A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor students can receive in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Jurors choose portfolios by high school seniors whose works best represent the Scholastic Awards’ judging criteria: originality, technical skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $10,000 scholarship.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2022 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are William Meng and Shaeley Lincoln.
William Meng
I drew inspiration for my writing from a wide variety of sources, from my school and extracurricular activities to the global headlines to my mundane daily happenings and routines. For example, I wrote about the Saudi Arabian arms trade after the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi became a turning point for U.S.-Saudi relations. On the other hand, I came up with the idea to write about agricultural subsidies after reading the back of a cereal box during my breakfast.
The Immense Failure of Zero Tolerance in American Schools
CRITICAL ESSAY
William Meng, Grade 12, Novi High School, Novi, MI. Gold Medal Portfolio, The New York Times Writing
Portfolio Award
In 2010, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez wrote on her desk in Spanish class with an erasable marker. Alexa was charged with vandalism, handcuffed, arrested, and detained at a New York City Police Department precinct in Queens. In 2014, high schooler Da’avon Shaw took out a fruit knife to slice his apple lunch and was suspended for a week. Ethan Chaplin, a middle-schooler, was twirling his pencil, which was apparently such a “threatening behavior” that he was sent for a 5-hour physical and psych evaluation, where his urine was tested and blood drawn. These are but just a few examples of when devotion to flawed ideals of an orderly school environment trumps common sense and fair justice. Zero tolerance—the idea that any infraction, no matter its severity, must be punished through draconian measures—is a disease that plagues the disciplinary policies of schools across the nation. The use of zero-tolerance policies in American schools must be discontinued because they fuel the school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionately harm minorities, and fail to promote order in schools.
Zero-tolerance policies in schools find their roots in Reagan’s War on Drugs. At a time when cultural rejection of anything “immoral” was at its peak, so were the fears that illegal substances could find their way into schools and negatively influence American youth. It was decided that, much like adults charged with drug offenses were treated, students who were caught perpetrating “moral vices”—from bringing drugs or weapons to school or exhibiting “threatening behavior,” or simply encouraging the spreading of said vices—had to be severely punished. Thus, the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 was born, which mandated that any student caught with a weapon that could harm others be expelled—no matter the explanation for their possession or any underlying circumstance. This mindset of “zero-tolerance” toward students posing a danger to the school environment was amplified by the Columbine shootings. Since then, zero-tolerance policies in schools have become widespread in America, with over 90% of schools having some sort of zero-tolerance policy. Zero-tolerance policies have even started expanding again in recent years due to President Trump’s rolling back of student rights protections, part of his agenda to strengthen security in schools.
The philosophy behind zero-tolerance policies, influenced by decades of hardline conservative thinking, can thus be thought of as an extension of the “broken windows theory.” This theory, introduced in the 1980s and popularized by the NYPD as a justification for their policing policy, states that visible signs of crime or disorderliness (such as broken windows) create an environment that encourages more serious crime and disorder, and that policing minor crimes (fixing the broken windows) creates an atmosphere of order and lawfulness. Following this principle, minor offenses or misbehavior by students—such as disobedience, tardiness, swearing, or defacing school property—is viewed with “zero-tolerance” and punished as a major infraction. Some of the most common punishments mandated under these zero-tolerance policies are the suspension or expulsion of the student from their school, following the broken window philosophy that removing the student would both teach them to better follow the rules—hence preventing them from escalating to more serious or violent infractions—while also creating a more “orderly” school environment. Throughout this process, the student is administered punishment only in accordance with whatever guidelines the school has previously set, without any regard to potential mitigating circumstances that could explain the student’s behaviors, such as the student’s disciplinary and academic history, whether the student was threatened by a peer, or environmental circumstances like a poor home environment.
The glaring issue with this approach is that it does not punish nor discourage violent behavior: one study found that 95% of out-of-school suspensions were for nonviolent minor misbehaviors. “Most disciplined students are not posing serious risks to the student body nor are they posing safety concerns for the schools they attend. [In fact,] some education researchers have found that students who misbehave and are the targets of discretionary zero-tolerance policies are doing well academically.” On the other hand, the students punished through out-of-school suspension miss out on vital school instruction and fall further behind in work, all the while labeled by school staff and ostracized by their peers. Not only does this take a considerable toll on suspended students’ mental health, but also counterintuitively discourages academic performance and adherence to school codes of conduct, as a student who feels detached from the school environment and alienated by those who control it feels less of an obligation to positively participate in said environment.
The perpetuation of zero-tolerance policies has also fueled the school-to-prison pipeline, “wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.” As police officers increasingly supplant the role of teachers and staff in maintaining order in underfunded, overcrowded public schools, schools resort to involving law enforcement in cases of misbehavior. Districts employ school resource officers, many of whom have little to no experience dealing with youth, to patrol school hallways and often intervene in misbehavior by students through school-based arrests. Once a student becomes involved with the juvenile criminal justice system, it is near impossible for them to fully get out—their record is permanently marked, making it hard for them to be admitted into higher education or to find a well-paying job, condemning them to poverty and hardship in later life. It is in this environment that those who resort to crime to make ends meet are created. These factors have turned schools from institutions of learning to de-facto jailhouses, designed to weed out “delinquents” for stepping out of line. Nowhere are the harmful effects of zero-tolerance policies more apparent than the disproportionate impact zero-tolerance has on black schoolchildren. The draconian nature, as well as the vague wording/structure of zero-tolerance policies, provides school administrators with an avenue to discriminate against minority students by choosing when and to what degree to enforce school policies. A study in 2002 found that “white students were more likely to be disciplined for provable, documentable offenses [ . . .] while black students were more likely to be disciplined for more subjective reasons.” In addition, this discriminatory trend extends beyond single schools—“a 2010 study by researchers at Villanova University that showed the punitiveness of a school’s discipline policy was positively correlated with the percentage of its students that were black.” Recent studies reveal that black students are suspended or expelled at 3 times the rate as their white peers and that despite making up 16% of all enrolled children in 2011–12, they accounted for 31% of all in-school arrests. This inequitable enforcement of zero-tolerance policies occurs despite the fact that minority students do not misbehave at higher rates than their peers. Given this situation, it comes as no surprise that young black Americans are funneled to the criminal justice system through the school-to-prison pipeline.
Even for the black students that are not condemned to being chained to the juvenile criminal justice system, exceedingly punitive measures such as suspension and expulsion have a dire effect on the students’ academic future and beyond. Zero-tolerance policies that have enabled schools to severely punish minority students for minor infractions in ways that remove them from the school environment for extended periods of time lead to an inability on the student’s part to properly gain the education to pass a grade. Alternatively, student expulsion removes them from the school district entirely. These factors lead to black students dropping out of high school at disproportionately higher rates than their white peers, with “35,000 public school students, 33% of which were African American, not graduating from high school during the 2011–2012 academic year,” a phenomenon that has been termed “pushout.” When combined, the targeting of minority students through zero-tolerance policies for suspension and arrest as well as the pushout effect have greatly contributed to the achievement gap between white and black students as well as the income gap later in life.
The inequitable treatment given to black students under zero-tolerance policies extends to other minorities as well. A report by the American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force stated that students with disabilities, especially those with emotional and behavioral disorders, appear to be suspended and expelled at rates disproportionate to the representation in the population, [and] juvenile justice facilities are three to five times more likely to have youth with emotional disabilities than public schools.” Under zero-tolerance, suspension rates for Hispanic students have more than doubled since the 1970s. Sexual minorities—who “have faced greater exposure to peer victimization” and thus greater likelihood to be physically/verbally targeted by their peers—are often blamed for their own victimization, as actions minority students take to defend themselves “ often fall under disciplinary categories that mandate an exclusionary discipline consequence.”
In a tragic twist of irony, zero-tolerance policies fail to achieve their sole purported purpose of creating order in schools. Numerous studies disprove the idea that zero-tolerance policies reduce violence, as the number of physical altercations in schools remains constant despite widespread implementation, and incidents of school shootings have remained steady or even increased in the past decade. Neither do zero-tolerance policies serve to deter future undisciplined behavior, proven by the fact that “school suspension in general appears to predict higher future rates of misbehavior and suspension among those students who are suspended.” In other words, those who committed an offense under zero-tolerance policies are “more likely to be repeat offenders.” Additionally, surveys have found that students feel less safe and that the school environment is less conducive to learning in schools that have high suspension rates under zero-tolerance policies. In fact, there exists “a negative relationship between the use of school suspension and expulsion and school-wide academic achievement, even when controlling for demographics such as socioeconomic status.”
Why, then, do so many schools nationwide cling to policies that actively harm minority students and are so ineffective at maintaining a proper learning environment? Aside from the purported benefits to the school environment, part of the reason lies in the fact that schools are financially motivated to keep zero-tolerance policies around. George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy rewards schools with federal grant money based on how well the school performs on standardized tests. Although this policy was discontinued by the Obama administration, the test-score/GPA oriented approach to ranking school districts still exists in the public consciousness, and school district performance plays a key role when parents are selecting where to buy a home (and thus where to pay property taxes that fund schools.) Thus, schools are monetarily incentivized to pressure “problematic” and underperforming students to drop out in order to raise the average score, and zero-tolerance policies act as the perfect tool to weed out these students.
There exist options to rectify the current system of zero tolerance. These range from modifying zero-tolerance policies to incorporate greater flexibility and school/teacher context, to reducing contact between law enforcement and students in favor of counselors, to scrapping the one-size-fits-all punishment system altogether and replacing it with school-specific “preventive measures that can improve school climate and improve the sense of school community and belongingness.” Not only do these approaches avoid the pitfalls of zero-tolerance policies, but they also give students the ability to defend themselves against the unfair application of these policies by granting them due process and a voice in the disciplinary system—a right that every American is entitled to. Education is often thought of as the root of all solutions. This is for good reason: the knowledge, skills, and know-how a child gains from a good education can function as a gateway to opportunity, wealth, and a successful adult life. However, due to zero-tolerance policies, the institutions that are supposed to dispense education instead currently function as a de-facto prison for many minority students, while serving as a gateway to an actual prison for them as well. By increasing the education and wealth gap through zero-tolerance policies, we exacerbate social and economic ills as well. America prides itself on being the land of equal opportunity for all. If the U.S. wants to stay true to these ideals, it cannot continue operating its public school system under the current zero-tolerance policies.
Shaeley Lincoln
My portfolio explores the injustices against People of Color and the richness of cultural values. Growing up, I knew nothing about hair care or the value of my hair. Most women of color had to perm their hair straight or straighten it over and over again. In the piece “Showing What They Couldn’t,” a grandmother has her hair out with heads hidden in the piece. This represents the symbolism behind the cherishing of hair, as there was a point in time when slaves’ hair was cut off and a time when curly hair had to be covered. It shows the pride that the grandmother has in her curls.
In pieces such as “Curls,” “Renewed,” and “Angel,” there is an emphasis on the hair. Curly hair is often perceived as trashy and less than, so I used materials that would be thrown away and created something that captures the beauty of curly hair.
“How Many More Braids Left” shows the time and effort black women and women of color have to take to look “presentable.” Hours of labor just for people to still touch and ask if your hair is real and say it looks funny or ghetto. Changing yourself won’t change people’s negative mentalities.
The sculpture “What They See” conveys a narrative about the audience; the figure looks like an innocent guy to some, but to others he is a dangerous black man in a hoodie. It gauges how society stereotypes regular people based on ethnic features and differences.
Many people have brushed the ignorance and stereotypes aside, but these pieces can spark conversation about the daily challenges people of color have to face. These artworks can make people think about how they perceive others of a darker skin tone and those with curly hair.
Featured images: Shaeley Lincoln, Renewed and Angel, Mixed Media. Grade 12, George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology, Towson, MD. Gold Medal Portfolio, Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Art Portfolio Award
To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.