“No Tolerance” Policy Means a “No Brain” Policy

Rawstory / AP is reporting that “School officials suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates”.

“http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fnation%2F2007-08-22-ariz-suspension_N.htm%3Fcsp%3D34

This sounds like the school is enforcing a “no tolerance” policy. This is a pet peeve of mine.

A no-tolerance policy is usually established after something happens and some kind of action is necessary to demonstrate the some thing is being done. A No Tolerance policy means that a set of rules will be established and enforced to the letter without any subjective evaluation. This means that no humans will be held accountable for the action because the action was required by the no tolerance policy. Therefore after a calamity in a school where students are killed because of the lack of security, the solution is to establish a No Tolerance Policy. Then everyone feels better. Gona get tough as there will be no tolerance. BS. They are only fooling the gullibles. Next thing you know they are suspending kids for toy guns from Cracker Jack boxes and wooden rubber band guns and now drawings of “what looked like a gun”. This detracts from solving the real problem.

Rules are necessary and some times you need strict rules but you always need someone to use judgment when enforcing the rules.

"No tolerance" policies are almost always spurred by an authority structure weary of making decisions. Just re-write the rules so that the rules make the decisions, and as you say, fool the gullible into thinking Something Has Been Done. We've all heard the litany of stories from the girl suspended for having a butter knife in her lunch to now a kid suspended for sketching something that looked like a gun.

But it isn't confined just to schools. Mandatory minimum sentencing works the same way, as does "three strikes" and draconian drug sentencing laws. The practical upshot is that more people than ever are locked up, their lives ruined, and yet we still seem to have crime rates on the rise. We're willing to spend millions and billions on prisons, but pennies for better schools.

Talk about a lack of judgment.

Sounds like a get tough policy but actually usually the wrong people are punished so that someone in charge doesn't have to be held accountable for decisions they are highly paid to make.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_Of_Images

Who said you can't earn anything useful in art class?

I often find myself driving through small rural communities who prominently post signs at their city limits "This is a Zero Tolerance Community". That wording gives me the creeps. It's particularly ill-chosen in light of the fact that a town infamous for driving its African American residents out and burning their houses to the ground is just a few miles away from my doorstep.

I would probably been arrested for threatening some dumb-ass administrator for "zero-tolerancing" my kids.

you are watching a person announce to the world at large that they are too fucking lazy or stupid to actually be bothered with the onerous task of thinking, and they wish to relieve themselves and their subordinates of the responsibility, since in their view their subordinates are also too fucking lazy or stupid to actually think. And in some cases, this is actually the case.

Is it not often the case that high-level school administrators are some of the most pathetically stupid people on the planet? How people so allergic to the rigors of thought and judgment achieve such positions of power and influence baffles me...

Todd in Cheesecurdistan

Including Congress.

How is that a threat? Is he then going to draw his clasmates in a stick-up?

he used to draw pictures of mushroom clouds. Yikes, but that was 40 years ago during the happy days.

Per other reports, the kid claims it is supposed to be a laser pistol, IIRC.