The Real School Safety Problem: The Long-Term Consequences of Harsh School Punishment
176
The Real School Safety Problem: The Long-Term Consequences of Harsh School Punishment
176eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520959842 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 07/12/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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The Real School Safety Problem
The Long-Term Consequences of Harsh School Punishment
By Aaron Kupchik
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95984-2
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Schools across the United States are in a school safety crisis. But it's not the one that most might imagine it to be. The crisis is not that our schools are at risk of another mass shooting like those at Columbine or Sandy Hook. And it's not that children are out of control, with violence and theft rampant in schools. Such situations are horrifying (particularly mass shootings) and devastating, and we ought to do what we can to prevent them. But they do not exist at crisis levels. The crisis — the real school safety problem — is that we have implemented a series of practices that go too far in promoting school security and punishment, and as a result do considerable harm to students, schools, families, and communities.
Parents, school officials, and policy-makers often ask the wrong questions. For example, consider my seven-year-old daughter's reaction when I told her about the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I expected a ten-minute conversation, in which I would tell her, she would be scared, and I would comfort her. I was so wrong. We talked for well over an hour. She was calm and curious, not scared. She asked me question after question about what had happened. At first she wanted to know the specifics of the event itself, in an attempt to wrap her mind around how such tragedy is possible: Were the children who died all in one classroom, or in many? Did they die right away? Did the killer use several guns, or reload one? And so on. But then her questions shifted to trying to come to grips with how the tragedy could have been prevented, what her school does to prevent violence, and what schools should do. She wanted to know what was done to diagnose and treat gunman Adam Lanza's mental health issues, whether the door to the school was locked, how Lanza was able to enter the school, whether they should have had a police officer there, and whether police officers should be at schools everywhere. She wanted to know whether schools were safe, and what we could best do to keep schools safe.
Thankfully, I felt pretty confident in answering her questions, since I'd spent the past several years trying to understand what schools do to keep kids safe, how well these practices work, and what effects they have. But it occurred to me how few people ask these questions that are apparent to a seven-year-old. Instead of asking whether tighter security and harsher punishments are a good idea for schools, the public, school administrators, politicians, and others simply assume that they are. Rather than engaging with the problem of school safety and seeking information, as my daughter did, these groups more often respond out of fear. As a result, their assumptions about security and punishment are usually wrong because they misunderstand the real problem with school safety. The problem is not that students misbehave too much, that school gates aren't sufficiently secure, or that we don't have enough surveillance over our kids. Instead, the real problems with school safety are the well-intended but misguided policies we have put in place over the past twenty years. Our fears about school safety have caused us to alter public education in a way that has hurt children more than it might help them.
Consider the response to the horrible events at Newtown. Soon after the massacre, the National Rifle Association (NRA) made headlines by proposing that all schools in the United States hire armed guards. The public response to their suggestion was harsh, with politicians and advocates calling it absurd (among other things). While I agree with the critics that it was a bad idea, the backlash against it was political hypocrisy, seeing as how it isn't too far from what we currently do. For example, then New York City Council Speaker (and 2013 mayoral candidate) Christine Quinn called the NRA's proposal "Some of the most stupid, asinine, insensitive, ridiculous comments I have ever heard in the public arena." New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the NRA's proposal "a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe." And yet, during Bloomberg's time as mayor, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had a School Safety Division of over five thousand school safety officers policing the city's public schools. Their job requirements are less strict than those for other NYPD officers, and they receive less training and pay than other officers. And while they do not carry guns, they do have arrest powers and are backed up by police officers who are armed. New York City was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union because of alleged unfair treatment of students, and several investigations have documented abusive treatment at the hands of these officers. Is that really so different from what the NRA proposed? Don't hold me to this, but I think the NRA's proposal may be better than what went on in New York City public schools during the Bloomberg administration.
The NRA wasn't the only group offering more security as a solution, either. Senator Barbara Boxer (D–CA) proposed stationing National Guard troops in schools across the country. Ironically, Mayor Bloomberg, who oversaw NYPD's massive School Safety Division, called Senator Boxer's plan "ridiculous," stating that "You can't live your life that way. You'd be in a prison." President Obama's January 2013 executive order in response to Newtown also proposed more policing in schools. While the gun control measures in this order drew the most attention by far, it also included more funding for police officers in schools.
We have already been fortifying schools for the past twenty years. We have added police officers, surveillance cameras, and locked gates. We now have drug-sniffing police dogs searching students' possessions. We follow zero-tolerance policies and suspend, expel, or arrest students for minor misbehavior that would only have led to a trip to the principal's office a generation ago. And so on. Each of these reforms is justified as a means to maintain safety: metal detectors are intended to prevent guns from entering the school, dogs to detect and eliminate drugs from the school, and zero-tolerance policies to target students who are violent and remove them from school before they can hurt other children. Of course, the causes of these practices are more complex and involve racial and class tensions, as well as insecurity about schools more generally. But they promise to maintain safety by securing the school's borders, policing students within the school, and punishing students who are seen as potential threats.
Over the past twenty years, while we have been punishing students in increasingly harsh ways and making schools look more like prisons, our policy-makers have failed to ask the questions my daughter raised. Those who study school security and school discipline have been warning that these practices are ineffective and often harmful. Yet the public, policymakers, and school officials either haven't been listening or don't care whether these practices are effective. They meet political needs, demonstrating that politicians and school administrators are taking action to protect children. The assumption that more invasive security and harsher punishments mean less trouble, less disorder, less danger, and more safety has either caused or allowed schools across the country to beef up security and punishments. Our children pay for the fact that adults misunderstand what the real problem with school safety is.
Certainly, horrific events like the shooting at Newtown are very important and offer many lessons. But they are rare. The horror at Newtown does not define the danger that students across the United States face on a daily basis. This danger — the real school safety problem — is the policies that we have put in place to try to keep children safe in schools. These policies, which have us guard the gates of schools, police their interiors, and respond vigorously to any disorder, are the real problem because they are mostly ineffective, while causing harm to students, schools, families, and communities. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that our school safety practices are often ineffective and even harmful to children, since we have made massive changes to schools that are guided by assumptions rather than evidence. But it is wrong to subject our kids to harm based on excessive devotion to security and punishment strategies in schools. The point of this book is to help improve this state of affairs, to discuss what we know about effective school security and punishment in the hope of advancing a real dialogue about the issue.
OVERREACTING TO OUR FEARS
Imagine that school crime has been decreasing for over twenty years, nationwide. Imagine kids in school today reporting that they are injured less, get in fewer fights, are less likely to carry a weapon to school, and less likely to have something stolen, compared to kids in the early 1990s. Imagine that school is one of the safest places for kids to be, that they are far more likely to be killed at home by a parent or other caregiver, to drown, or to die in a fire, for example, than to be killed at school.
All of this is actually true. Schools are safer, and students better behaved (in terms of fighting, stealing, weapon carrying, etc.) than they were in the early 1990s, when the Department of Education began collecting annual nationwide data on school crime. And yet parents' fears about the dangers kids face at school are high. In a 2013 Gallup poll, 33 percent of parents with a child in kindergarten to twelfth grade stated that they feared for his or her physical safety while at school, even though only 10 percent of these same parents stated that their children had voiced any concern about their own safety. This fear among parents and other adults is a significant problem, because it has caused us to change how we run schools. Over the past twenty years we have put police officers and other security guards in schools, posted surveillance cameras, and installed metal detectors. The criminal justice system is now a real part of our educational system. This doesn't just happen in inner-city schools with mostly students of color and low-income children, but in wealthy communities with mostly White students, too. In order to keep students in line we have beefed up punishments within school so that minor misbehavior — talking back to teachers, cursing, and other types of typical adolescent shenanigans — now results in suspension. We use police dogs to search our children's belongings — not just in response to an incident, but as a matter of course. Either we don't care whether these practices actually work to keep kids safe or we've just assumed they will, without bothering to consider any evidence on whether or not they work. The evidence that is available tells us that our efforts have been misguided — an overreaction that hurts kids.
Consider, for example, the use of a chemical spray — a version of mace, or pepper spray, called "Freeze +P" — in Birmingham, Alabama, public schools. Students working with the Southern Poverty Law Center recently won a lawsuit against police officers stationed in schools; the students sued the police for repeatedly using mace on students, even when there was no immediate danger to anyone. Students named in the lawsuit claim that they have been sprayed for watching — not participating in, but just watching — fights in the hallways, for running on school grounds, and even while already restrained by other security guards or police. One complainant, K. B., was four months pregnant when she was involved in a macing incident. According to her, she was upset after being sexually harassed (being called a "ho" and other offensive terms) by another student, so she walked away to her next class, crying. When a police officer approached her and she failed to "calm down" as ordered, the officer sprayed her in the face.
Certainly, police officers should have authority to use force if it is necessary to protect themselves or others from a real threat of serious violence. But cases described in the lawsuit included no threat of violence to the officers, and rarely to other students (if there was a threat, it was in the form of a fistfight, not a deadly weapon). Instead the case demonstrates what happens when an entire student body is perceived as threatening and in need of aggressive policing. Birmingham schools tend to be overcrowded and disorderly, and they are overwhelmingly composed of low-income Black students. Many police might fear these students, seeing them as potential criminals. It's a shame that fear causes adults to see a child as a criminal who requires force, not as a teenager struggling to cope with real-life problems (as in the case of K. B.). In such a case, fear is dehumanizing — it leads adults to see kids only as threats, not as children who need care or young people learning to be citizens. Harsh, abusive actions like this can seem reasonable only if the public has blind faith in rigid security measures.
Although this example offers a good illustration of how fear of school violence can lead us to bad policy choices, it's also a little misleading because it's such an extreme case. A majority of high schools across the country have police officers in them, but such brutality is exceptionally rare. Moreover, police in schools do many good things for children. They mentor students and serve as positive role models, and they are there to protect and restore order in case real crime occurs on campus. This is all true and is too often dismissed by advocates for removing police from schools.
Yet there is a growing body of research showing that on the balance, the daily presence of police can do more harm than good. Certainly they are needed in some schools with real violence problems. Thankfully, though, most schools are relatively peaceful, with only occasional fights — fewer than they had a generation ago, when teachers and administrators were able to break them up without police intervention. The harm comes because the presence of police officers changes the school environment in subtle but important ways. Schools shift from sites of caring, where students' academic and social needs are met, to sites of law enforcement, with a greater focus on crimes and legal responses to student problems than on students' academic, social, and emotional needs.
Recently, in October 2015, we saw another example of harm at the hands of a school police officer when Richland County, South Carolina, Sheriff's Deputy Ben Fields was captured on camera throwing a female student to the ground and across a classroom. Mr. Fields was fired within days of the incident, as the cell phone footage went viral, being reported by major news media and social media as well. The fact that Fields was fired shows that the Sheriff's Department recognized that his actions were inconsistent with department policy and procedure. But if we look more carefully at this incident, it highlights other potential problems with school policing that go well beyond a single officer's violent overreaction. One issue is that an officer was called to the classroom because the student would not follow an order to leave the room — she was banished from the classroom for having her cell phone out, despite the fact that she put it away when asked and apologized to the teacher. A second issue is that the child who stood her ground and refused to leave her seat was in foster care. These two aspects of the incident are important, because they demonstrate some of the hazards of putting officers in schools across the country: (1) officers are asked to respond to behavior that is against school rules, but illegal only under a very loose interpretation of criminal law; and (2) they are asked to respond to the actions of students whose complicated lives and histories they have no way of knowing about, but whose trauma might be directing their behaviors.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Real School Safety Problem by Aaron Kupchik. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Effective School Crime Prevention
3. Extending Inequality
4. Hurting Families
Written with Thomas J. Mowen
5. How Schools Teach Bullying
Written with Katie A. Farina
6. Civic Participation in the Future
Written with Thomas J. Catlaw
7. Financial Costs of School Security and Punishment
8. Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Index