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Old school: Districts rediscover teacher discretion, drop ‘zero tolerance’ policies
So-called “zero tolerance” is out and grownup discretion is back in at schools around the country, after years of policies that punished children for everything from playing cops and robbers at recess to chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.
Educators from New York to Los Angeles and at numerous districts in between are rethinking policies intended to render classroom justice blind, but which produced dozens of cases in which kids as young as kindergarten paid dearly for behavior that would have been addressed by a simple scolding in a different era.
“We need discretion in imposing punishment,” said Elizabeth Rose, longtime New York public high school teacher and author of the memoir “Yo Miz!: 1 teacher + 25 schools = 1 wacky year.”
So-called “zero tolerance” is out and grownup discretion is back in at schools around the country, after years of policies that punished children for everything from playing cops and robbers at recess to chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.
Educators from New York to Los Angeles and at numerous districts in between are rethinking policies intended to render classroom justice blind, but which produced dozens of cases in which kids as young as kindergarten paid dearly for behavior that would have been addressed by a simple scolding in a different era.
“We need discretion in imposing punishment,” said Elizabeth Rose, longtime New York public high school teacher and author of the memoir “Yo Miz!: 1 teacher + 25 schools = 1 wacky year.”