Stratford High School in
Goose Creek, South Carolina, could be as infamous as Columbine High,
evoking images of terror in the hallways of a public school as chilling
as the Colorado school’s day of infamy in April 1999.
On November 5, 2003, local
police conducted an early morning, commando-style drug raid at the
request of Stratford’s principal. It was all captured on video, thanks
to surveillance cameras the school installed to monitor student behavior.
Guns were drawn as the cops ordered dozens of students down on the
floor, handcuffed them and brought in a dog to sniff the students’ backpacks.
The dog signaled drugs 12 times, and not surprisingly, no drugs were
found (drug-sniffing dogs are notoriously unreliable). But the gun-toting
cops and dog had their effect. As one 15-year-old boy told a reporter, “I
froze up. I didn’t know what to do. Everybody thought it was a terrorist
attack.”
These days, it’s getting
hard to tell the terrorists from those supposedly protecting us from
them. At Stratford High, 17 students have filed suit against the
police and school district claiming their constitutional rights to
due process and to protection from unreasonable search and seizure
were violated. But they will be fighting an uphill battle, no doubt. “Student
rights” has become an oxymoron over the last decade, as local, state
and federal laws – as well as the U.S. Supreme Court – have stripped
young people of their rights as they enter the schoolhouse door.
What’s more, those laws and the courts that enforce them in the educational
arena have promoted the transformation of U.S. public schools into
prison-like institutions, where metal detectors, surveillance cameras,
random drug searches, uniformed police and zero tolerance policies
are part of the curriculum.
Welcome to Lock Down High.
Public
schools have tumbled so far down the slippery slope toward the model
of a correctional
facility, where policing strategies substitute for enlightened
pedagogy, that most Americans take for granted that schools and
their pupils are out of control. The reality is far different.
Today’s youth commit fewer violent crimes – in schools and outside – than
they did a decade ago. School violence in fact, is at an all time
low and has been falling steadily since the early 1990s, according
to yearly reports from the federal National Center for Education
Statistics and the Department of Justice. Drug use is down, too,
among the young despite a culture of adult drug and alcohol abuse
that’s excused, if not rewarded (think Rush Limbaugh’s Oxycontin
addiction, or the reported substance abuse of young George W. Bush).
In New York City, as in other urban centers, major crimes in schools
have steadily declined: from 2001 to 2002, they dropped 14 percent;
last year, the decline was 8 percent.
Yet statistics about safer
schools and a generation of young people better than their parents
by many indicators, have been trumped by a mythology of violent
youth and schools whose genesis dates to the Reagan years. Back
then, conservative criminologists James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio
fueled the myth with predictions of a new juvenile “superpredator,” their
rhetoric steeped in racist stereotypes of young Black and Latino
males as a more vicious breed of criminal. When juvenile violent
crime spiked in the early 1990s and began to fall, the myth was
invigorated by a series of splashy, school shootings that claimed
multiple victims. Columbine was only the most dramatic because
the death toll – 15 – was the highest. Jonesboro, Arkansas, Paducah,
Kentucky and Springfield, Oregon all had their school shootings,
and in each case, the perpetrators were mentally disturbed white
males with ready access to firearms. The superpredators, it would
seem, were not ghetto thugs, but suburban outcasts spawned by a
culture of alienation and gun worship.
Columbine only pumped
up the zero-tolerance frenzy and crackdown on students in public
schools that was well underway across the country. And while consequences
for all young people have been felt in classrooms from San Francisco
to Cleveland to Miami, the effects of zero tolerance and policing
in our public schools have been most devastating for Black children.
A veritable epidemic of suspensions, triggered by harsh disciplinary
policies, ejects 3 million students every year from school. And
of those, more than one third are Black students although they
represent just 17 percent of all public school students. Suspensions
disrupt children’s education, put them at risk for academic failure
and increase the chances of high school drop-out, according to
ample research. In some jurisdictions, suspensions are increasingly
accompanied by police arrests for disorderly conduct and minor
violations of disciplinary codes that used to be handled by principals.
Far from improving a student’s behavior, suspensions too often
for Black youth begin a downward spiral into the criminal justice
system.
Stratford High is no exception
to the rule of racial disparity in how zero tolerance and criminalizing
of students plays out. Black students comprised just 20 percent
of the school’s 2,700 students. But of 107 students rounded up
in the drug raid, two-thirds were Black youth. This lesson in racial
profiling wasn’t lost on students. One white student told The
New York Times she considered the cops racist because, “I looked
down the long hall and saw the police lining up all these black
students.” In the same article, a Black student described how cops
descended on her with guns drawn as she exited a bathroom: "I
assumed that they were trying to protect us, that it was like Columbine,
that somebody got in the school that was crazy or dangerous. But
then a police officer pointed a gun at me.”
Stratford High sure isn’t
like Columbine. In February, I attended a forum on zero tolerance
in the public schools organized by the Philadelphia Citizens for
Children and Youth. An education specialist with the group told
how he’d recently met a young woman who had attended Columbine
High and was present during the shootings. He asked her how things
had changed after the incident, were there metal detectors and
guards? Oh, no, she told him. There are no metal detectors. But
the hallways were crawling with counselors to offer support and
comfort. Investing in human resources, not hardware, was the prophylaxis
Columbine administrators – and presumably parents in that affluent,
white suburban enclave – chose for keeping students safe.
Columbine-style incidents
are rare despite the exaggerated media attention and widespread
perception that school violence is rampant. That isn’t to say physical
violence and disruptive behaviors aren’t a problem in many schools.
The question, though, is what conditions in schools foster negative
behaviors and encourage youth to drop out. A report, “Equity
or Exclusion,” by the National Centers for Schools and Communities
at Fordham University in November 2003, answers that clearly. The
report reveals the overwhelming correlation between high suspension
rates and racially segregated, resource-starved schools. Those
schools with the highest suspension rates were the most overcrowded,
with the least qualified and educated teachers, the fewest extracurricular
activities, library resources or functioning computers – and the
highest percentage of Black and Latino students.
The racial discrimination
inherent in New York City’s public schools – where majority white
and Asian Stuyvesant High in posh Tribeca can produce Westinghouse
Science Award winners while majority Black JFK High in the Bronx
produces students with criminal records – is hardly surprising.
And neither is it an accident. In New York as elsewhere, the educational
tracking of students steers some into achievement and opportunity,
while others are funneled into the prison track. In his article, “Urban
Pedagogies and the Celling of Adolescents of Color,” (Social Justice,
Vol. 27, No. 3, 2000) Garrett Albert Duncan understands the U.S.
public education system in the context of the prison-industrial
complex, where investment in corrections outstrips that in schools
in California, New York and other states with large urban centers
and Black and Latino populations. “Urban pedagogies effectively
serve an economic function: to channel young people of color in
the U.S. into the prison system,” he writes. Forget the narrative
of education as the “great equalizer,” Duncan says. Historically
public schools have always functioned on one level to prepare a
workforce and today that means preparing Black and Latino students
for “subordinate roles in the economy and, by extension, society.” Racism
and the economic imperatives of a postindustrial society, Garret
argues, intersect to create an urban pedagogy that works on and
through Black and Latino students to make them an ill-educated,
superfluous population for whom prison is a logical option.
A professor of Education
and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis,
Missouri, Duncan told me he had his ‘eureka’ moment when doing
research in that city’s public schools. He came across a state-of-the-art
computer lab that was locked and unused because necessary parts
were missing and the principal never completed the hook-ups. “It
finally hit me over the head in St. Louis. What I saw in these
schools are the same things W.E.B. Dubois talked about: placing
an easily identifiable group of students out of competition with
white kids. What would our society be like if every child was educated
to full potential? It would be utter chaos because we don’t have
jobs for every child.”
In Lock Down High, where
school budgets are invested in surveillance and security hardware,
on more school cops, not better educated teachers or enrichment
programs, functioning computers and well-stocked libraries, students
are doing exactly what is expected of them. The system works.
Annette Fuentes is
a New York freelance journalist and adjunct professor at
the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. With a 2002
fellowship on children and family policy from the Philip
Merrill School of Journalism at the University of Maryland, she
researched school violence, zero tolerance policies and theschool-to-prison
track in public schools.
|