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Introduction to zero tolerance in schools essays
Zero Tolerance Policies in Schools
Zero tolerance policy in american schools
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Tim Funk
In schools, teachers need to find a way to create and maintain a safe learning environment. Schools have a duty to keep students safe. Teachers find it challenging to maintain this environment when some students do not follow rules that are designed to keep both the teachers and students safe. In an effort to keep students safe, a policy of zero tolerance has has tried to help maintain this environment. Zero Tolerance is a policy in which it does not matter why a rule was broken or what the story was just that the rule was broken. This is thought to keep students safe, because the student breaking the rule will be punished and can be removed from the school so that the safe learning environment of the school is maintained. Many schools
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have adopted Zero Tolerance policies for both minor and major offenses. With Zero Tolerance policies, schools can make sure that their students are safe. Teachers can focus significantly more time teaching their students instead of working to maintain order in their classroom. Because of severe punishments, students are more likely to think about their actions, and less likely to do anything that may negatively hurt someone else. Certain and quick punishment has been a deterrent for many students not break rules. Students will not break rules out of fear of punishment, if they know what the punishment is and are certain they will receive it. Zero tolerance policies remove all subjectivity in the disciplinary process.
Punishment is consistent for each and every student for every single policy violation. All that matters is that the rule was broken. It does not matter who the student is or why the violation occurred. Punishment can be more consistent. All students will receive identical punishment for identical infractions. Students will be prepared for the real world. When a law is broken, people are punished for their crime and not for the reason they committed the crime. The punishment will always be fair and equal for every student that breaks the rule, regardless of the …show more content…
circumstance. Many schools have found that Zero Tolerance policies are too harsh. They usually are not effective in correcting behavior. Students with behavior issues may need more than just a simple punishment to correct their behavior problems. Some students face legal issues for minor offenses or lapses in judgement during adolescence. Continued and repeated use of suspension and expulsion as a form of punishment has been shown to increase the rate of dropouts in schools. Some students may be willing to learn from mistakes they have made, but if a punishment is so severe that they are expelled, then they are not given that chance to learn. For example, expelling a student for a drug infraction could increase the risk of that student continuing to abuse drugs, because their support network has been removed. Students that have mental disorders may be punished for things that are no fault of their own. Zero Tolerance policies have lead to the overuse of suspension policies by administrators. Studies have shown that schools with higher rates of expulsion and suspension have actually created a worse environment for learning than those schools with lower rates of suspensions and expulsions. Zero Tolerance does not allow equal access to education for all students. Punishment is not always consistent and equal depending on the race of the individuals involved in the incident. African American students tend to receive more severe punishments than student who are not members of a minority ethnic group. Minorities are more likely to get expelled or suspended then other students. The policies are meant to be equal to anyone who breaks the schools rules, but the administration is still given power to punish students how they wish, regardless of a Zero Tolerance policy. President Obama urges schools to end Zero Tolerance policies, because it can disproportionately affect the Hispanic and black communities. Since the implementation of Zero Tolerance policies, the rates of violence in schools has remained about the same. During the same period of time, rates of punishments have risen. More students are being punished than ever before, even though the rates of violence in schools has not risen. Administrators handing out on average more punishment for the same amount of infractions. This has created the exact opposite effect on the learning environment than was originally intended when these policies were implemented. Some of the possible effects of suspensions and expulsions are: social alienation, rejection, and then breaking of healthy adult bonds between the students. In 2009, six year old Zachary Christie was suspended for 45 days and threatened with placement in a reform school. Zero Tolerance can keep students who misbehave out of the classroom.
This allows teachers to focus much more on teaching and to focus less on maintaining classroom control. This gives teachers the ability to focus on meeting the individual needs students instead of trying to correct the behavior of individual students. Zero Tolerance punishments are fair and consistent. The punishment will ideally match the infraction committed. Harsh punishments may discourage students from breaking school rules. On the other hand, the harsh punishments such as suspension and expulsion have resulted in greater dropout rates. Zero Tolerance policies are not always fair and consistent. This is especially true in the African American and Hispanic communities. Minorities are more likely to get expelled and suspended than non minority students. Zero Tolerance policies have created an opposite effect than their original intent by preventing the creation a safe learning environment. The policies tend to create a less conducive environment to learning the more they are implemented. Some mentally disabled students have experienced legal troubles for minor offenses, when they can not control how they act. Both relaxed policies and Zero Tolerance policies are not good, but schools need to decide for themselves how they are going to keep students safe and create a conducive learning
environment.
He makes some very valid points pertaining to the zero tolerance policy practiced by schools and how it has a negative effect on children in our school systems and essentially pushes them into our juvenile and prison systems. I am a firm believer that the zero tolerance does nothing good for students in school. In my mind it completely goes against everything our schools supposedly stand for. We tell kids to go to school to learn, but the first time they break a rule we suspend them and send them home or even worse we expel them for the entire year. I just don’t see how that isn’t setting kids up for failure down the road and neglecting them of a quality education. One statistic the author presented that really caught me off guard was when they said that when someone is suspended or expelled even once in their entire time in school their chances of ending up behind bars is increased at a rate of five times than that of someone who doesn’t get suspended or expelled. This made me really reflect on how many friends I had in high school that were suspended and ultimately flunked out. It made me wonder if the system truly wasn’t there for them to help them get an
A new policy is needed and most certainly should start out with holding schools to handle their own discipline situations, rather than relying on school security and police (Wilson, 2014). School administrators must be able to differentiate between what is a true discipline situation and when a student simply made a mistake. The rate of school suspensions have skyrocketed over the last thirty years from 1.7 million nationwide to 3.1 million and growing today (ACLU, n.d.). Each school needs to create policies of when to get school security involved and what the school’s security job involves. Unless there is a true threat to the safety of the school and/or its student’s law enforcement should never be called (Wison, 2014). The instinct to dial 911 at every infraction has to stop. Furthermore the schools must develop a gender and racial fairness; black children should not be receiving harsher punishments for similar infractions of white students (Wilson,
Another major reason why juveniles are ending up in the juvenile justice system is because many schools have incorporate the zero tolerance policy and other extreme school disciplinary rules. In response to violent incidents in schools, such as the Columbine High School massacre, school disciplinary policies have become increasingly grave. These policies have been enacted at the school, district and state levels with the hopes of ensuring the safety of students and educators. These policies all rely on the zero tolerance policy. While it is understandable that protecting children and teachers is a priority, it is not clear that these strict policies are succeeding in improving the safety in schools.
...e, however in support of changing the honor code system in terms of the expulsion penalty at all times as well as the tolerance portion of the penalty. I feel that there are many circumstances in which expulsion is extreme and unnecessary especially when it has to do with tolerance of an honor code violation.
Following the Columbine tragedy in 1999, “school systems across the nation introduced the zero-tolerance policies aimed at the curtailment of harmful student behaviors” (Noll, 2014, p. 295). The original focus of the policies was to eliminate the use/carrying of weapons but soon after spread to restricting drugs and medication (2014). By 2006 95% of the U.S. public schools had adopted the zero-tolerance policies and more than half of them reported taking significant action against students, many of which resulted in expulsion (2014). While the zero-tolerance polices were originally welcomed by all members of a community as a means of promoting and keeping a safer environment-- as of late many individuals are questioning the relevance of some actions and some school officials (2014).
Schools inevitably must deal with disciplinary action when it comes to misconduct in students. However, at what point should the courts and law enforcement intervene? “Zero tolerance” policies started as a trend in the school setting during the 1990s in “response to the widespread perception that juvenile violence was increasing and school officials needed to take desperate measures to address the problem” (Aull 2012:182-183). However, national statistics indicated a decrease in juvenile’s share of crime during the influx of zero tolerance policies in schools (National Crime Justice Reference Service 2005).
In all grades of education, from kindergarten to college, there is a form of discipline known as a zero tolerance policy. While the exact wording is different from school to school, basically a zero tolerance policy means that a student is immediately suspended, asked to attend an alternative school, or expelled if they are suspected or caught doing certain things. These policies are in place to hopefully deter students from doing drugs or being violent, but the ethics behind them are questionable. Some research has shown that these policies may not even work, and other forms of discipline would be better suited to help students. The three main activities that result in the zero tolerance policy are being caught with drugs or alcohol, being caught with a weapon, and bullying.
The Zero-tolerance policy was originally developed in the 1980s to target the booming drug trade by the U.S. Customs Agency (Martinez, 2009). The policy was later adopted in public schools as a response to the perception that juvenile violence was increasing and the need for school officials to take desperate measures to address the problem of violence. School officials became increasingly concerned about the use of drugs and the increasing involvement of gang activity among students. The horrific shooting at the Columbine High School only further solidified the fears of school safety among students and staff (Curtis, 2014). The Zero-tolerance policy assumes that removing students who engage in disruptive behavior will deter others from disruption and create an improved climate for those who remain (American Psychologist, 2008). The U.S. educational system has implemented a policy and philosophy, which was intended to deter drug criminals to be rendered as a disciplinary tool for students.
If the zero tolerance program is installed in the educational system, schools must decide when and how it should be enforced. This is a very complex issue and when open to debate you see three approaches to it. First, advocates of zero tolerance policies concentrate on positive changes in school security, ways of punishment, and change in student behavior. Those who oppose the policies argue that zero tolerance should be eliminated due to its lack of rationale and logic. Finally, the opposing viewpoint criticizes the zero tolerance policy for being too extreme and inappropriate for schools.
These kids don’t misbehave in the classroom for no reason. They are probably releasing those emotions that are bottled up from them at home in school. Not coming from a stable background can have quite the effect on trying to learn in a classroom. The problems that need to be fixed are trying to make schools feel more like a “safe haven” rather than a prison. Afterschool programs need to be put into place, to allow kids to stay at school for long so they don’t get involved in street life, or so they can just not have to deal with the outside problems of the world for a little bit longer. Also, school need to change. They need to try and make learning more fun, and more integrated with the children they are teaching. An easy an example of this is teaching these kids about their history, so they have many people to look up to besides just Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. Only teaching black and Latino kids about people that don’t even look like them or go through anything they have gone through, makes them bored and uneager to learn. Also, more rewards in to be into place to make kids feel more welcomed and wanting to do good in class. Even though it may seem out of the ordinary for some, suspension needs to stop. Allowing these kids to take a break from somewhere they already don’t want to be is ushering them towards a life of hating school. Suspension not only hurt the school district but also hurt the
...of deciding whether or not there should be enforcement of a policy or taking part of the rules that are to be implemented could decrease the number of students that are against the policy. Now ask yourselves this, how American and just are these uniform policies?
Zero tolerance laws initially were introduced as a means to discipline drug offenses of students while attending school. Due to increased gang violence, the policy spread nationwide after the 1994 signing of the “Gun Free Schools Act” where zero tolerance policies were coupled with the mandated reporting of a student to the police if they are carrying a gun or acting violence to other students or school
Students who are disruptive in class and refused to do their work were sent down to discipline where they received the consequences for their actions. More often than not, in school suspension was the end result. The concept of in school suspension was new to me because it was not something that I had seen when I was growing up.
The zero tolerance policy has been braced by various organisations,
...o make school a safe learning environment by prohibiting weapons and drugs. Today, the zero tolerance policy includes much more than weapons. They may also lead to suspension or expulsion for several things. For instance, carrying other over-the-counter medications.