Discipline and Punish

Bryson Donaldson, 12, was horsing around at his Muskogee, Oklahoma, school one morning last fall, mimicking the cops-and-robbers scenario that is as American as apple pie and Al Pacino. Bryson pointed his finger like a gun at a classmate and in a flash was hit with a five-day suspension. The principal singled out Bryson, the only African-American in his grade, for punishment, patting him down and scanning his sixth-grader's frame with a metal detector. He was placed in an alternative program for "bad" students, serving two days of his sentence until his mother brought in the NAACP. Bryson had been a straight-A student, but that changed. "He has nightmares now," Diane Donaldson said last June. "I had to take him to a psychiatrist. It is to the point where we have to struggle to go to school every day."

Daniel Brion, 14, was an eighth grader with a bright mind, a diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and a typical adolescent's jubilation as summer approached this past May. Walking down the hall of his Lexington, Kentucky, school, Daniel remarked that he wished the school would burn down and take the principal with it. His words were overheard and translated to said principal thusly: Daniel had gasoline and was recruiting a gang to burn down the school. Without notifying Daniel or his parents, the principal brought in the police to investigate Daniel's comments. Two weeks later, Daniel was yanked out of math class and interrogated by an officer who read him his Miranda rights. "The whole thing is like Franz Kafka's The Trial," said Dr. Gail Brion, his mother. "They were ready to arrest him on charges of terrorist threats."

Every year, more than 3 million students like Bryson Donaldson are suspended and nearly 100,000 more are expelled, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Of those, untold thousands like Daniel Brion increasingly face police action for disciplinary problems that were previously handled in school, because forty-one states now require that certain acts committed in school be reported to the police. Boys in general are the targets, with African-American males bearing a disproportionate brunt of suspensions and disciplinary actions. Together, these trends are the poisonous byproduct of a decade of so-called zero tolerance policies in public schools, from urban enclaves to rural outposts alike.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.