A Mesh Backpack!!? how could that even carry everything, I remember having to carry practically my entire locker full of books the whole day. We never got enough time to go to our lockers and I always wondered then what the point of lockers really was…

Kafkaesque is a good word to describe middle school.

Example: “Administrators saw three students at the Union Colony Charter School in Greeley, Colo., playing with a water gun. According to the school’s interpretation of the state’s “zero tolerance” weapons law — which mandates suspension of students who “carry, bring, use or possess a firearm or firearm facsimile at school” — the unnamed boys have been suspended. According to standard practice in “weapons” cases, the boys must now face expulsion hearings.”

There are more examples are collected here – http://www.thisistrue.com/zt.html

I know when my brother was in school he was suspended for having a broken rubber band – they said he could use it to shoot at someone and disrupt class. These are the kind of bullshit policies that are supposed to keep us safe? I don’t think so.

As for the US jail population, it always makes me laugh at how many people are imprisoned in the “land of the free”. Cognitive dissonance seems to be becoming a widespread problem.

Did you read the article?

me: “What would Jesus have to say about ‘zero tolerance’ policies?”

him: “Uh….”

The author is talking about kids who don’t break rules, and are still growing up with constant surveillance, rules taken to ridiculous levels, and punishment with no appeal as the expected norm. “Respect for authority” translates to “control by intimidation, bullying, and threats.” Every student is treated like a criminal, and they’re learning that that’s just how it is.

He also argues that zero-tolerance rules and surveillance don’t seem to reduce actual crimes or trouble at school.

swiss army knives
multitools
exacto knives
insulin syringes
stuff they brought for show and tell (e.g. Grandpa’s Korean War souvenir)
Sikh ceremonial blades
An unloaded, disassembled, cased rifle because the conservation club’s going hunting

of course, “zero tolerance” policies are inevitably applied unevenly in the end, too.

The argument isn’t that rules against serious infractions shouldn’t exist, it’s that administrators should have discretion in how penalties are applied, so incidents where “that’s dumb, don’t do that again,” or even “I can see how this situation wasn’t forseen by the rules; carry on,” should suffice are instead ruining lives, involving the criminal justice system, and teaching a terrible civics lesson to the student body at large.

To #1 because of one size fits all rules means that a cap gun or a drawing of a gun is punished exactly the same as using an actual firearm to menace other students.

Students should be schooled to disrupt the standing establishment as required, not to become used to a Stazi police state.

If there is to be an armed cop on campus he should never be allowed to do anything other than act as an armed response unit, none of this resident snoop, bag search, and drug investigator crap. An on site officer is like a corporate legal department, since you are paying them to sit there they might as well earn their keep. Those idle police hands are a real devils playground.

While I was in school, there was a rule that was along the lines of “playing cards, betting, and other forms of gambling are not allowed on campus”. The administration liked to interpret this as saying that a deck of cards was banned… even if the cards were unusable for playing a game (if the cards had been heavily modified for a magic trick, for instance). They were completely unable to understand the difference between “playing cards” (the action, a form of gambling) and “playing cards” (the object, not a form of gambling).

I would be tempted to start a satirical “BAN THE SPORKS” campaign to point out the absurdity of these sorts of bans if I weren’t so afraid that people would take the whole thing seriously, and that sporks might actually get banned. (I’ll give up my spork when they pry it from my cold, dead, greasy fingers!)

Back when I was in school, my brother was attending the same school. I was standing on a balcony and see my brother walking by underneath. He shouts up that he has lost his pencil, and that he will get in trouble if he does not have one. I drop him down a pencil. A teacher sees, and I get suspended for assault. No questions asked, will not allow me to explain myself.

Going back even further, in elementary school. I’m having lunch with a few friends. I have a pudding. My friend has cookies. I wanted to trade my pudding for his cookies. He agrees. I hand him my pudding. I reach over the table and grab the cookies. I get detention for stealing. Teacher won’t let me explain, just sees me taking cookies and writes me up.

Beyond the rules being “black and white”, they also always seem to assume the worst in kids, and any excuse they have is just that, an excuse. If I am going to get in trouble when I am not doing anything wrong, why bother being good?

But seriously, the author isn’t saying any of that. Of course a child who brings a potentially dangerous item to school should be made to understand the gravity of their actions. But there’s a difference between a third grader bringing a cub scout cutlery set for show-and-tell and a high-school gang member with a blade in their boot.

As much as fear may be in play, I think it’s also symptomatic of our increasingly lazy/desperate educational bureaucracy. They have neither the interest nor the resources to effectively deal with infractions on an individual basis.

Obviously the rule existed as a zero tolerance policy for serious offenses like guns and weapons.

Like the article stated…it now encompasses an even larger list of offenses, some of which do not warrant a blanket fix.

Fighting for example.

Fighting is unacceptable to be doing in school, but I was taught that if the standard issue methods of reporting a bully do not work (notifying a teach, speaking with a principal, having principal speak with bully’s parents etc), the next time the bully gives you a hard time and puts you in an uncomfortable situation, you punch him in the nose.

Nobody forgets what it feels like to get punched in the nose. Bully’s pick on easy targets, and getting punched in the nose by a target does not make it easy.

While that would warrant some type of suspension or disciplinary action, it does NOT fall into any stupid zero tolerance policy. God forbid administration in schools actually has to do work and sort through the variables involved in a situation.

If our educational system were functioning (and I mean a system which includes parental involvement) the kids would all be smart enough to know better.

Kids have been suspended or expelled for such things as Cub Scout utensil kits, Tylenol, and similar nonsense.

Kids also assault each other and teachers, vandalize, and occasionally more.

It’s a set of gray-head cliches, I suppose, to say that the failure is that of parenting, that we are seeing an erosion of society’s fabric, that as such foolish, anti- or asocial behavior becomes more commonplace, the sadly predictable overreaction to it will become ever more extreme.

So be it.

Conviction without trial is only a symptom of the failures described above.

These are systems with feedback. All feedback systems work by taking an ideal and subtracting reality. This difference is the error signal: the bigger the error, the more correction is required to bring the system back to its ideal set point. The part that does correcting and acting upon the environment is the control which uses the error signal to correct the output of the plant which alters the outside environment. The output of the plant is then resampled to provide feedback.

Anything that “regulates” is a control system thus this includes the legal and political systems themselves plus the executive functions that obey the definitions and outputs of these. The ideal set point is what laws define. The error generation and control may or may not be defined in the law – often enough in the US laws get passed which define none of this nor how they should correct. The plant is the executive branch which includes school administrations. The environment includes students and their behaviors – the plant tries to control the behaviors (as far as they are detectable) through feedback.

Insisting on zero tolerance is precisely insisting that the ideal must equal zero and that you must measure zero in the environment.

In an ideal world this is possible but in the real world it is impossible: there are Bayesian sampling limits, noise floors and resolution limitations to measurements that assure that zero can’t be measured in the first place. Bayesian sampling error looms large here – it is often impossible to with modest measurement to do better than 50% chance actual correctness when the sampled quantity is a needle in the haystack (e.g. preventing students from going postal). The false positives are more likely than true positives.

But worse: 0 – 0 = 0 and generally “very small” – “very small” = “very small with even more inaccuracy” so that the error signal of your feedback control system is essentially nonexistent.

There’s another name for this: an open-loop, uncontrolled system. There are even technically interesting reasons from complex analysis that show how tiny error signals are equivalent to no feedback at all. It’s simply a mathematical imperative that a control system with zero tolerance *must fail* to achieve its goals entirely.

So in the name of controlling something you are in fact not controlling it at all – a very small excursion in the “plant” output is completely undetected and undetectable – the very opposite of the goal of negative feedback control systems. In fact this is an excellent way of creating a Black Swan failure.

This is what is required with any large organization because the organization itself enables dead wood, free riders and ethically-unconstrained behaviors by its members.

The only time knives ever came up in a negative context was in metal shop, where we were strictly not allowed to make knives or anything weapon-like (even though the teacher did have a battle-axe on the wall :-)

There was one time that a girl asked one of my high school teachers for a hall pass to go to the school nurse to get aspirin. His reply was that the pass was on his desk and he could trust her not to steal any aspirin out of the drawer under it while he was looking the other way writing on the board.

And for a decade or so, before Reaganoid political correctness set in, kids were allowed to smoke in a couple of designated areas outside next the the school building. For those of us who didn’t smoke, it was great, because they could successfully enforce not smoking in the bathroom, and they could get everybody to clean up their cigarette butts.

For the most part, the various school administrations were reasonable and proportionate about things, though there were a couple of hardass vice principals who sometimes overreacted. And there was occasional bullying and fighting in elementary school, and occasional fights in junior high though most of them were off the property after school, but for the most part we were treated like good kids, and teaching us responsibility as we grew up was part of our education.

But this is, in fact, what it means to be an American citizen today, is it not?

How about instead of teaching “Zero Tolerance” we teach DUE PROCESS . . . ???

How about instead of teaching “Just Say NO” we teach the Bill of Rights ???