首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
In the name of "zero tolerance," our schools are treating innocent children like criminals. "Zero Tolerance" In High Schools
In the name of "zero tolerance," our schools are treating innocent children like criminals. "Zero Tolerance" In High Schools
admin
2010-04-30
32
问题
In the name of "zero tolerance," our schools are treating innocent children like criminals.
"Zero Tolerance" In High Schools
On a chilly December morning in Houston, Eddie Evans’s 12-year-old son hurried out the door in shirt sleeves on his way to the bus stop. Feeling the cold, he ducked back into his house to quickly grab a jacket. It wasn’t until he’d gotten inside the school building that he remembered his three-inch pocketknife was still in his coat. Why would a sixth-grader carry a knife? Because he was a Boy Scout and he’d brought it to his last Scout meeting.
After asking a friend what he should do, the boy decided to keep quiet and hide the knife in his locker until the end of the day. But his friend mentioned the knife to a teacher, and school officials called the police. That afternoon, cops arrested the Evans child and took him to a juvenile detention center. "From that point on, my family’s life was flipped on its head," the boy’s father says.
The boy was suspended from school for 45 days and enrolled in an alternative school for juvenile offenders. Evans says the place was like a boot camp, where his son —a good student, a youth leader in his church and a First Class Boy Scout —was so miserable he talked about suicide.
This is yet another chapter in the ongoing madness that is America’s "zero tolerance’ craze. Schools nowadays are wildly overreacting to any behavior with a whiff of danger or controversy. Some of these policies were a response to rising teen drug use and high-profile school shootings (such as the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999), which led to a wave of tough federal, state and local laws dealing with drugs and guns.
But they’ve been applied to everything from typical rowdy (粗野的) behavior to innocent missteps. According to a report issued by the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D. C.:
- A 17-year-old in Richmond, Illinois, shot a paper clip with a rubber band, missing his target but hitting a cafeteria worker instead. He was expelled.
- A 12-year-old in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, diagnosed with a hyperactivity disorder, told others in a lunch line not to eat all the potatoes, or "I’m going to get you."
Turned in by the lunch monitor, he was referred by the principal to the police, who charged the boy with making "terroristic threats." The kid spent several weeks in a juvenile detention (拘留) center.
- A 13-year-old in Denton County, Texas, was assigned in class to write a "scary" Halloween story. He concocted (编造) one that involved shooting up a school, which got him a visit from police —and six days in jail before the courts confirmed that no crime had been committed.
"Zero tolerance has been implemented mindlessly," says education professor Cecil Reynolds of Texas A&M University. "Anytime you take something as complex as the way children behave and apply something simplistic to it, you can’t be doing a good job."
Schools Are Overreacting
Take a recent case of "sexual harassment" in a Hagerstown, Maryland, elementary school. Now, Sexual harassment is serious business. But what if I told you the suspect in this case was still trying to master the alphabet? Last December a five-year-old boy pinched the behind of a girl in his kindergarten class and was cited for harassment. As the boy’s father told a local newspaper, "He knows nothing about sex."
But school officials said that the pinch fell under the Maryland Department of Education’s definition of sexual harassment and that a tough response would be a learning experience for the child. The incident will stay in the young boy’s file for as long as he remains at the school. And he’s not even the flint to be treated this way: According to Maryland state data, 15 kindergartners were suspended for sexual harassment in the 2005-2006 school year.
Cases like these might be one reason the American Psychological Association says zero tolerance policies are having a harmful effect on our kids. When the APA studied such policies last year, it found that kids actually feel less safe and have lower academic performance in schools with high suspension or expulsion rates ( and that’s even if you take other factors, like local income levels, into account). The APA also found that suspending students under zero tolerance rules makes it more likely they’ll be disrnptive in the future.
"Educators should have zero tolerance for the behavior but not zero common sense for the consequences," says Tom Hutton, an attorney for the National School Boards Association.
And one consequence, a Virginia attorney told the American Bar Association’s journal, is that "kids are not going to respect teachers and administrators who cannot appreciate the difference between a plastic knife and a switchblade."
The good news is that some parents have been fighting back. Eddie Evans, for one, didn’t take what happened to his son lying down. He contacted everyone from the governor to his state legislators. He organized a parents’ group, complete with its own website, called Texas Zero Tolerance.
Soon he was testifying at the state capitol to reform Texas’s inflexible zero tolerance laws. In 2005 Gov. Rick Perry signed a law that would give special consideration to whether students with weapons had any intent to cause harm or were acting in self-defense. Present at the ceremony: Eddie Evans and his son.
"Get involved in the political process," Evans now urges other parents, "because if you remain silent, the system will not change." His family had the courage and tenacity to say, Enough! Now, how about the rest of us?
What do we know from the three reports issued by the Justice Policy Institute?
选项
A、These teenagers are potential criminals in the future.
B、The authorities have been overreacting to these behaviors.
C、These teenagers deserve the punishment.
D、There must be something mentally wrong with these teenagers.
答案
B
解析
三个案例共同体现了当局的过度反映。A、C、D三项的内容与文章不符。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/wFOK777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
MoreandmoreyoungEuropeansremainsinglebecause______.WhatissaidaboutEuropeansocietyinthepassage?
A、Amanandawomanshouldfolloweveryoftheirownimpulserespectively.B、Agoodmarriagetakessomelevelofcompromisebetw
Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteashortessayentitledFightingCorruption.Youshouldwriteatleast150wor
Personalityistoalargeextentinherent—AtypeparentsusuallybringaboutAtype(36)______.Buttheenvironmentmustalsoha
Maglevtrainsarecomparabletoairplanesinrevolutionizingthetransportation.JapanesemaglevtrainsaredifferentfromGerm
Fromthefirstsentencewelearnthatresearchers______.ThefindingthatchildrenrearedathomehadlowIQsatage12indica
A、ChildreninCaliforniaarenotlikelytolearncreativegeography.B、ChildreninprivateschoolsrunbyJapanesearesmarter.
A、Indifferent.B、Sympathetic.C、Angry.D、Annoyed.BHowdidthedoctorrespondtothecaller?
A、Atthecallbox.B、Atthejewelrystore.C、Fromamachine.D、Fromthepurchaser.CM:Miss,canyougivemechangeforadollar
随机试题
冠状动脉粥样硬化临床多见
A.C=C0.e-ktB.Css=k0.(k•V)-1C.C=k0.(k.V)-1.(1一e-kt)D.Css=X0.(k•V.τ)-1E.C=ka.F.x0.(e-kt—e-kat).[V(ka-k)]-1表示一室模型静脉滴注单次给药血药浓度
某肺结核患者大咯血而致血压突然下降,首选治疗是
甲乙双方就房屋租金数额发生争议,乙根据租赁合同中的仲裁条款向仲裁机构申请仲裁,但是甲对该仲裁条款的效力有异议。下列表述中正确的有哪些选项:
假设程建国先生与王子玲小姐是你的新客户,目前正面临职业生涯与家庭上的转变,需要金融理财师协助规划。经过初步沟通面谈后,你获得了以下家庭、职业与财务信息:一、案例成员二、收支情况1.收入情况:程先生每月税前收入7500元,已有11年的工作年资;程太太
纳税人发生下列税务违法行为,应由税务机关追缴其不缴或少缴的税款、滞纳金,并处以不缴或少缴税款的50%以上5倍以下的罚款的是()。
“育人为本”的儿童观要求教师要从幼儿的实际情况、个别差异出发,有的放矢地进行有差别的保育、教育,使每个幼儿都能扬长避短。这体现了“育人为本”的()。
学校文化主要是指教育与学习的文化。()
小福、小禄、小康、小宁四人是好朋友,又知其中一人是律师,一人是法官,一人是会计,一人是检察官。已知:(1)律师比小禄年龄大。(2)法官比会计年龄大。(3)小康比检察官年龄大。当小王知道了律师、法官、会计、检察官的名字后,就逻辑地推断出四人的唯一排名
在窗体上绘制一个命令按钮,其名称为Cmd1,标题为Display。编写适当的事件过程,使程序运行后,若单击命令按钮,则把窗体的标题修改为VisualBasic,程序运行结果如下图所示。注意:文件必须存放在考生文件夹中,工程文件名为exec
最新回复
(
0
)