Researcher and Professor Aaron Kupchick has a new book out about school discipline issues and zero tolerance policies.

In his recently published book, Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear, Kupchik examines disciplinary practices in schools, practices that include assigned police officers, drug-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, armed security guards, surveillance cameras and zero tolerance policies.

Kupchik spent time inside four schools in two states observing teachers, administrators and students. Two of the schools are located in the Southwest and two are in the Mid-Atlantic region. In each state, one school’s student body is mostly middle-class white students and one school’s population is composed of mostly lower-income minority students.

Kupchik found discipline was doled out similarly in all four schools.

“When students got in trouble, the people in charge of discipline didn’t ask questions about why they got into trouble or didn’t try to solve their underlying problems,” he said.

Instead, disciplinarians followed what Kupchik calls excessive and counterproductive strategies for dealing with students’ misbehavior, one of the worst of which is the popular notion of zero tolerance, policies that assign a certain punishment to an infraction regardless of circumstance.

Here is Kupchik sharing the central thesis of this study.

I just found out about this book last week so I have not yet read it. I am hoping to get to it in the next couple of months. He was recently interviewed in Salon Magazine about his research.

I thought that this part of the interview was particularly troubling:

As part of my research, I interviewed students, and one of the questions that seemed like a good idea at the start was asking them whether they liked having the SROs [school resource officers] in their schools. For me, having gone to public schools without cops, this really seemed odd to me, to put police officers in peaceful schools. And the students were puzzled by this question, and I quickly realized that it makes no sense to them because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s completely normal. It makes about as much sense as if you asked them, “Should your school have a principal?”

From a review of the book:

Homeroom Security outlines suggested strategies, rooted in empirical data, for making schools safer. Among them: mandatory tutoring rather than suspension, since students often act up in class when they have trouble understanding lessons, and involving students in rule creation.

Today, schools are notably safer than they were two decades ago. National statistics show rates of violent crime and victimization on the decline. Yet, school discipline tactics trend in the opposite direction, increasing and becoming harsher.