Schools That Turn Students into Outcasts Are Unamerican
March 4, 2014 in Economics
By Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff
Former Chief Judge of New York State Judith S. Kaye always makes necessary sense, as she did when she recently wrote this in the opinion pages of The New York Times:
“As universal pre-K and the Common Core standards dominate the headlines, we cannot overlook a third subject that deserves top billing: keeping children in school and out of courts” (Letters, The New York Times, Feb. 22).
Kaye was writing in response to an op-ed that had run in the Times last month. In it, Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, the respective heads of the California Endowment and the United States programs for the Open Society Foundations, wrote: “Large numbers of students are kicked out, typically for nonviolent offenses, and suspensions have become the go-to response for even minor misbehavior, like carrying a plastic water gun to elementary school …
“The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that the number of secondary school students suspended or expelled increased by some 40 percent between 1972-73 and 2009-10 … A study of nearly one million Texas students found that those suspended or expelled for violations at the discretion of school officials were almost three times as likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year” (“Real Discipline in School,” Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, The New York Times, Feb. 17).
The “pipeline” that takes students from school to prison has become a national cliche. This mass creation of student outcasts is the product of “zero tolerance” policies in schools across this land of the free and home of the brave.
Only one organization, The Rutherford Institute in Charlottesville, Va., headed by constitutional lawyer and defender John Whitehead, has continuously intervened. Whitehead and his team of lawyers have represented in court — at no charge — these victims of zero tolerance. He also reports on these and other cases in his commentary at rutherford.org, which is distributed to hundreds of newspapers. Moreover, these penetrating reports and accounts of different cases also appear online in news websites and in blogs.
He is the Paul Revere of national alerts to preserve the constitutional liberties of current and future generations of self-recognizable Americans.
Here is such a case whose characteristics typically merit Whitehead’s expertise (and which he wrote about last year):
At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., 10-year-old “fifth grader Johnny Jones asked his teacher for a pencil during class. Jones walked …read more
Source: OP-EDS
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