Classrooms and Courtrooms: Facing Sexual Harassment in K-12 Schools & Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in our Schools. (Reviews).

CLASSROOMS AND COURTROOMS: FACING SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN K-12 SCHOOLS

by Nan Stein (Teachers College Press, 1999)

ZERO TOLERANCE: RESISTING THE DRIVE FOR PUNISHMENT IN OUR SCHOOLS

by William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Rick Ayers, eds. (New Press, 2001)

When I was in kindergarten, David Coady bit my arm during milk and crackers time. I have no idea why he did it, but under some school policies these days, that act (which certainly got my attention and that of Miss Nelson, my teacher, as well) might just be termed sexual harassment, or maybe assault with a dental weapon. Or perhaps this is a more clear-cut example of sexual harassment: my driver's ed teacher repeatedly "adjusting" my adolescent shoulders to improve my posture in the driver's seat.

It's always nice to find analytical material on K-12 education that examines what's been happening in our schools from a progressive perspective. As the country's leaders in general, and schools in particular, slouch towards the Right, two books offer reassurance that we are well represented by some worthy school watchdogs on the Left: Classrooms and Courtrooms: Facing Sexual Harassment in K-12 Schools by Nan Stein and Zero Tolerance. Resisting the Drive for Punishment in our Schools ed. William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Rick Ayers. If these authors' names sound familiar, you may recall Ayers and Dohrn from their days in the Weather Underground and Stein as a leading expert on sexual harassment in schools. What each of these books brings to us is a social context that helps explain why students have increasingly lost their rights in schools and suffered from repressive, criminalizing policies on the streets.

Classrooms and Courtrooms contains an historical overview of how K-12 schools have dealt with the problem of sexual harassment. First acknowledged as a women's issue in the workplace and in higher education, sexual harassment became recognized as prevalent in schools in the 1980s. Stein's research, influenced by her feminist and anti-racist perspectives, and coupled with her summaries of all relevant studies, demonstrates the frequency of the phenomenon. In schools sexual harassment is unwanted sexual attention that interferes with the right to an education. According to Stein, sexual harassment in schools is characterized by four main themes. 1) It is performed publicly; that is, there are often bystanders and witnesses, both students and adults who readily recognize the behavior. 2) Schools tend to treat the problem, however, as something to be hidden, a secret. 3) The targets, most often but not always girls, are not passive recipients of this unwanted attention, especially if the perpetrators are peers. T argets readily fight back, complain and report sexual harassment. 4) Unfortunately, schools tend to respond to claims of sexual harassment by trivializing the incidents, applying innocuous remedies or inappropriately setting rigid, mandatory punishments.

Stein includes simple definitions of terms related to sexual harassment and demonstrates the connections among sex discrimination, gender harassment and gender violence. She explains how Title IX outlawed both sex discrimination and sexual harassment. She has collected a useful compendium of case law as it relates to schools and leads us through the murky waters of recent court decisions, even as they issue contradictory and ambiguous opinions. It is, in fact, these contradictions that expose the current confusion about how we as a society should handle incidents of sexual harassment in schools.

This confusion is not the result of cloudy thinking on the part of educators. Instead it exposes conflicting ideologies about acceptable behavior in school. When Stein examines the relationship of bullying in elementary school to sexual harassment in the upper grades, she sees similar patterns and correctly identifies that they are both rooted in similar norms. What are these norms? Those who allow bullying and sexual harassment to continue in school settings reinforce the beliefs that a) social organization is hierarchical; b) at the top of the status ladder are whites, males, and those who exhibit American standards of beauty; c) higher status individuals are entitled to behave in ways that reinforce their status even if they are violent; and d) such violence is condoned or inadequately responded to. It comes as no surprise that these norms are implicit in a conservative world view.

Stein is additionally helpful by documenting how schools have misapplied punishments to sexual harassment. She chronicles the trend by schools to react to claims of sexual harassment through overkill, as in the example of the 6 year old boy who kissed his female classmate on the playground, was accused of sexual harassment and became the subject of media attention for two straight weeks in 1996. For me the most useful part of this book was the invitation to examine the underlying currents of thought beneath the surface of school policy. What motivated the school to rush to judgment about such an incident? Why was this so interesting to network news and talk shows? Where was the girl's side of the story? How can this incident illuminate paths we might take in challenging draconian school punishments?

Classrooms and Courtrooms also decries the lack of research about sexual harassment of people of color and lesbian and gay students, and it recognizes the challenges of identifying the differences among sexist, offensive and harassing behaviors. These are important distinctions, not for lexiconic reasons but because as a society we need to observe and respond to misbehavior by youth in a nuanced way. We must value preventive and educational interventions over mere punitive responses. Stein helps us to see that schools can indeed become more humane places, if we are both diligent and compassionate in our responsibilities as stewards of safe schools.

In a way Zero Tolerance picks up where Classrooms and Courtrooms leaves off. In fact, we find that Nan Stein herself is one of the authors of the 21 pieces in this anthology about the disturbing trend toward harsher punishments in schools. Zero tolerance is a popular school disciplinary response to violations of school policy, usually as severe as expulsion, a sort of "one strike and you're out." Critics of the policy, some of the best on today's education scene, are included here, from academic/ activists like Michelle Fine, Pedro Noguera and Vincent Schiraldi to classroom teachers from one end of the country to the other. We find that "sexual harassment," "school violence" and "zero tolerance" are terms that have been appropriated by forces that have highjacked the education reform movement. Where are they headed? Towards more restrictive and repressive schools, and they are taking us with them, according to these authors. How did this happen?

Several Zero Tolerance contributors mention the 1994 Gun Free Schools Act as a turning point in student rights. This federal legislation required all states that wished to retain federal education funding to pass legislation mandating severe punishment for the possession of a gun (later any weapon) in school. Coupled with state education reform laws like the Massachusetts School Reform Act of 1993, which gave much greater disciplinary power to principals, this legislation sanctioned harsh, mandatory penalties for weapons possession and other offenses and heralded in the era of zero tolerance, not just for guns in school but for a wide range of behaviors.

Taken as a whole, this collection indicts both the media for exploiting a public panicked about youth violence and officials who sought the ultimate quick fix. The tendency to label certain students as dangerous and to get rid of those students is not just cutting butter with a chainsaw; it overlooks the dysfunctions of systems like public schools and juvenile courts and places blame on the shoulders of individual young people, especially people of color. Bernadine Dohrn, who now directs the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern, documents the trend of criminalizing youth in her article, "'Look Out Kid/It's Something You Did': Zero Tolerance for Children." She shows, for instance, how behavior not considered illegal in adults is a status offense for juveniles and that girls are disproportionately punished in this way.

The regulation of school behavior is becoming more and more conservative.

Compulsory adherence to a rigid social structure with traditional sex roles is just one of the rules. Racial profiling and singling out mentally ill children and labeling them as criminals are two other topics discussed in very helpful ways elsewhere in the collection.

One drawback to this anthology is an unfortunate repetitiveness. Everyone seems to have the same perspective: zero tolerance is a lousy idea whose time has come and gone. But there is useful documentation of the increase in suspensions and expulsions in U.S. schools that can provide fuel for a campaign to eradicate zero tolerance. And there are policy recommendations to counteract this trend.

Taken together, Classrooms and Courtrooms and Zero Tolerance paint a troubling picture of today's K-12 schools as places where the culture wars still flare up at the expense of children. Fortunately, they also constitute a call to arms for continued diligence in creating and maintaining safe schools where everyone learns and grows.

PAM CHAMBERLAIN has taught Sunday school, middle school, high school and college students. After many years, she escaped the Massachusetts Department of Education just as it was getting heavily politicized by conservative forces. She now juggles jobs researching the political right and supporting lbgt youth.