Ironically, children are unsafe in public schools today
not because of exposure to drugs and violence, but because
they have lost their constitutional protections under the Fourth
Amendment.
—Randall Beger, 2002: 127
1.1 There is a war being waged in the United States. It
is a war being waged on the domestic front that feeds off the
general decay of democratic politics and reinforces what
neoliberals are more than pleased to celebrate as the death of
the social. The enemy for conservative forces is "big
government." And yet, as Kevin Baker (2003) recently pointed out
in Harper's Magazine: "Since the advent of Reagan and the
current Republican hegemony, the federal government has by almost
all objective measures become larger, more intrusive, more
coercive, less accountable, and more deeply indebted than ever
before. It has more weapons, more soldiers, more police, more
spies, more prisons" (38-39). But, given that the current
administration has such a massive government when it comes to the
military, law enforcement, deficit spending, control over
public schooling, etc., this is really a war against the welfare
state and the social contract itself—this is a war against
the notion that everyone should have access to
decent education, health care, employment, and other public
services. The following quotes signal what is at stake in such an
unprecedented attack on the democratic social contract. The first
quote comes from Texas state representative, Debbie Riddle. The
second comes from Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for
Tax Reform and arguably Washington's leading right-wing
strategist.
Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves
free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from
Moscow…from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of
hell.
My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five
years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the
bathtub.
As these quotes suggest, Norquist and his ilk target
some parts of government for downsizing a
little more energetically than others. They are most concerned
with dismantling the parts of the public sector that serve the
social and democratic needs of the non-affluent majority of the
American populace. The parts that provide "free" service and
welfare to the privileged and opulent minority and dole out
punishment to the poor are reserved from that great domestic war
tool—the budgetary axe. Hence, democracy has never appeared
more fragile and endangered in the United States than in this
time of civic and political crisis. This
is especially true for young people. While a great deal has been
written about the budget busting costs of the invasion of
Iraq and the
passing of new anti-terrorist laws in the name of "homeland
security" that make it easier to undermine those basic civil
liberties that protect individuals against invasive and
potentially repressive government actions, there is a thunderous
silence on the part of many critics and academics regarding the
ongoing insecurity and injustice suffered by young people in this
country. As a result, the state is increasingly resorting to
repression and punitive social policies at home and abroad.
1.2 The "war" on working-class youth and youth of
color is evident
not only in the disproportionate numbers of such youth who
provide the fodder for Bush's preventive war policy, it is also
evident in the silent war at home, especially since the Iraqi war
and the war against terrorism are being financed from cuts in
domestic funding on health care, children's education, and other
public services. The class and racial war being waged against
young people is most evident in the ways in which schools are
being militarized with the addition of armed guards, barbed-wired
security fences, and "lock down drills." As educators turn over
their responsibility for school safety to the police, the new
security culture in public schools has turned them into "learning
prisons" (Chaddock, 1999: 15). It would be a tragic mistake for
those of us on the left either to separate the war in Iraq from
the many problems Americans, young people in particular, face at
home, or fail to recognize how war is being waged by this
government on multiple fronts.
1.3 Slavoj Zizek (2003) claims that the "true target of
the 'war on terror' is American society itself—the
disciplining of its emancipatory excesses" (28). He is partly
right. The Bush "permanent war doctrine" is not just aimed at
alleged terrorists or the 'excesses of democracy', but also
against disposable populations in the homeland, whether they be
young black men who inhabit our nation's jails or those
unemployed workers who have been abandoned by the flight of
capital, as
well as those levels of the government that provide any semblance
of a social contract for the people. The financing of the war in
Iraq, buttressed by what Dick Cheney calls the concept of "never
ending war," results not only in a bloated and obscene military
budget but also economic and tax policies that are financially
bankrupting the states, destroying public education, and
plundering public services. These multiple attacks on the poor
and much needed public services must be contested by an expanding
political and social vision that refuses the cynicism and sense
of powerlessness that accompanies the destruction of social
goods, the corporatization of the media, the dismantling of
workers' rights, and the incorporation of intellectuals. Against
this totalitarian onslaught, progressives need a language of
critique, possibility, and action—one that connects diverse
struggles, uses theory as a resource, and defines politics as not
merely critical but also as an intervention into public life. We
need a language that relates the discourse of war to an attack on
democracy at home and abroad, and we need to use that language in
a way that captures the needs, desires, histories, and
experiences that shape people's daily lives. Similarly, as
democratic institutions are downsized and public goods are
offered up for corporate plunder, those of us who take seriously
the related issues of equality, human rights, justice, and
freedom face the crucial challenge of formulating a notion of the
political suitable for addressing the urgent problems of the
21st century—a politics that as Zygmunt Bauman
(2002) argues "never stops criticizing the level of justice
already achieved [while] seeking more justice and better justice"
(54).
1.4 As the wars abroad and at home are interrelated,
this suggests that the concept of war has taken a distinctly
different turn in the new millennium. These days, wars are rarely
waged between nations. Instead, wars are more frequently waged
against drugs, terrorists, crime, immigrants, labor rights, and a
host of other open-ended referents that have become synonymous
with public disorder. War no longer needs to be ratified by
congress since it is now waged at various levels of government in
diverse forms that escape the need for official approval. War has
become a permanent condition adopted by a nation-state that is
largely defined by its repressive functions in the face of its
refusal and increasing political powerlessness to regulate
corporate power, provide social investments for the populace, and
guarantee a measure of social freedom. As a permanent state of
politics, war and its accompanying culture of fear are now, in
part, a response to the impotence of public institutions to
improve conditions of radical insecurity and the threat of an
uncertain future.
1.5 Wars are almost always legitimated in order to make
the world safe for "our children's future" but the rhetoric
belies how their future is often denied by the acts of aggression
put into place by a range of state agencies and institutions that
operate on a war footing. This would include the horrible effects
of the militarization of schools, the use of the criminal justice
system to redefine social issues such as poverty and homelessness
as criminal violations, and the consequential rise of a
prison-industrial complex as a way to contain disposable
populations such as youth of color who are poor and marginalized.
Under the rubric of war, security, and anti-terrorism, children
are "disappeared" from the most basic social spheres that once
provided the conditions for a sense of agency and possibility, as
they are rhetorically excised from any discourse about the
future. What is so troubling about the current historical moment
is that youth no longer symbolize the future. And yet, any
discourse about the future has to begin with the issue of youth
because more than any other group they embody the projected
dreams, desires, and commitment of a society's obligations to the
future. This echoes a classical principle of modern democracy in
which youth both symbolized society's responsibility to the
future and offered a measure of its progress. For most of this
century, Americans embraced as a defining feature of politics the
idea that all levels of government should assume a large measure
of responsibility for providing the resources, social provisions,
security, and modes of education that simultaneously offer young
people a future and the possibility of expanding the meaning and
depth of a substantive democracy. In many respects, youth not
only registered symbolically the importance of modernity's claim
to progress, they also affirmed the centrality of the liberal,
democratic tradition of the social contract in which adult
responsibility was mediated through a willingness to fight for
the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their
future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them
to make use of the freedoms they have while learning how to be
critical citizens. Within such a political project, democracy was
linked to the well-being of youth, and the status of how a
society imagined democracy and its future was contingent on how
it viewed its responsibility towards future generations.
1.6 Yet, at the dawn of the new millennium it is not at
all clear that we believe any longer in youth, the future, or the
social contract—even in its minimalist version. Since the
Reagan/Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, we have been told that
there is no such thing as society and, indeed, following that
nefarious pronouncement, institutions committed to public welfare
have been disappearing ever since. Rather than being cherished as
a symbol of the future, youth are now seen as a threat to be
feared and a problem to be contained. A seismic change has taken
place in which youth are now being framed as both a generation of
suspects and a threat to public life. If youth once symbolized
the moral
necessity to address a range of social and economic ills, they
are now largely portrayed as the source of most of society's
problems. Hence, youth now constitute a crisis that has less to
do with improving the future than with denying it. A concern for
children is the defining absence in most dominant discourses
about the future and the obligations this implies for adult
society. To witness the abdication of adult responsibility to
children, we need look no further than the current state of
children in America.
1.7 Instead of providing a decent education to poor
young people, American society offers them the growing potential
of being incarcerated; buttressed by the fact that the U.S. is
one of the only countries in the world that sentences minors to
death and spends "three times more on each incarcerated citizen
than on each public school pupil" (Wokusch, 2002: 1). Instead of
guaranteeing them food, decent health care, and shelter, we serve
them more standardized tests; instead of providing them with
vibrant public spheres, we offer them a commercialized culture in
which consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship. But in
the hard currency of human suffering, children pay a heavy price
in the richest democracy in the world: 12.2 million children live
below the poverty line, more than 16 million are at the low end
of the income scale, and 9.2 million children lack health
insurance (Clemetson, 2003). On top of that, millions lack
affordable child care and decent early childhood education, in
many states more money is being spent on prison construction than
on education, and the infant mortality rate in the United States
is the highest of any other industrialized nation. New York
Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert (2003) reports that in
Chicago "there are nearly 100,000 young people, ages 16 to 24,
who are out of work, out of school and all but out of
hope…. Nationwide…the figure is a staggering 5.5
million and growing" (A35). The magnitude of this crisis can be
seen in the fact that in some cities, such as the District of
Columbia, the child poverty rate is as high as 45 percent
(Childhood Poverty Research Brief 2, 2001). When broken down
along racial categories, the figures become even more despairing.
For example: "In 2000, the poverty rate for African Americans was
22 percent, basically double the rate for the entire
nation….In Chicago the poverty rate for blacks is 29.4
percent and only 8.2 for whites. The poverty rate for black
children is 40 percent, compared to 8 percent for white kids"
(Street, 2003).
1.8 While the United States ranks first in military
technology, military exports, defense expenditures and the number
of millionaires and billionaires, it is ranked 18th
among the advanced industrial nations in the gap between rich and
poor children, 12th in the percent of children in
poverty, 17th in the efforts to lift children out of
poverty, and 23rd in infant mortality.1
Economically, politically, and culturally the situation of youth
in the United States is intolerable and obscene. In his 2003
budget, Bush has done something no other president has done. He
has pushed through an immense tax cut that largely benefits the
rich—estimated at $3 trillion—in the midst of a war
whose cost down the road for future generations will be
staggering. The U.S. budget deficit for 2003 is already $290
billion and the current national debt is $6.84 quadrillion and is
estimated to reach $9.3 quadrillion by 2008 (Carter, 2003). The
war on Iraq is costing about $4 billion a month and the
Republican controlled congress has just passed a bill authorizing
an additional $87 billion to support the "war against terrorism"
being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time that the
Bush administration is giving huge tax cuts to the rich, it is
cutting veterans programs by $6 billion, including money for
disabilities caused by war, and benefits in education health care
for their kids. He is also cutting $93 billion from Medicaid,
making huge environmental cuts, and whittling away a vast array
of domestic programs that directly benefit children. One of the
most shameful cuts enacted in the federal budget took place in
December 2002 when Bush eliminated $300 million from a "federal
program that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat
their homes in the winter" (Carter, 2003: 69).
1.9 Under this
insufferable climate of increased repression and misplaced
priorities, young people become the new casualties in an ongoing
war against justice, freedom, citizenship, and democracy and this
can be seen in the images this society provides of children in
trouble. In a society that appears to have turned its back on the
young, what we are increasingly witnessing on prime time media
are images of children handcuffed, sitting in adult courts before
stern judges, facing murder charges. These images are matched by
endless films, videos, ads, documentaries, television programs,
and journalistic accounts in which urban youth—depicted
largely as gang bangers, drug dealers, and rapists—are
portrayed as violent, dangerous, and pathological. Or, when
working-class youth are not being directly demonized, television
offers images of ruling-class youth in programs such as "Born
Rich," "Rich Girls," and "The Simple Life," suggesting that they
are the group with real problems, such as coping with envy
management and figuring out ways to "dispel the voodoo of
inherited wealth" (Garner, 2003: 29). Such images invoke
ruling-class youth as an unapologetic paean to class
power—affirming the privilege of class as a way of both
offering a voyeuristic glimpse at the rich while simultaneously
dehumanizing those middle-class and poor youth who can't run up
$1000 bar tabs whenever they wish. In a society where 59 percent
of college students say they will eventually be millionaires, the
dominant press provides enormous coverage to celebrities such as
Paris Hilton, a famous New York debutante, who, as reported in
the media, "has stood for the proposition that wealth comes with
no obligations of tact, taste or civic responsibility. For people
who dream of someday putting unearned wealth to poor use, Ms.
Hilton has been a beacon" (Leland, 2003: ST1). In the age of
Bush, class becomes less a metaphor for marking the unjust
inequities of class privilege than a way of celebrating wealth
and power and rubbing it in the face of the poor. This is the
popular culture version of the neoliberal view of the world now
so popular among neoconservatives and the ultra right whose
policies reproduce and legitimize a growing appeal to "tough
love" which in reality is marked by contempt for those who are
impoverished, disenfranchised, or powerless. This is class
politics waged in the realm of popular culture with a
vengeance.
1.10 No longer seen as a crucial social investment for
the future of a democratic society, youth are now demonized by
the popular media and derided by politicians looking for
quick-fix solutions to crime. A whole generation of youth is
being depicted as superpredators spiraling out of control. In a
society deeply troubled by their presence, youth prompts in the
public imagination a rhetoric of fear, control, and surveillance.
The impact of such rhetoric is made all the more visible with the
2002 Supreme Court decision upholding the widespread use of
random drug testing of public school students. Such random drug
testing of all junior and senior high school students who desire
to participate in extra-curricular activities registers a deep
distrust of students and furthers the notion that youth should be
viewed with suspicion and treated as potential criminals. Along
with drug testing, increasingly, school officials subject
students to vehicle search policies and unannounced weapons
searches. In some schools, students have been "stripped-searched
by police officers to locate money missing from a classroom"
(Beger, 2002: 124). Police and drug-sniffing dogs are now a
common fixture in public schools as schools increasingly resemble
prisons, and students are treated like suspects who need to be
searched, tested, and observed under the watchful eye of
administrators who appear to have less interest in education than
in policing. In Biloxi, Mississippi surveillance cameras have
been installed in all of its 500 classrooms. The school
administrators call this school reform but none of them have
asked the question about what they are actually teaching kids
when they are put under constant surveillance. The not so
hidden curriculum
here is that kids can't be trusted. At the same time, they are
being educated to passively accept constant
surveillance, one of the conditions of a police state. It
gets worse. Some schools are actually using sting operations in
which undercover agents who pretend to be students are used to
catch young people suspected of selling drugs or committing any
one of a number of school infractions. The consequences of such
actions are far reaching. As Beger (2002) points
out:
Opponents of school-based sting operations say they not
only create a climate of mistrust between students and police,
but they also put innocent students at risk of wrongful arrest
due to faulty tips and overzealous police work. When asked about
his role in a recent undercover probe at a high school near
Atlanta, a young-looking police officer who attended classes and
went to parties with students replied: 'I knew I had to fit in,
make kids trust me and then turn around and take them to jail'.
(123)
Children have fewer rights than almost any other group,
and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently,
their voices are almost completely absent from the debates,
policies, and legislative practices that are developed in order
to meet their needs.
1.11 In many suburban malls, working-class youth of
color cannot even shop or walk around without either appropriate
identification cards or being accompanied by their parents.
Excluded from public spaces outside of schools that once offered
them the opportunity to hang out with relative security, work
with mentors in youth centers, and develop their own talents and
sense of self-worth, young people are forced to hang out in the
streets. There, they are increasingly subject to police
surveillance, anti-gang statutes, and curfew laws, especially in
poor, urban neighborhoods. Gone are the youth centers, city
public parks, outdoor basketball
courts, or empty lots where kids can play stick ball. Play areas
are now rented out to the highest bidder and then "caged in by
steel fences, wrought iron gates, padlocks and razor ribbon wire"
(Kelley, 1997: 44).
1.12 Liberals, conservatives, corporate elites, and
religious fundamentalists are waging a war against those public
spaces and laws that view children and youth as an important
social investment. Peter Cassidy (2003) argues that young people
are being subjected to forms of emotional violence and privacy
intrusions that were unimaginable twenty years ago, except for
prison inmates. He claims that a veritable Kindergulag has
been erected around schoolchildren, making them subject to
arbitrary curfews, physical searches, arbitrarily applied
profiling schemes, and…random, suspicionless, warrantless drug
testing….If you're a kid in the U.S. today, martial law isn't a
civics class lecture unit. It is a fact of life as the war
on drugs, the war on violence, and a nearly hysterical emphasis
on safety has come to excuse the infliction of every kind of
humiliation upon the young. (3)
Youth have become the central site onto which class and
racial anxieties are projected. Their very presence represents
both the broken promises of capitalism in the age of
deregulation and downsizing and a collective fear of the
consequences wrought by systemic class inequalities and a culture
of "infectious greed" that has created a generation of unskilled
and displaced youth expelled from shrinking markets, blue collar
jobs, and any viable hope for the future. It is against this
growing threat to basic freedom, democracy, and youth that I want
to address the related issues of democracy, zero tolerance
policies, and public schools.
Class/Race and the Politics of Punishment in
Schools
2.1 When the War on Poverty ran out of steam with
the social and economic crisis that emerged in the 1970s, there
was a growing shift at all levels of government from an emphasis
on social investments to an emphasis on public control, social
containment, and the criminalization of social problems. The
criminalization of social issues—starting with President
Ronald Reagan's war on drugs,2 the privatization of
the prison industry in the 1980s, escalating to the war on
immigrants in the early 1990s, and the rise of the
prison-industrial complex by the close of the decade—has
now become a part of everyday culture and provides a common
referent point that extends from governing prisons and regulating
urban culture to running schools. This is most evident in the
emergence of zero tolerance laws that have swept the nation since
the 1980s, and gained full legislative strength with the passage
of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of
1994. Following the mandatory sentencing legislation and
get-tough policies associated with the "war on drugs," this bill
calls for a "three strikes and you're out" policy which puts
repeat offenders, including nonviolent offenders, in jail for
life, regardless of the seriousness of the crime. As is widely
reported, the United States is now the biggest jailer in the
world. Between 1985 and 2002 the prison population grew from
744,206 to 2.1 million (approaching the combined populations of
Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana), and prison budgets jumped from $7
billion in 1980 to $40 billion in 2000 (Delgado, 2000; Vicini,
2003).3 As Sanho Tree (2003) points
out:
With more than 2 million people behind bars (there are
only 8 million prisoners in the entire world), the United
States—with one-twenty-second of the world's
population—has one-quarter of the planet’s prisoners.
We operate the largest penal system in the world, and
approximately one quarter of all our prisoners (nearly half a
million people) are there for nonviolent drug offenses.
(5)
In addition, we are adding 700 inmates every week of the
year (Vinci, 2003). Yet, even as the crime rate plummets
dramatically, more people, especially people of color, are being
arrested, harassed, punished, and put in jail.4 Of the
two million people behind bars, 70 percent of the inmates are
people of color; 50 percent are African Americans and 17 percent
are Latino/as (Barsamian, 2001).
2.2 A Justice Department report points out and that on
any given day in this country "more than a third of the young
African-American men aged 18-34 in some of our major cities are
either in prison or under some form of criminal justice
supervision" (Donziger, 1996: 101). The same department reported
in April of 2000 that "black youth are forty-eight times more
likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison for drug
offenses" (Press, 2000: 55). When poor youth of color are not
being warehoused in dilapidated schools or incarcerated they are
being aggressively recruited by the military to fight the war in
Iraq. For example, Carl Chery (2003) recently
reported:
With help from The Source magazine, the U.S.
military is targeting hip-hop fans with custom-made Hummers,
throwback jerseys and trucker hats. The yellow Hummer,
spray-painted with two black men in military uniform, is the
vehicle of choice for the U.S. Army's 'Take It to the Streets
Campaign'—a sponsored mission aimed at recruiting young
African Americans into the military ranks. (1)
It seems that the Army has discovered hip-hop and urban
culture and rather than listening to the searing indictments of
poverty, joblessness, and despair that is one of its central
messages, the Army recruiters appeal to its most commodified
elements by letting the "potential recruits hang out in the
Hummer, where they can pep the sound system or watch recruitment
videos" (Chery, 2003: 1). Of course, they won't view any videos
of Hummers being blown up in the war-torn streets of Baghdad.
2.3 Domestic militarization in the form of zero
tolerance laws, in this instance, functions not only to contain
"minority populations," deprive them of their elector rights (13
percent of all black men in the U.S. have lost their right to
vote) (Street, 2001), and provide new sources of revenue for a
system that "evokes the convict leasing system
of the Old South" (Featherstone, 2000: 81), it also actively
promotes and legitimates retrograde and repressive social
policies. For example, an increasing number of states, including
California and New York, are now spending more on prison
construction than on higher education (Lotke, 1996). In addition,
School Resource Officers—armed and unarmed enforcement
officials who implement safety and security measures in
schools—are one of the fastest growing segments of law
enforcement in the United States (Beger, 2002).
2.4 What is one to make of social policies that portray
youth, especially poor youth of color, as a generation of
suspects? What are we to make of a social order—headed by a
pro-gun, pro-capital punishment, and pro-big business
conservative such as George W. Bush—whose priorities
suggest to urban youth that American society is willing to invest
more in sending them to jail than in providing them with high
quality schools and a decent education? How does a society
justify housing poor students in schools that are unsafe,
decaying, and with little or no extra curricular activities while
at the same time it spends five times more annually—as high
as $20,000 in many suburban schools—on each middle-class
student, housing them in schools with Olympic swimming pools, the
latest computer technology, and well cared for buildings and
grounds? What message is being sent to young people when in a
state such as New York "more Blacks entered prison just for drug
offenses than graduated from the state's massive university
system with undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees combined
in the 1990s" (Street, 2001: 26)? What message is being sent to
youth when as federal deficits are soaring, the Bush
administration provides tax cuts for the rich—in one
instance $114 billion in corporate tax concessions—while at
the same time children face drastic cuts in education and health
aid, as well as other massive cuts in domestic programs such as
job training and summer employment opportunities? In this
instance, the culture of domestic militarization, with its
policies of containment, brutalization, and punishment become
more valued to the dominant social order than any consideration
of what it means for a society to expand and strengthen the
mechanisms and freedoms of a fully realized
democracy.5
2.5 Zero tolerance policies have been especially cruel
in the treatment of juvenile offenders.6 Rather than
attempting to work with youth and make an investment in their
psychological, economic, and social well being, a growing number
of cities are passing sweep laws—curfews and bans against
loitering and cruising—designed not only to keep youth off
the streets, but also to make it easier to criminalize their
behavior. For example, within the last decade "45 states…have
passed or amended legislation making it easier to prosecute
juveniles as adults" and in some states "prosecutors can bump a
juvenile case into adult court at their own discretion" (Talbot,
2000: 42). In Kansas and Vermont, a 10-year-old child can be
tried in adult court. A particularly harsh example of the
draconian measures being used against young people can be seen in
the passing of Proposition 21 in California. This law
makes it easier for prosecutors to try teens, fourteen and older,
in adult court if they are accused of a felony. These youth would
automatically be put in adult prison and be given lengthy
mandated sentences. The overall goal of the law is to largely
eliminate intervention programs, increase the number of youth in
prisons, especially minority youth, and keep them there for
longer periods of time. Moreover, the law is at odds with a
number of studies that indicate that putting youth in jail with
adults both increases recidivism and poses a grave danger to
young offenders who, as a Columbia University study suggested,
are "five times as likely to be raped, twice as likely to be
beaten, and eight times as likely to commit suicide than adults
in the adult prison system" (Nieves, 2000: A1,
A15).
2.6 Paradoxically, the moral panic against crime and now
terrorism that increasingly feeds the calls for punishment and
revenge rather than rehabilitation programs for young people
exists in conjunction with the disturbing fact that the United
States is now one of only seven countries in the world that
permits the death penalty for juveniles (Rimer & Bonner,
2000). In many states, youth cannot get a tattoo, join the
military, get their ears pierced, or get a marriage license until
they are 18, but youth as young as ten years old can be jailed as
adults and condemned to death in some states. The prize-winning
novelist Ann Patchett (2002) suggested in The New York
Times that perhaps the problem is that "as Americans, we no
longer have any idea what constitutes a child" (17). This strikes
me as ludicrous. The ongoing attacks on children's rights, the
endless commercialization of youth, the downsizing of children's
services, and the increasing incarceration of young people
suggest more than confusion. In actuality, such policies suggest
that, at best, adult society no longer cares about children and,
at worse, views them with scorn and fear.
2.7 As the state is downsized and basic social services
dry up, containment policies become the principle means to
discipline working-class youth and restrict their ability to
think critically and engage in oppositional practices. At the
academic level, this translates into imposing accountability
schemes on schools that are really about enforcing high-stakes
testing policies. Such approaches deskill teachers, reduce
learning to the lowest common denominator, undermine the
possibility of critical learning, and prepare young people to be
docile. Schools increasingly resemble other weakened public
spheres as they cut back on trained psychologists, school nurses,
programs such as music, art, athletics, and valuable after-school
activities. Jesse Jackson (2000) argues that under such
circumstances, schools not only fail to provide students with a
well-rounded education, they often "bring in the police, [and]
the school gets turned into a feeder system for the penal system"
(16). Marginalized students learn quickly that they are surplus
populations and that the journey from home to school no longer
means they will next move into a job; on the contrary, school now
becomes a training ground for their "graduation" into containment
centers such as prisons and jails that keep them out of sight,
patrolled, and monitored so as to prevent them from becoming a
social canker or political liability to those white and
middle-class populations concerned about their own safety.
Schools increasingly function as zoning mechanisms to separate
students marginalized by class and color and as such these
institutions are now modeled after prisons. This follows the
argument of David Garland (2001), who points out that,
"Large-scale incarceration functions as a mode of economic and
social placement, a zoning mechanism that segregates those
populations rejected by the depleted institutions of family,
work, and welfare and places them behind the scenes of social
life" (B4).
Schools Emulating Prison Policies
3.1 Across the nation, school districts are lining up to
embrace zero tolerance policies. According to the United States
Department of Education, about 90 percent of schools systems
nationwide have implemented such policies in order to deal with
either violence or threats (Zernike, 2001). Emulating state and
federal laws passed in the1990s, such as the federal Gun-Free
Schools Act of 1994, that were based on mandatory sentencing
and "three strikes and you're out" policies, many educators first
invoked zero tolerance rules against those kids who brought guns
to schools. Schools soon broadened the policy and it now includes
a gamut of student misbehavior ranging from using or circulating
drugs, harboring a weapon, to threatening other
students—all broadly conceived. Under zero tolerance
policies, forms of punishment that were once applied to adults
now apply to first graders. Originally aimed at "students who
misbehave intentionally, the law now applies to those who
misbehave as a result of emotional problems or other
disabilities" as well (American Bar Association, 2003:
3).
3.2 Unfortunately, any sense of perspective or guarantee
of rights seems lost, as school systems across the country clamor
for metal detectors, armed guards, high-tech surveillance
systems, see-through knapsacks, and, in some cases, armed
teachers. Some school systems are investing in new software in order to
"profile" students who might exhibit criminal behavior (Moore,
2000). Overzealous laws relieve
educators of exercising deliberation and critical judgment as
more and more young people are either suspended or expelled from
school, often for ludicrous reasons. For example, two Virginia
fifth-graders who allegedly put soap in their teacher's drinking
water were charged with a felony (Goodman, 2000). A 12-year-old
boy in Louisiana who was diagnosed with a hyperactive disorder
was suspended for two days after telling his friends in a food
line "I’m gonna get you!" if they ate the all the potatoes.
The police then charged the boy with making "terroristic threats"
and he was incarcerated for two weeks while awaiting trial. A
14-year-old disabled student in Palm Beach, Florida was referred
to the police by the school principal for allegedly stealing
$2.00 from another student. He was then charged with
strong-armed-robbery, and held for six weeks in an adult jail,
even though this was his first arrest.7 There is
the absurd case of five students in Mississippi who were
suspended and criminally charged for throwing peanuts at each
other on a school bus (Beger, 2002). There is
also the equally revealing example of a student brought up on a
drug charge because he gave another youth two lemon cough drops.
3.3 As Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman
(2000) points out, zero tolerance does more than offer a simple
solution to a complex problem; it has become a code word for a
"quick and dirty way of kicking kids out" of school rather than
creating safe environments for them (8). For example, the
Denver Rocky Mountain News reported in June of 1999 that
"partly as a result of such rigor in enforcing Colorado's zero
tolerance law, the number of kids kicked out of public schools
has skyrocketed since 1993—from 437 before the law to
nearly 2,000 in the 1996-1997 school year" (38A). In Chicago, the
widespread adoption of zero tolerance policies in 1994 resulted
in a 51 percent increase in student suspensions for the next four
years, and a 3000 percent increase in expulsions, jumping "from
21 in 1994-1995 to 668" the following year (Michie, 2000: 24). In
Connecticut, students are being pushed out of schools like never
before. For example:
The number of suspensions jumped about 90 percent from
1998-1999 to 2000-2001. In 2000-2001, 90,559 children were
suspended from schools around the state, up from 57,626 two years
earlier. (Gordon, 2003: 14CN)
Within such a climate of disdain and intolerance,
expelling students does more than pose a threat to innocent kids,
it also suggests that local school boards are refusing to do the
hard work of exercising critical judgment, trying to understand
what conditions undermine school safety, and providing reasonable
support services for all students—and viable alternatives
for the troubled ones. Moreover, the No Child Left Behind
program, with its investment in high-stakes testing puts even
more pressure on schools either to push underachieving students
out or do nothing to prevent them from leaving school. Raising
test scores is
now the major goal of educational reformers and it puts a huge
amount of pressure on principals who are expected to reach
district goals. Such pressure played an important role in the
Houston School System, held up as a model by President George W.
Bush, which not only does nothing to prevent students from
leaving school but also falsified dropout data in order for
principals to get financial bonuses and meet district demands.
Tamar Lewin and Jennifer Medina (2003) reported in The New
York Times that large number of students who are struggling
academically are being pushed out of New York City schools in
order to not "tarnish the schools' statistics by failing to
graduate on time" (A1). As the criminalization of young people
finds its way into the classroom, it becomes easier for school
administrators to punish students rather than listen to them or,
for that matter, to work with parents, community programs,
religious organizations, and social service agencies.8
Even though zero tolerance policies clog up the courts and put
additional pressure on an already overburdened juvenile justice
system, educators appear to have few qualms about implementing
them. And the results are far from inconsequential for the
students themselves.
3.4 Most insidiously, zero tolerance policies and laws
appear to be well-tailored for mobilizing racialized codes and
race-based moral panics that portray black and brown urban youth
as a frightening and violent threat to the safety of 'decent'
Americans. Not only do most of the high profile zero tolerance
cases involve African-American students, but such policies also
reinforce the racial inequities that plague school systems across
the country. For example, the New York Times has reported
on a number of studies illustrating "that black students in
public schools across the country are far more likely than whites
to be suspended or expelled, and far less likely to be in gifted
or advanced placement classes" (Lewin, 2000: A14). Even in a city
such as San Francisco, considered a bastion of liberalism,
African-American students pay a far greater price for zero
tolerance policies. Libero Della Piana (2000) reports that
"According to data collected by Justice Matters, a San Francisco
agency advocating equity in education, African Americans make up
52 percent of all suspended students in the district—far in
excess of the 16 percent of [African-American youth in] the
general population" (A21). Marilyn Elias (2000) reported in an
issue of USA Today that, "In 1998, the first year national
expulsion figures were gathered, 31 percent of kids expelled were
black, but blacks made up only 17 percent of the students in
public schools" (9D).
3.5 Feeding on moral panic and popular fear, zero
tolerance policies not only turn schools into an adjunct of the
criminal justice system, they also further rationalize misplaced
legislative priorities. And that has profound social costs.
Instead of investing in early-childhood programs, repairing
deteriorating school buildings, or hiring more qualified
teachers, schools now spend millions of dollars to upgrade
security, even when such a fortress mentality defines the
simplest test of common sense. As mentioned earlier, school
administrators in Biloxi, Mississippi decided to invest $2
million to install 800 cameras in 11 schools rather than use that
money to hire more teachers to reduce class size, provide more
books for the library, fund extracurricular programs or a host of
other useful school improvements (Dillon 2003). Young people are
quickly realizing that schools have more in common with military
boot camps and prisons than they do with other institutions in
American society. In addition, as schools abandon their role as
democratic public spheres and are literally "fenced off" from the
communities that surround them, they lose their ability to become
anything other than spaces of containment and control. In this
context, discipline and training replace education for all but
the privileged as schools increasingly take on an uncanny
resemblance to oversized police precincts, tragically
disconnected both from the students who inhabit them and the
communities that give meaning to their historical experiences and
daily lives. As schools become militarized they lose their
ability to provide students with the skills to cope with human
differences, uncertainty, and the various symbolic and
institutional forces that undermine political agency and
democratic public life itself.
Schooling and the Crisis of Public Life
4.1 Zero tolerance policies suggest a dangerous
imbalance between democratic values and the culture of fear.
Instead of security, zero tolerance policies in the schools
contribute to a growing climate of bigotry, hypocrisy, and
intolerance that turns a generation of youth into criminal
suspects. In spite of what we are told by the current Bush
administration, conservative educators, the religious right, and
the cheerleaders of corporate culture, the greatest threat to
education in this country does not come from disruptive students,
the absence of lock-down safety measures, and get tough school
polices. Nor are young people threatened by the alleged decline
of academic standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes,
or the lack of rigid testing measures. On the contrary, the
greatest threat to young people comes from a society that refuses
to view them as a social investment, that consigns 13.5 million
children to live in poverty, reduces critical learning to massive
testing programs, refuses to pay teachers an adequate salary,
promotes policies that eliminate most crucial health and public
services, and defines masculinity through the degrading
celebration of a gun culture, extreme sports, and the spectacles
of violence that permeate corporate controlled media industries.
It also comes from a society that values security more than basic
rights, wages an assault on all non-market values and public
goods, and engages in a ruthless transfer of wealth from the poor
and middle class to the rich and privileged.
4.2 We live in a society in which a culture of
punishment, greed, and intolerance has replaced a culture of
social responsibility and compassion. We have increasingly become
a society in which issues regarding persistent poverty,
inadequate health care, racial apartheid in the inner cities, and
the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor have been
either removed from the inventory of public discourse and
progressive social policy or factored into talk-show spectacles.
This is evident in ongoing attempts by many liberals and
conservatives to turn commercial-free public education over to
market forces, dismantle traditional social provisions of
the welfare state, turn over all vestiges of the health care
system to private interests, and mortgage social security to the
whims of the stock market. Emptied of any substantial content,
democracy appears imperiled as individuals are unable to
translate their privately suffered misery into public concerns
and collective action. The result is not only silence and
indifference, but the elimination of those public spaces that
reveal the rough edges of social order, disrupt consensus, and
point to the need for modes of education and knowledge that link
learning to the conditions necessary for developing democratic
forms of political agency and civic struggle. This is a society
in which biographical solutions are substituted for systemic
contradictions, and as Ulrich Beck (1995) points out,
institutions "for overcoming problems" are converted into
"institutions for causing problems" (7).
4.3 Within such a climate of harsh discipline and moral
indifference, it is easier to put young people in jail than to
provide the education, services, and care they need to face the
problems of a complex and demanding society.9
Conservative critics such as Abigail Thernstrom (2003) actually
reinforce the ongoing criminalization of school policy, the
expansion of police power in schools, and the vanishing rights of
children by arguing that zero tolerance policies are especially
useful for minority and poor children. Thernstrom's comments on
educational reform not only expand zero tolerance policies to
include the most trivial forms of transgression, but they also
suggest a barely concealed, racially-coded standard for punishing
students. She writes: "They need schools where there is zero
tolerance for violence, erratic or tardy attendance,
inappropriate dress, late or incomplete homework, incivility
toward staff and other students, messy desks and halls, trash on
the floor and other signs of disorder" (B17). The notion that
children should be viewed as a crucial social resource who
present for any healthy society important ethical and political
considerations about the quality of public life, the allocation
of social provisions, and the role of the state as a guardian of
public interests appears to be lost in a society that refuses to
invest in its youth as part of a broader commitment to a fully
realized democracy. As the social order becomes more privatized
and militarized, we increasingly face the problem of losing a
generation of young people to a system of increasing intolerance,
repression, and moral indifference.
4.4 The growing attack on working-class youth, youth of
color, and public education in American society may say less
about the reputed apathy of the populace than it might about the
bankruptcy of the old political languages and the need for a new
language and vision for expanding and deepening the meaning of
democracy and making the education of youth central to such a
project. Made over in the image of corporate culture, schools are
no longer valued as a public good but as a private interest;
hence, the appeal of such schools is less their capacity to
educate students according to the demands of critical citizenship
than it is about enabling students to master the requirements of
a market-driven economy. This is not education but training.
Under these circumstances, many students increasingly find
themselves in schools that lack any language for relating the
self to public life, social responsibility, or the imperatives of
democratic life. In this instance, democratic education with its
emphasis on social justice, respect for others, critical inquiry,
equality, freedom, civic courage, and concern for the collective
good is suppressed and replaced by an excessive emphasis on the
language of privatization, individualism, self-interest, and
brutal competitiveness. Lost in this commercial and privatizing
discourse of schooling is any notion of democratic community or
models of leadership capable of raising questions about what
public schools should accomplish in a democracy and why under
certain circumstances, they fail; or for that matter, why public
schools have increasingly adapted policies that bear a close
resemblance to how prisons are run.
4.5 Zero tolerance has become a metaphor for hollowing
out the state and expanding the forces of domestic
militarization, reducing democracy to consumerism, and replacing
an ethic of mutual aid with an appeal to excessive individualism
and social indifference.10 Within this logic, the
notion of the political increasingly equates power with
domination, and citizenship with consumerism and passivity. Under
this insufferable climate of manufactured indifference, increased
repression, unabated exploitation, and a war on Iraq that Senator
Robert Byrd believes is rooted in the arrogance of unbridled
power, young people have become the new casualties in an ongoing
battle against justice, freedom, social citizenship, and
democracy. As despairing as these conditions appear at the
present moment, they increasingly have become the basis for a
surge of political resistance on the part of many youth,
intellectuals, labor unions, educators, and social
movements.11 Educators, young people, parents,
religious organizations, community activists, and other cultural
workers need to rethink what it would mean to both interrogate
and break away from the dangerous and destructive ideologies,
values, and social relations of zero tolerance policies as they
work in a vast and related number of powerful institutional
spheres to reinforce modes of authoritarian control and turn a
generation of youth into a generation of suspects. This suggests
a struggle both for public space and the conditions for public
dialogue about how to imagine reappropriating a notion of
politics that is linked to the creation of a strong participatory
democracy while simultaneously articulating a new vocabulary, set
of theoretical tools, and social possibilities for re-visioning
civic engagement and social transformation. We have entered a
period in which class warfare offers no apologies because it is
too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance. But the
collective need for justice should never be underestimated even
in the darkest of times.
By: Henry A. Giroux
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1
These figures largely come from Children’s Defense Fund,
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13.
2
For an insightful commentary on the media and the racial nature
of the war on drugs, see Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell,
Cracked Coverage: Television News, The Anti-cocaine Crusade,
and the Reagan Legacy. Durham: Duke University Press,
1994.
3
These figures are taken from the following sources: Gary Delgado,
"'Mo' Prisons Equals MO' Money." Colorlines. Winter
(1999-2000): 18; Fox Butterfield, "Number in Prison Grows Despite
Crime Reduction." The New York Times 10 August 2000:
A10.
4
For some extensive analyses of the devastating affects the
criminal justice system is having on black males, see Michael
Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; Jerome
Miller, Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the
Criminal Justice System. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996; David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in
the American Criminal Justice System. New York: The New
Press, 1999; Marc Mauer & Meda Chesney-Lind, Eds.
Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass
Imprisonment. New York: The New Press, 2002.
5
Even more shameful is the fact that such discrimination against
African Americans is often justified from the Olympian heights of
institutions such as Harvard University by apologists such as
lawyer Randall Kennedy who argue that such laws, criminal
policies, and police practices are necessary to protect "good"
blacks from "bad" blacks who commit crimes. See Randall Kennedy,
Race, Crime, and the Law. New York: Pantheon,
1997.
6
For a moving narrative of the devastating effects of the juvenile
justice system on teens, see Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud
I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court. New York:
Touchstone, 1996.
7
These examples are taken from a report on zero tolerance laws by
the American Bar Association. <www.abanet.org/crimjust/juvius/zerotolreport.html>
29 May 2003.
8 It
was reported in the New York Times that in responding to
the spate of recent school shootings, the FBI has provided
educators across the country with a list of behaviors that could
identify "students likely to commit an act of lethal violence."
One such behavior is "resentment over real or perceived
injustices." The reach of domestic militarization becomes more
evident as the F.B.I. not only takes on the role of monitoring
potentially disruptive student behavior, but also to the degree
to which teachers are positioned to become adjuncts of the
criminal justice system. The story and quotes appear in the
editorial, "F.B.I. Caution Signs for Violence in Classroom."
The New York Times 7 September 2000: A18.
9 As
has been widely reported, the prison industry has become big
business with many states spending more on prison construction
than on university construction. See, Anthony Lewis, "Punishing
the Country." The New York Times 2 December 1999:
A1.
10
For a provocative analysis of the relationship between what
Norman Geras (1998) calls "the contract of mutual indifference"
(30) and neoliberalism's refusal of the social as a condition for
contemporary forms mutual indifference; see Geras, The
Contract of Mutual Indifference. London: Verso Press,
1998.
11
For some recent commentaries on the new student movement, see
Liza Featherstone, "The New Student Movement," The Nation.
15 May 2000: 11-15; David Samuels, "Notes from Underground: Among
the Radicals of the Pacific Northwest." Harper's Magazine.
May (2000): 35-47; Katazyna Lyson, Monique Murad & Trevor
Stordahl, "Real Reformers, Real Results." Mother Jones.
October (2000): 20-22. Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair
& Allan Sekula, 5 Days that Shook the World. London:
Verso Press, 2000; Mark Edelman Boren, Student
Resistance. New York: Routledge, 2001; See also, Imre Szeman,
"Learning from Seattle." Special Issue of The Review of
Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 24(1-2) January-June
(2002).