Myra Blackmon writes for Athens Online in Athens, Georgia. This column was posted on Maureen Downey’s “Get Schooled” blog in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Blackmon says that punishment doesn’t work when students lose control and act out.

She writes:

“What works best with these most challenging students is not punishment, but extra support, according to the research. Extra counselors, tutors to help them catch up with their school work and coaching to develop ways to cope with their personal challenges have been shown to make a difference.
With most school guidance counselors expected to support up to 500 students, there is little time to work one-on-one with a troubled student. Growing class sizes make it more difficult for teachers to identify and work with kids who need intervention or extra support.

“As a nation, we are facing a perfect storm created by confluence of three trends, none of which on its own was particularly positive, but which combined generate an explosive atmosphere: zero tolerance, letting rules trump common sense and the militarization of our police forces.
Our communities, and particularly our schools, have gone overboard with zero tolerance policies. A child with a one-inch plastic pistol attached to a backpack zipper gets the same treatment and punishment as one who brings a loaded pistol to school. We all know other instances zero-tolerance has backfired.

“Often, our response to one negative incident is to make a rule that will prevent that same thing from happening again. In a school setting, that trumps a teachers’ judgement, and frequently prescribes a response guaranteed to escalate rather than resolve a situation….

“This over reliance on rules and zero tolerance has also led to the criminalization of what used to be just bad teenage behavior. When I was in high school, every couple of years some idiot would put a cherry bomb in a toilet, or steal a turkey and put it in the school courtyard over a weekend.

“They were caught and punished. They worked to make restitution to the school, or the farmer who was wronged. There were consequences. Most of them learned their lessons and became productive adult citizens. Now our zero tolerance for breaking any rules means that a kid caught doing one stupid thing may have a criminal record. It also takes a “guilty until proven innocent” approach to the discipline of teenagers.

“Finally, much has been written about the militarization of our police forces. Not only are most forces now equipped with far more powerful equipment than is required for ordinary community protection, there are more police officers with combat experience—and the issues that come from that—as a result of our years of war. Of necessity, military training teaches aggressive responses necessary for survival in a combat setting. But it takes more than a few weeks of police training to unlearn those responses, so officers may overreact to situations that could be defused.

“Combine those three, and we have a perfect formula for unnecessary violence in our schools and in our streets.”