Police officers, armed security guards, surveillance cameras, and metal
detectors are common features of the disturbing new landscape at many of
today's high schools. You will also find new and harsher disciplinary
practices: zero-tolerance policies, random searches with drug-sniffing
dogs, and mandatory suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, despite the
fact that school crime and violence have been decreasing nationally for
the past two decades. While most educators, students, and parents accept
these harsh policing and punishment strategies based on the assumption
that they keep children safe, Aaron Kupchik argues that we need to think
more carefully about how we protect and punish students.
In Homeroom Security, Kupchik shows that these policies lead schools
to prioritize the rules instead of students, so that students' real
problems--often the very reasons for their misbehavior--get ignored.
Based on years of impressive field research, Kupchik demonstrates that
the policies we have zealously adopted in schools across the country are
the opposite of the strategies that are known to successfully reduce
student misbehavior and violence. As a result, contemporary school
discipline is often unhelpful, and can be hurtful to students in ways
likely to make schools more violent places. Furthermore, those students
who are most at-risk of problems in schools and dropping out are the
ones who are most affected by these counterproductive policies. Our
schools and our students can and should be safe, and Homeroom
Security offers real strategies for making them so.
