Zero tolerance: Is it moving the District toward safer schools?

An ineffective approach, it is unfair in its impact on students

by David Lapp

Teachers cannot teach and students cannot learn if they don’t feel safe. The question is, “What’s the best way to achieve the goals of safe schools and increased opportunities to learn?”

While proven strategies exist, some used by the School District of Philadelphia, zero-tolerance policies, like the one adopted last year, will not accomplish these goals.

In its 2006 review of exclusionary and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, the American Psychological Association found no evidence that the use of suspension, expulsion, or zero-tolerance policies resulted in improvements in student behavior or increases in school safety. Research also shows that such practices have negative effects on student academic performance and drive up dropout rates, resulting in enormous long-term social costs.

Here’s what zero tolerance in the District meant during 2008-2009:

• Teachers and administrators who actually knew the students lost their powers of discretion;

• Relatively minor offenses were often lumped together with very serious infractions;

• Mitigating circumstances were frequently ignored;

• Students recommended for expulsion were improperly removed from their regular schools and transferred into disciplinary schools months before any hearing to determine if they were actually guilty;

• Many students were eventually exonerated, but only after months of unjust educational disruption.

Though the District improved parts of the process this year, problems remain. Students are still sent to disciplinary schools before their formal hearing. They still wait too long for expulsion hearings and for an SRC decision. Dozens of students are waiting for the SRC to vote on expulsions for alleged infractions dating as far back as March.

The District’s flawed approach has severe consequences for many students. My office represented students who missed almost a half-year of instruction before the SRC finally determined that they merely witnessed fights. Countless students, never seriously considered dangerous, were arrested and hauled away from school in handcuffs. Their criminal cases were quickly dismissed, months before their school discipline cases were resolved. Recommendations by teachers and principals that students be allowed to return to regular schools are frequently ignored. The District has the legal authority to prescribe lesser punishments when appropriate, but zero tolerance makes this unlikely.

An 11th grade boy, who unwittingly left a two-inch pair of scissors in his backpack, will never go back to his magnet school, where he was passionate about digital media production. When his hearing officer asked him what zero tolerance meant to him, he responded, “Zero tolerance means that if you break the rule, you get punished, even if you didn’t know you were doing it, and even if it’s not fair.”

These practices are particularly troubling because of their disparate impact: 67 percent of students in disciplinary schools are boys; African American students, 64 percent of the student body, make up 82 percent of the transfers to discipline schools; and students with disabilities are transferred at a rate roughly twice that of their peers.