I think you’re painting school administrators as more cunning than they really are. The truth is that zero-tolerance gained prominence because it creates a system that allows the administrators to bypass making judgement calls.

If two kids fight and one of them is clearly the agressor and you punish the aggressor as such; you now have to deal with angry parents who can’t believe their precious snowflake spends recess making other kids eat mud. Theirs a flipside to it too, one kid throws a rock and gets the shit beat out of him and then goes crying to mommy about the bullies at school. Aggressor/Victim status is rarley clear cut in schools fights. Kids are manipulative, and parents are easily manipulated, all to the chagrin of school officials.

I would contend that dealing with those situations is their JOB, its what they signed up for. But instead they have adopted zero-tolerance policies and when the parents complain, legitamately or not, they can wash their hands of it and say “its school policy”.

Did we turn her in, thus ensuring the girl would be expelled and face criminal charges?

Nope.

Another girl, Dana, took the gun from the purse, wrapped it up in a sweater, and said nothing. She took the gun home to her father, who would hold onto it until the “unstable” girl’s parents contacted him.

The authorities were bypassed and the girl’s parents had to confront the situation.

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/school-district-launches-hr-investigation-controve/nGJfJ/

The fact that the administrators gave victim and bully equal punishment kind of destroyed any chance of someone speaking up about it.

I think that this deliberate moral equivalence between aggressive violence and self-defense is not accidental. I think that they want to create citizens who will equate the violence of the state with legitimate force and question their own right to defend themselves.

Well, there was this one-armed man…

Radley’s piece in 2009 touched on it a bit more:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2009/12/haley_barbours_bizarre_pardon_record.html

The guy was working at the governor’s mansion, so Haley may have just liked the cut of his jib. Would like to know the whole story.

It would be great if people recognize that corporation/industry-favoring regulations are NOT free market economics. Bush wasn’t hands off, free market he was always help the big guy who’s executive is my friend. Just a raging corporatist.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/09/mississippi-governor-haley-barbour-frees-murderer-who-was-recently-denied/

I realize this has absolutely nothing to do with anything Radley posted today, but it struck me as something worth mentioning since Radley wrote an article about Barbour’s bizarre pardoning tendencies for Slate a couple of years ago.

The best advice you can give a kid in a State Indoctrination Center is to beat the crap out of another student in a crowded cafeteria on the first day of school. Instant alpha status, with all the attendant attention from the ladies and the respect of the betas. And you might even get a 10-day furlough too.

The State is so good at perverse incentives. If only knew then what I know now.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone. “It means just what I choose it to mean – neither more or less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Fucking words! How do they work?

It was a lot like solitary, we could only read, no one was allowed to talk, we were served lunch seperate from other kids, also in silence. And we were given additional work that “would be graded”, which I’m pretty sure was thrown in the garbage by my real teachers.

Fights were rampant in the school, but unless it happened directly in front of a teacher they wouldn’t bother to do anything about it. The fact that the administrators gave victim and bully equal punishment kind of destroyed any chance of someone speaking up about it.

The funny thing is that as a kid I had heard the “schools are prisons” analogy and thought it was hyperbolic, but as an adult I’m less sure about that.

Unfortunately, the punishment was four days of “in-school” suspension. So it’s actually more like four days of hard-core prison-prep indoctrination, often meted out by a surly former phys ed teacher (“SIT STILL, SHUT UP! IF YOU DIDN’T WANT TO BE HERE, YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE FOLLOWED THE RULES!”).

Really, I don’t see why you expect the this young man’s punishment to be a vacation. The article never said the kid was a cop, after all.

You have a point. I’m not against Public School teachers having a union. I’m against Public Schools having a lock on nearly all education money from the State. We need Vouchers. And while we can’t get them, we need to fund private charities for children who would otherwise have no options.

Break up the near-monopoly of the Public School System, and I think (I HOPE) that a lot of other education-related stupidities will begin to sort themselves out.

Four days off from a State indoctrination center sounds like a pretty good ride to me.

No, CyniCAl, you only get the days off from the State Indoctrination Center if it’s the 10-day one. The four day one is “in-school” suspension, so you have to go and be ‘punished’ there.

Four days off from a State indoctrination center sounds like a pretty good ride to me.