They called it “zero tolerance,” meaning that the schools would not put up with bad behavior under any circumstances. What that meant in practice was a huge increase in police and security forces, often stationed right in the schools themselves.
The schools also adopted a series of incredibly harsh punishments for any offenses. In Detroit, for example, students can be suspended for up to 20 days for holding hands. For worse behavior, there and everywhere, the penalty is very often expulsion.
The theory is that this is necessary to prevent a few rotten apples from ruining good kids’ chance at an education.
About the same time came a shift to a drastically increased reliance on test scores as an infallible measure of student progress.
Parents and legislators who wanted to make sure their schools were accountable helped push schools to an ever-increasing reliance on standardized tests as a measure of achievement. In Michigan, the the MEAP, short for Michigan Educational Achievement Program test, became the holy grail for measuring performance.
Other states evolved similar tests, and classroom curricula began to be based on “teaching to the test,” meaning that if something isn’t going to be on the all-important exam, schools aren’t going to have the time to teach it, period.
Well, both sets of policies have now been in place for up to a quarter century. So, how are they working out for our kids and our society? We got some answers last week from a new report.
And they aren’t what a lot of people probably want to hear. A Washington-based group called the Advancement Project conducted a study of zero tolerance and test-based educational policies across the nation. The results were just published in a document called “Test, Punish and Push Out: How ‘Zero Tolerance’ and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth Into the School to Prison Pipeline.”
It makes devastating reading. While there is scanty evidence that zero tolerance policies do much good for students who are trying to learn, it seems very clear that there is no safety net for those who fail, especially those who end up expelled or driven out of school.
Even a well-intentioned high school dropout has little or no chance of making it in today’s world. What zero tolerance policies seem to do best is create a new manpower pool for state prison systems, at an enormous social and financial cost to society.
High-stakes testing has also been devastating, driving more students out of school, or into believing that success isn’t even an option for them. Today, Michigan teachers are worried that the situation will get even worse, thanks to the new requirements just enacted in an effort to get “Race to the Top” funding.
Those are legitimate worries. There’s nothing wrong with demanding that our schools provide a decent education. But as the Advancement Project’s report concludes, every student must be given a full and equal opportunity to receive a high-quality education.
If we don’t do that, it is pretty clear that the real losers won’t just be the millions of kids who fail, but our entire society as well.
All that we know of "The Advancement Project" from Jack Lessenberry's reporting is that it is a "Washington-based group."
Okay.
What kind of "Washington-based group"?
In truth, The Advancement Project is a "Washington and Los Angeles-based group." With a Board of Directors including such celebrity left-wingers as Harry Belafonte and Connie Rice. It is also closely linked to the SEIU (Service Emplyees' International Union) and the AFL-CIO, with whom some of its Directors are also officers.
I don't know about where and how the Advancement Project gets its funding. In five minutes of looking on the internet, I see that it is an organization strongly linked with ACORN and a host of other liberal activist organizations, participating in joint congresses with those groups.
None of this, alone, automatically negates The Advancement Project's research. A report from the group is not neccesarily unsound or invalid, based on who and what they are,politically.
But since most of us don't have time to check the data and to re-do the regression analyses involved in these kinds of studies, we have to rely on the rporting to give us at least a bit of the basic background; to know where it is that folks are coming from.
So, we expect our news reporters, the good ones, to simply identify sources and organizations in as much reasonable detail as possible, to be able to judge the material.
Uh, right?
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Posted by: Cynthia | February 04, 2010 at 01:01 PM
You might think "Zero Tolerance" is a playground issue — just a way for school administrators to deal with violent kids. If you did, you would be wrong. ZT is a mindset of black-and-white rules applied to a gray world.
Posted by: Account Deleted | August 15, 2010 at 07:55 AM
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Posted by: Account Deleted | August 15, 2010 at 07:55 AM