceep/projects/PDF /PB_V2N2_UnplannedOutcomes.pdf (retrieved, February 8, 2011); Harvard Civil Rights Project. Opportunities Suspended.
Christopher Dunbar, Jr. and Francisco A. Villarruel. “What a Difference the Community Makes: Zero Tolerance Policy Interpretation and Implementation,” Equity & Excellence in Education, 37 (2004): 351–359.
According to the National Center on Education Statistics, by the 1996–1997 school year, 94 percent of U.S. schools had zero tolerance policies for weapons or firearms, 87 percent had such policies for possession of alcohol, 88 percent for drugs, and 79 percent for fighting and/or tobacco. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/98030/Tabl9.asp; Jennifer Sughrue. “Zero Tolerance for Children: Two Wrongs Do Not Make a Right.” Educational Administration Quarterly 39.2 (April 2003): 238–258.
School boards and courtrooms did at times assert their authority over matters of school discipline, but usually to support the actions of teachers and principals. For a discussion on the legal and historical roots of the doctrine of in loco parentis, see, Rodger Bybee and E. Gordon Gee. Violence, Values and Justice in the Schools (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1982), 23–98. The term “professional bureaucracies” is borrowed from David Tyack. The One Best System.
John Meyer, W. Richard Scott, and Terrence Deal. “Institutional and Technical Sources of Organizational Structure: Explaining the Structure of Educational Organizations.” In Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality edited by John Meyer and W Richard Scott (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1983).
Rodger Bybee and E. Gordon Gee. Violence, Values and Justice in the Schools; Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
In a review essay on the history of discipline in U.S. schools, for example, educational historian Ronald Butchart remarks that “much work remains to be done” on the history of school discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. Ronald Butchart. “Punishments, Penalties, Prizes, and Procedures: A History of Discipline in U.S. Schools,” in Classroom Discipline in American Schools: Problems and Possibilities for Democratic Education, eds. Ronald Butchart and Barbara McEwan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 19–49, 49. There are some studies that document disciplinary milestones across time—mostly through court cases—but do not offer historical analysis of these developments.
See, for example: Gordon Crews and M. Reid Counts. The Evolution of School Disturbance in America: Colonial Times to Modern Day (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997);
Rollin Watson and Robert Watson. The School as a Safe Haven (Wesport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002).
On the history of school discipline in earlier eras, see, Barbara Finkelstein. Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth Century United States (New York: Falmer Press, 1989);
David Hogan. “Modes of Discipline: Affective Individualism and Pedagogical Reform in New England, 1820–1850.” American Journal of Education 90 (1990): 1–56;
Kate Rousmaniere. “Losing Patience and Staying Professional: Women Teachers and the Problem of Classroom Discipline in New York City Schools in the 1920s.” History of Education Quarterly 34, (1994): 49–68.
Seminal scholarship on schooling in postwar America that only briefly mention discipline: David Angus and Jeffrey Mirel. The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890–1995 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999);
Larry Cuban. How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1890–1990, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993);
Diane Ravitch. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983).
Robert Hampel’s The Last Little Citadel American High Schools since 1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986), is one exception. Histories of urban school districts in the postwar era often discuss conflict and violence in the context of desegregation or community control efforts, but rarely through the lens of discipline.
See, for example, Jack Dougherty. More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
Jeffrey Mirel. The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907–81. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993);
Daniel Perlstein. Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
Gerald Grant in The World We Created at Hamilton High (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), and
Mary Metz in Classrooms and Corridors: The Crisis of Authority in Desegregated Secondary Schools (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), provide in-depth studies of the construction of authority in desegregated high schools in the 1960s and 1970s, but primarily from a sociological rather than historical perspective.
Kenneth Weinig. “The 10 Worst Educational Disasters of the 20th Century: A Traditionalist’s List.” Education Week 19.40 (June 14, 2000): 31; Kay Hymowitz. “Who Killed School Discipline?” City Journal (Spring 2000) http://www.city-journal.org/html/about_cj.html, (retrieved March 27, 2008).
See also, Abigail Thernstrom. “Where Did All the Order Go? School Discipline and the Law.” In Brookings Papers on Education Policy edited by Diane Ravitch (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution Press, 1999).
Richard Arum. Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 13.
David Blacker. “Proceduralism and the Orthodox Backlash against Students’ Rights.” American Journal of Education 108 (2000): 318–355;
Forrest Gathercoal. “Judicious Discipline.” In Classroom Discipline in American Schools: Problems and Possibilities for Democratic Education edited by Ronald Butchart and Barbara McEwan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 197–216;
Daniel Perlstein. “Unspoken Dangers: The Curtailment of Free Expression and the Endangerment of Youth.” In The Boundaries of Freedom of Expression and Order in American Democracy edited by T. Hensley (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2001), 291–308, 302–303.
Pedro Noguera. “Preventing and Producing Violence: A Critical Analysis of Responses to School Violence,” Harvard Educational Review 65.2 (1995): 189–213, 197.
See also, Ronnie Casella. “Being Down”: Challenging Violence in Urban Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001);
John Devine. Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Lnner-City Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
The district encompassed over 700 miles and enrolled around 450,000 students in the late 1950s, peaked at over 650,000 in the late 1960s and then declined to below 600,000 in the mid-1970s. LosAngeles City School District, Los Angeles City School District Annual Report, 1958–59. Progress and Achievement: A Report Submitted to the Honorable Members of the Board of Education of the Los Angeles City School District by Ellis A. Jarvis, Superintendent of Schools. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City School District, 1959);
Research and Evaluation Branch of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Racial and Ethnic Survey, Fall, 1975, Publication No. 354 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Unified School District, 1976).
George LaNoue and Bruce Smith. The Politics of School Decentralization (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973), 74.
Los Angeles City School District. Racial and Ethnic Survey, Fall 1966. (Los Angeles County: Los Angeles County (Calif.) Office of Superintendent of Schools, 1966); John Caughey. Segregation Blights Our Schools: An Analysis Based on the 1966 Official Report on Racial and Ethnic Data Distributed by School throughout the Los Angeles System. (Los Angeles: Quail Books, 1967).
Prior to 1930, citizens of Mexican descent were counted as white on the U.S. census forms, and experts have varied in their estimates of the size of the Mexican American population in Los Angeles during that time . Even after 1930, counts widely varied as different categories have been used to identify this particular community (including, Hispanic, Latino, and Spanish-surname) . Judith Rosenberg Raftery. Land of Fair Promise: Politics and Reform in Los Angeles Schools, 1885–1941 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 12–13.
Raftery. Land of Fair Promise; Josh Sides. L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 11–35.
Los Angeles had a thriving suburban life far earlier than its Eastern counterparts, but suburbanization really took off in the region as affordable housing was built near war industry jobs in the 1940s, and continued in the decades that followed. James Allen and Eugene Turner. The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California, (Northridge, CA: The Center for Geographical Studies, 1997), 11.
Gerald Nash. The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 93;
Becky Nicolaides. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002); Sides. L.A. City Limits, 2, 109.
Ian Haney-Lopez. Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 86; Sides. L.A. City Limits, 108–111.
Kevin Roderick. The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times Books, 2001).
Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots. Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? A Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (Sacramento: State of California, 1965), 49–61.
Rodolfo Acuña. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 108–140.
Martin Schiesl. “Behind the Badge: The Police and Social Discontent in Los Angeles since 1950,” in 20th Century Los Angeles: 153–194. Other infamous incidents involving LAPD brutality against Mexican Americans include the police’s arrest of Mexican American victims in the “Zoot Suit riots” of 1943 and the Sleepy Lagoon incident of 1942. See also, Acuna. A Community under Siege; Haney-Lopez. Racism on Trial; Richard Harris. Delinquency in our Democracy: A Study of Teen-age Behavior among Negroes, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and American Lndians in Los Angeles, San Antonio, Gary, Lndiana, Cleveland, Memphis, New York, Chester, Pennsylvania, (Los Angeles: Wetzel Publishing Co., Inc., 1954);
Gerald Horne, Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997); Sides, L.A. City Limits.
During the “long hot summer” of 1967, over 100 American cities experienced riots— including Detroit and Newark. Michael Flamm. Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. (New York: Columbia University Press: 2005), 83.
Peter Schrag. Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).
“Crime in L.A. Schools Shows Slight Increase,” Los Angeles Times (October 15, 1981), A9; Heather Doob. Codes of Student Discipline and Student Rights. (Arlington, VA: Educational Research Service, 1975).
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© 2011 Judith Kafka
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Kafka, J. (2011). Zero Tolerance and the Case of Los Angeles. In: The History of “Zero Tolerance” in American Public Schooling. Palgrave Studies in Urban Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001962_1
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