How Zero Tolerance Policies in the 1990s Caused Our Modern Puritanism
The notice was posted on all four doors entering the school. On pink (or maybe fuchsia) paper, in block letters big enough to read from the curb was the headline: ZERO TOLERANCE POLICY.
Underneath this draconian bark was a list of behaviors by students that would now result in immediate suspension. The list included everything from chewing gum in class to bullying other students. It was a laundry list of control. The policy took away any teacher discretion when dealing with kids who might need a bit and aped the attitude if not the specific policies of President Clinton's recently passed omnibus bill known as the "Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act."
The school was now officially tough on crime.
Except most of the list of offenses hardly felt like crimes. Most were venial sins at best. I knew the gum chewing thing was from our librarian. She was a nasty woman who had, over a career that lasted thirty years or so, learned to love books but hate children. And, man, did she hate them. Every faculty meeting she brought up the gum chewing, the gum stuck under the desks, under the chairs, in the pages of the dictionary. She was a woman obsessed.
Effectively, the jackboot of authoritarian rule had descended upon the necks of children.
At the next faculty meeting, I argued that this was not going to solve the problems we had but make them worse.
“The kids who are already following most of the rules will continue to. The kids who break them will now only break them more.”
“Just because that’s how you would react doesn’t mean the children will,” replied Mrs. Johnson, a math teacher who ran her classroom like Mussolini ran his trains.
She was right about me—I bent and broke rules like it was my personal creed. Somewhere along the line of two-year old baby cussing his mother out in a grocery store—
The story is somewhat legendary in my family but the gist of it was that my then seventeen-year old mother took me to the store. She set me in the cart like you do with babies. As we rounded a corner, my little monkey hands grabbed a bag of Pinto beans. She put them back.
“We don’t need beans.”
“I want those fucking beans!” I screamed.
“We don’t need the motherfucking beans!”
“Gimme the FUCKING BEANS!”
All the while, the spectacle of a toddler cursing like a veteran about Pinto Beans and his child-mother cursing right back at him likely caused many adults in the place some measure of dismay
—and being hired to teach seventh graders about music, my compass was almost always pointed a bit west, a bit east, but rarely due north.
Mrs. Johnson was wrong about the kids.
Just as I thought, the students who were already prone to chewing gum, tagging the bathrooms with markers, gathering in loud packs in the hallways, and picking on the smaller kids flaunted the fact that ZERO TOLERANCE just meant they were suspended and sent home more often. The students who were on the rule-following side got angry. They tattled more often.
“Jerome was tagging the boy’s locker room!”
“Tanya is chewing gum!”
“Billy Hash flipped me off and called me a fag!”
The school had just north of 1,500 students and two security officers. These two were hopelessly outnumbered. This meant that it was up to the teachers to enforce this new policy while also trying to, you know, teach.
The librarian loved the policy and her new role. In her opinion, less kids in the library was a good thing and certainly less work. Mrs. Johnson suddenly found herself in the hallways more than her classroom and started complaining that we needed more security officers on school grounds. I, typically, decided to ignore the policy and, as I had before the notices, use discipline as a series of teachable moments.
Granted, my discipline was creative.
Billy Hash spent a day with wooden popsicle sticks and packing tape on his hands affixing his ‘fuck you’ fingers up and saluting for a day to teach him to avoid flipping others off in school. Instead of suspending Jerome, he spent the day washing off tagging all over the school with brill-o and soap. I solved the gum chewing thing (at least on my floor) by creating a ‘gum sculpture’ that any kid caught chewing was required to contribute their mastication object upon.
What I expected was that either I’d get written up for ignoring the policy or that the policy would fade away as so many of these sorts of policies do. When the work involved in policing a thousand+ students becomes more than the benefits usually it just goes to background.
What I didn’t expect was that my rule-following students would add me to list of offenders.
“Mr. Hall didn’t suspend Javier for pushing Gabriel in the hallway!”
“Mr. Hall let Maria call Julia a bitch!”
“Mr. Hall was supposed to kick Billy Hash out of class instead of just talk to him!”
I wasn’t the only teacher in the building trying to use these moments to educate the monkeys on how people behave in civilization so I wasn’t the only teacher tattled on but I was the one most targeted because I had spoken up against the policy in the first place.
Soon it wasn’t just the kids calling me out. It was their parents, too.
“I understand that ‘wetback’ is a racial slur and that Billy Hash should never use it. I also think Billy is thirteen-years old and is not so far gone that he can’t be taught that rather than instantly punished for it.”
“That’s bullshit! My daughter will not be called names at school. That Hash kid is a fucking monster and should be in a prison instead of a middle school!”
“I hear you. Did you know that Billy’s uncle is in prison right now? And that his dad just got out? I’d like to hope that with a bit of education and compassion, we could help him avoid the same fate.”
“Fuck that! Isabella doesn’t feel safe in class! This school has a zero tolerance policy and we expect you to follow it!”
Isabella would be roughly thirty-six years old now and would classify as a Millennial. Her kids are the protocol-typical Gen Z crowd. Both she and her kids seem to operate still with this zero tolerance policy in mind. They have become the hall monitors for their collegiate experience, the snitches of social media, and the ‘Karens’ of every Walmart and Starbucks in America.
It’s our fault they’re like this.
We taught them with our zero tolerance policies to forego context or nuance and call for maximum punishment for even the slightest of mistakes. We taught them that the only teachable moment is expulsion, the only appropriate response to insult is absolute exile, and that one should always ‘call the manager’ before accepting any sort of slight.
They are the children of Purell, the offspring requiring helmets and knee-pads, the progeny who, because we didn’t want them to feel pain or discomfort, feel it in every interaction.
Billy Hash was suspended after multiple infractions. Mrs. Johnson was thrilled as was our librarian. They couldn’t stand Billy. Sure enough, a few years later, Billy dropped out of school and graduated into a cell in Joliet, Illinois. Carrying on the family tradition as it was set out for him.
We let Billy down. We let Isabella down.
Now they come for us. They grew up believing in the Puritanical resistance to redemption and no second chances for mistakes. They grew up believing in zero tolerance. Go ahead. Make a joke about George Floyd or rape or climate change. You will reap the whirlwind of what we were sewing.
You will be met with zero tolerance perhaps even written on pink (or fuchsia) paper.
