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1. Punishing Schools and a Zero Tolerance Culture
- University of Michigan Press
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Chapter 1 Punishing Schools and a Zero Tolerance Culture Our fear grows, I suggest, proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt. By slashing spending on educational, medical, and antipoverty programs for youths we adults have committed great violence against them. Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves, and onto strangers we imagine will attack them. —Barry Glassner (1999) The defining purpose of education is not to train students to take their place in either the corporate order or the existing society, but to encourage human agency as an act of social intervention. —Henry Giroux (2003b) On a chilly November morning we approached the side entrance doors at Suburbia High School (SHS) in Ohio to conduct half a dozen prearranged student and teacher interviews.1 We were met at the door by a teacher who told us in a tense, excited voice that the school was “in lockdown” for a random drug search and that if we came in we would be unable to leave for several hours. He asked if we still wanted to come in. We assured him that we did. We walked quickly through the halls, following our teacher-guide, as he explained to us that lockdowns were always a surprise and that this one had been announced only moments before our arrival. He said that once a lockdown was announced, it usually took about five minutes for every exit to be secured, including interior doors, effectively separating sections of the school and making movement between those sections difficult, if not impossible. When we asked him what the lockdown would mean in terms of procedure, he replied, “It means dogs. Uniforms. Nobody gets in or out.”2 This teacher offered to accompany us if we wanted to try to walk around during the lockdown; we did. We walked quickly through the school and between floors, hoping to catch a glimpse of the police offi- cers and their dogs and listening to our companion describe the procedures he had witnessed on prior occasions: “It’s really quite something when you see all of them lined up in military formation. The dogs are unbelievable—the training! They’re all German shepherds, big, and it’s really sort of bizarre to see them right before they come into the school, perfectly still, and at a word they split up because they have different things to do.”3 Moments later, through an interior window, we saw an officer with a dog walking around in a classroom; as we turned the corner we saw the students from that classroom standing outside the door. They had been instructed to leave their backpacks in a pile, and the officer brought the dog in to search the room and their belongings while the students waited in the hall. If the dog sniffs any contraband, we were told—if the dog “tags” anything—the owner of the offending backpack is asked to come into the classroom and the door is shut. The student is then questioned by the officer and an administrator or teacher while the backpack is searched and the substance examined. If further action is deemed necessary, it is taken after the student has been escorted to the principal’s office, where parents, police officers, or other officials might be called.4 Most of the students waiting outside their classroom chatted quietly; we moved on to a large open area, the Senior Commons, which looks like the atrium café of a five-star hotel, with huge panes of glass, sunshine streaming in, brand new tables and chairs, and gleaming tile floors. We arrived just as three officers with dogs approached from the opposite hallway. We stopped about thirty feet from the nearest tables and watched. There were fifty to sixty students occupying the tables, and the officers stopped a moment to speak with each other before proceeding. We were immediately struck by an overwhelming impression: this was a paramilitary unit. There’s no other way to describe it. Their uniforms are designed on a military model, and every officer we saw was physically imposing: big shoulders and chests with weight-lifter arms that strained the fabric of fitted, button-down black shirts. We did not see any women or thin, small men. Every officer we saw was a white male with a short, military-style haircut. They wore no hats, and their paratrooper pants were tucked into black, lug-soled, lace-up jackboots. Their heavy belts held...