There is a particular kind of silence that forms after violence, a societal hush masquerading as resolve. In the 1990s, this silence gave birth to a policy: zero tolerance. It arrived clad in certainty, armored by its own name, as if ambiguity were the enemy. In the wake of Columbine and the ghosts that preceded it, schools became battlegrounds of imagined war, and children were recast not as students but as potential threats, each infraction a prophecy fulfilled.
What followed was the institutionalization of reaction: mandatory suspensions, expulsions, referrals to police. The pretense was safety, with the aim of deterrence. But beneath the legalese and sanitized administrative language was something older and more primal, that being the ritual of exile. To cast out the unruly, the broken, the misunderstood. To protect order by sacrificing those who most needed grace.
Under the constructionist gaze, we see the scaffolding of this moral edifice. The grounds were an epidemic of fear, built on televised tragedies and media myths. The warrants were the sacred duty to protect, spoken in the voice of grieving parents, shaken superintendents, and lawmakers with trembling polls.
The conclusions were swift, mechanized discipline, punishment without discretion, context, or compassion. The rhetoric was borrowed from war and from prisons. The diagnostic frame declared student misbehavior as existential threat; the prognostic fix was expulsion, removal, silencing. A motivational frame followed, to protect the good, purge the bad. The binary was seductive, as it always is. But these frames obscured the deeper fracture. That many of the so-called “offenders” were already on society’s margins. That a child bringing Tylenol to school or scrawling profanity on a desk might not be dangerous, but simply unheard.
And that silence, not chaos, was the more honest threat. We now speak of latent consequences, but what is latent to one is lived to another. Black children were suspended at quadruple the rate of white peers for the same behaviors. Students with disabilities, already tasked with navigating a world not built for them, were expelled at twice their population share (U.S. Department of Education, 2021).
These are not data points; rather, they are indictments. The American school became a sorting mechanism, a gatekeeper of futures, where the unspoken curriculum was disposability. This disparity reflects not just bias, but a systemic reliance on exclusionary discipline in schools with already vulnerable populations (Skiba et al., 2011).
The school-to-prison pipeline is not metaphor. It is logistics, taken form in a policy rendered path. Children expelled from classrooms find themselves caught in the systems that feed on failure. A missed year becomes a missed life, just as suspension becomes surveillance and detention becomes detention. And the policies failed even on their own terms. According to the American Psychological Association (2008), there is no compelling evidence that zero tolerance has made schools safer.
Instead, it has made them colder, crueler, and more carceral. It has turned classrooms into checkpoints and educators into wardens. Discipline has become a euphemism for erasure. Yet from the ashes of these punitive systems has risen a new whisper of restorative justice, of trauma-informed practice, of listening.
This too was an unintended consequence, a rebellion born from the ruins. The harm called forth the healing, though it remains fragile, nascent, unguaranteed. The failures of zero tolerance policies are not simply administrative missteps. They are philosophical failures, a profound misunderstanding of what it means to educate, to safeguard, to respond. From the constructionist perspective, the original problem was over-framed, moralized into abstraction, as it has continually been shown these policies have done nothing to curtail violence or misconduct (American Psychological Association Task Force, 2008).
The students who are cast out are far more likely to drop out permanently, fail, or be arrested, in turn cementing the fall of which is started by the flawed academic systems of which they inhabited (Mallet, 2016). Anecdotes became data, and fear became fact. Columbine was made to stand in for all schools, all students, all time. And when policies are crafted not in reflection but in panic, they do not solve; they entrench.
The social movements framework reminds us: the diagnostic frame was incomplete. It cast students as the danger, ignoring that behavioral “problems” often emerge from poverty, trauma, unmet needs. The prognostic frame offered no structural remedy, only exclusion. The motivational rhetoric of a moral war against misbehavior betrayed a deeper cynicism: that some children are not worth saving.
This is not just poor policy, but rather a failure of imagination and of empathy. If we are to rebuild and are to unmake this architecture of punishment, we must begin with the radical act of reconsideration. Restore what was broken not with retribution, but with dialogue. Let schools become spaces of restorative justice where harm is addressed through repair, not exile. Let students be invited back into community, not cast out of it.
González (2012) reminds us that such approaches do not merely reduce suspension rates; they change culture. Misbehavior is often the grammar of unaddressed pain. By investing in mental health professionals, trauma-informed care, and social-emotional support (Payne & Welch, 2015), we build schools not as fortresses, but as sanctuaries.
Discipline is not neutral. Teachers and administrators must be trained not just in behavior management, but in cultural humility, anti-racist practice, and reflective listening. If bias is a structure, then it must be dismantled as one. Shift the narrative from criminality to complexity, from containment to care. Children are not threats to manage, but beings in formation. Every infraction contains a story.
Our job is to ask what that story is, not to write its ending for them. Zero tolerance policies were born from a well of fear, poured into bureaucratic molds, and hardened into punitive infrastructure. But policies are not inevitable; they are authored. Which means they can be rewritten.
And so, we must, not for the sake of statistics, but for the boy in the principal’s office who brought scissors to class and was called a danger. For the girl suspended for speaking out of turn because her home taught her survival through volume. For the students whose names we’ve forgotten and whose futures we never saw. We owe them more than safety. We owe them justice.
References
American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force. (2008). Are zero tolerance policies effective in the schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. American Psychologist, 63(9), 852–862.
González, T. (2012). Keeping kids in schools: Restorative justice, punitive discipline, and the school to prison pipeline.Journal of Law & Education, 41(2), 281–335.
Mallett, C. A. (2016). The school-to-prison pipeline: A comprehensive assessment. Springer.
Payne, A. A., & Welch, K. (2015). Restorative justice in schools: The influence of race on restorative discipline. Youth & Society, 47(4), 539–564.
Skiba, R. J., Horner, R. H., Chung, C. G., Rausch, M. K., May, S. L., & Tobin, T. (2011). Race is not neutral: A national investigation of African American and Latino disproportionality in school discipline. School Psychology Review, 40(1), 85–107.
