It is unfortunate Rev. Jesse Jackson did not know when to declare victory in Decatur and go home.
Yes, “victory,” although you would hardly guess that from most of the news reports and commentary that has erupted nationwide in the wake of his caper there.
You also would not guess from the rough rhetoric or the rising use of “zero-tolerance” disciplinary policies in schools that school violence actually has been declining nationwide in recent years.
In a case that has become a national symbol of conflicts over zero tolerance, Jackson came to Decatur to defend six black male students who had been expelled from high school for two years after a massive brawl that almost emptied part of a stadium during a high school football game.
Within days, he was able, with Gov. George Ryan’s intervention, to get that suspension reduced to one year and enrollment for the teens in an alternative school.
As a compromise, it was almost elegant. It erased the two-year punishment that just about everyone agrees in hindsight was too stiff. It satisfied the community’s need to have some punishment and remove the youths from their school population. It also gave the youths an opportunity to resume their studies and graduate on time, if they wished.
But instead of accepting that compromise, Jackson proceeded to protest the expulsions. Jackson insisted on immediate reinstatement for the students. When the Decatur School Board refused, Jackson took them to federal court to have the expulsions rescinded. As a result, he has snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.
The setback came last week when Judge Michael McCuskey ruled the board acted appropriately in disciplining the youths for the Sept. 17 fight.
“The citizens and students of Decatur should be able to go to a high school football game without worrying about a violent confrontation erupting in the stands,” he wrote in an opinion posted on the Internet.
No doubt about that. But the question is, how best can a safe school environment be imposed?
“Zero tolerance,” the imposition of stiff penalties even for offenses as minor as playing a boom box too loud, has caught on among educators across the country since the late 1980s. They were further encouraged by President Clinton’s signing the Gun-Free Schools Act in 1994, which mandated a one-year expulsion for weapons in school. Zero-tolerance policies tightened further in the wake of mass shootings in rural and suburban schools in recent years.
But Jackson rightfully objected to the severity of the two-year expulsion imposed in Decatur in the wake of a fight that involved no weapons. That’s one of the problems with zero-tolerance policies. If a simple one-on-one fight can result in a yearlong expulsion, for example, a bleacher-clearing brawl almost automatically triggers a knee-jerk, two-year expulsion.
In two telephone conversations I had with Jackson before the ruling, Jackson rightfully objected to the way school officials lumped all of the six cases together, as if the students were all alike. They are individuals. At least a couple were chronic truants, but at least two more were good students who were only a few credit hours short of graduation.
Jackson correctly pointed out that the consequences of zero-tolerance policies have fallen disproportionately on blacks, as evidenced by statistics the youths’ lawyers produced in court. They showed that 82 percent of the students expelled from Decatur schools over the past three years have been African-American, even though blacks make up just 48 percent of the student body. A recent national study by the Applied Research Center showed black students were expelled two to three times more often than whites.
Unfortunately, that study did not analyze whether the nature of white students’ offenses was significantly less severe than those of black students. That’s important, because there are many other factors beside race that can lead to the disparity. Just as the Decatur youths should have been judged as individuals, not as a group, so should the individual cases that the statistics represent.
At best, Jackson has alerted school districts to the need to judge young people as individuals and not as groups, whether you are imposing punishment or trying to get it lifted.
As a nation, we have shown great enthusiasm for kicking dangerous and alienated kids out of school. We need to summon up similar enthusiasm for helping troubled youths to reconnect and perform better in school.
