The History of Zero Tolerance in American Public Schooling [Paperback]

Through a case study of the Los Angeles city school district from the 1950s through the 1970s, Judith Kafka explores the intersection of race, politics, and the bureaucratic organization of schooling.?Kafka argues that control over discipline became increasingly centralized in the second half of the twentieth century in response to pressures exerted by teachers, parents, students, principals, and local politicians - often at different historical moments, and for different purposes. Kafka demonstrates that the racial inequities produced by today's school discipline policies were not inevitable, nor are they immutable.Zero Tolerance and the Case of Los Angeles *?Discipline before Zero Tolerance, 1800-1950 * Bureaucratizing Discipline in the Blackboard Jungle * Struggle for Control in the 1960s * The Death of in Loco Parentis * Reclaiming School Discipline

Kafka writes an admirable history of zero tolerance policies and practices in urban education . . . While doing so, she exposes controversies among academic and therapeutic concerns, overweening bureaucratic entanglements, the changing nature of teacher-student and teacher-family relationships, and the trend toward discipline as punitive rather than educative. . . The author's precise archival research highlights urban patterns that would become public and glaring decades later . . . Highly recommended. - Choice

The History of Zero Tolerance in American Public Schooling is an important scholarly contribution to the history of American education.It will undoubtedly serve as a guidebook for scholars studying school discipline for many years to come.Using Los Angeles as a case study to anchor her work, Kafka demonstrates how an often irrational fear of violence has served as an impetus for highly punitive discipline policies in schools.Supported by extensive historical research, this book should also help policymakers and educators to question some of the assumptions about the nature of violl#}