The Clampdown

The principal perceived the clearly satiric poster as threatening, and because the school district had in place a zero-tolerance policy that mandated automatic suspension for making threats, Heitner was suspended from high school for two weeks, weeks that happened to correspond with some important exams for the first quarter of the year. As a consequence, his quarter grades -- the last sent off to many of the colleges he was applying to -- included a D in calculus, which, since he planned to major in engineering, was highly problematic. By the end of the semester, Heitner had pulled his grades back up and still managed to graduate last spring as valedictorian. But he was not accepted at UC Berkeley, his first-choice school. Now a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, Heitner has put the incident behind him. But he questions the wisdom of zero tolerance. “These policies are much more about protecting the school administration from legal problems than they are about protecting students,” he says. “They hurt students.”

If the get-tough mindset has created problems for elite students like Heitner, it has been even harder on those not at the top either academically or socioeconomically. Last year, Harvard’s Civil Rights Project, in conjunction with the Advancement Project, took a hard look at zero tolerance, concluding in their report “Opportunities Suspended: The Devastating Consequences of Zero Tolerance and School Discipline Policies” that the results of zero tolerance, in many cases, “defy common sense,” and that “children in kindergarten through 12th grade receive harsh punishments, often for minor infractions that pose no threat to safety.” Furthermore, the report noted, “African-American, Latino and disabled children bear the brunt of the consequences of these policies.”

Although statistics over time are sketchy and unreliable, it would appear that in the years since zero-tolerance policies took effect, school suspensions have risen dramatically. And nonwhite students are suspended at far greater rates. Data from the U.S. Department of Education cited in the “Opportunities Suspended” document concluded “that while African-American children only represent 17% of public school enrollment nationally, they constitute 32% of out-of-school suspensions.” During the school year 1997-98, according to the Department of Education, one in eight black students was suspended, while only one in 30 white students was suspended. Moreover, one-third of all students permanently expelled from school were black.

The country‘s recent harsh crackdown on teenagers might be understandable if it had come in response to a real threat. But in fact, juvenile-crime rates have dropped dramatically in the last 10 years. In most ways that can be measured, teenagers are doing extremely well. As a group, they’re smoking less and drinking less. They‘re volunteering more. They have higher IQs. They’re more accepting of gender and ethnic differences. They have the lowest teen-birth rate of the last 60 years. They‘re better educated. “This is a great bunch of kids,” says William Strauss, co-author of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. “They’re working much harder. They‘re smarter. They’re out volunteering in the community. It‘s important that we understand that.”

So why don’t we seem to? In part, it‘s that media portrayals of teens have focused disproportionately on crime, leaving a majority of people believing -- falsely -- that kids are responsible for the bulk of crimes committed. Teenagers are constantly portrayed by the media as being in crisis. “Our perceptions of kids are saturated with misconceptions perpetuated by the media,” says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute. “And this is the climate in which we’re making policy.”

Strauss believes the get-tough mentality can be traced directly to how baby boomers were raised. “The boomers were born when the world was reeling from the deeds of Hitler and Stalin. There was a conscious effort to raise idealistic children who‘d resist authority and reject totalitarianism,” he says. “Now there’s a feeling on the part of that generation that we‘ve gone too far and need to get back to traditional virtues like honor and duty.”

Still, the gap between what kids are really like and how we are treating them is disturbing. “I feel sorry for today’s kids,” says Schiraldi. “They‘re so much better behaved, but they don’t get any chance to mess up even in the most normal ways.”

Sue Horton, former editor of the Weekly, is currently on a University of Maryland fellowship looking at perceptions vs. reality of the American teenager.