What I find amusing is that the same people who tend to support zero-tolerance policies are the first ones to decry the Patriot act.

Zero tolerance polices are more a symptom of a larger issue.  Today's public school teachers, by and large, simply aren't very intelligent compared to the general population anymore.  As a result, to substitute for intelligence, they implement policies because intellectuals no longer tend to become public school teachers.

A couple generations ago, when American society was more blue-collar and less emphasis was placed on education, teachers were a shining light amongst their peers.  Unfortunately, since the general population didn't value education, teachers were poorly paid.  But the typical teacher was more educated and more thoughtful than the typical parent.

Today, roles have reversed.  Increasingly, parents are far more educated than so-called "educators" who increasingly are little more than paid babysitters. This is particularly true of elementary education teachers who seem to generally (though not all, there are outstanding teachers everywhere) be below average in intelligence.  Unfortunately, the inertia of the past in which teachers were more educated than the general popultion has lingered on and today's teachers mistakenly believe that they know more about "things" than the parents which is rarely the case.

Zero-tolerance polices are an outcry of this because at some level, administrators and teachers are no longer capable of really thinking about things because they lack the intellectual capacity to think on their feet. It is much easier to enforce blanket policies than to have to deal with situations individually.  The charge that they're protecting themselves from lawsuit is absurd as zero-tolerance policies are likely to generate as many lawsuits as they prevent (if not more). 

Worse, it's likely to create more expensive lawsuits.  My own son was nearly suspended for drawing a crayon picture (he was just barely 7 years old) of a wrecking ball wrecking the school (replaying a scene from Fairly Odd Parents -- a cartoon). What does the district think would happen if schools started expelling children for this kind of thing? Do they think the parents would sit idly by?

As if school districts are working overtime to demonstrate that they are no longer bastions of thought and intellectualism, you regularly see teachers and administrators complaining about the rise of charter schools and home schools -- as if most parents want to have to pay taxes to public schools and then turn around and spend their time teaching them.  Home schools and the like are the natural result of the decline of intellectual vigor of public schools.  Zero-tolerance policies are the poster child of that decline.

Speak for yourself I guess.  Do you have children Kingbee? Or are you simply trying to reinforce the left-wing dogma of "Those damn ignorant breeders." that we see so often (and often seems to shine through on your blogs).  In case you've beein a cave, the US over the past generation has been migrating from an industrial economy to an information economy.  We're no longer a country of assembly line workers.  A don't have the stat handy but I would go as far as to say that most American parents today have college degrees, something that wasn't the case a century ago.

William Bennett did not send my 7 year old son to the office for drawing a picture that they didn't approve of.  But feel free to provide a link to any statement or policy that Bennett was involved on that could somehow be construed as supporting expelling small children because they draw stuff blowing each other up.

.  Oh yea, can you point to any people you know, any at all, that have been affected by the patriot act? 

As an exmaple we have the unintended irony of someone complaining how it's wrong to generalize one way but being blissfully unaware that they are generalizing the other way.  That is, I shouldn't presume to know how intelligent the typical elementary ed teacher is but it's perfectly reasonable for elementary ed teachers to presume the opposite.

In the name of a semblance of diplomacy, the typical American is far more educated today than they were 50 years ago. By contrast, the typical teacher has not had to increase their education level to nearly the same extent.  Moreover, there are far more career opportunities in our economy for people who like to "think" than there were 50 years ago so the teaching profession has had to increasingly compete for intelligent people more and more.  Which has reached the point where in college, the least intelligent people seemed to be going into "special ed" or elementary ed.

To me, it's not surprising to see blanket unthinking policies such as "zero tolerance" be adopted wholesale. It takes the pesky task of thinking or individualizing students and replacing it with enforcing policy.

Why should I yank my kids out? It does the job of watching my kids and teaching them basic skills.  I have very low expectations from public schools. As long as they distribute out the coursework then I'm basically okay with it. Anything particularly important I fully expect them to learn from home. And the system is redundant enough (12 years of it) that it only takes a few particularly good teachers (such as my son's third grade teacher who is outstanding) to make up for the NEA robots.

BTW, I would love to see a thorough study on what the average IQ of an American elementary school teacher. However, if you read what I wrote, or at least comprehended it, you would realize that I wasn't making a "blanket statement". Blanket would be saying ALL teachers are less intelligent. I said "by and large" as it "Generally speaking". And in the context of what I wrote I believe is indisputable. Today's parents, on average, are far more educated and intelligent than they were a couple generations ago. By contrast, teachers (at best) have not progressed at nearly the same rate. Therefore, teachers have lost much, if not all, of their relative educational/intelligent edge they may have once had over parents. 

Well Marcie let me be perfectly candid: I think the typical elementary school teacher has, at best, average intelligence.  I have met very few elementary teachers that I would consider to be on the right side of the bell curve by a meaningful amount.

I don't even consider elementary school teachers to be a "jack of all trades".  And in fact, if they were, we wouldn't need mindless "zero tolerance" policies in the first place.

I for one would love to see national teacher IQ testing on elementary school teachers.  Given that the NEA tends to oppose any sort of merit-based testing of teachers, I can speculate as to why that is.

Incidentally, I can assure you that few "computer geeks" would be upset if an elementary school teacher called them a "moron". And it's not because computer geeks are unintelligent.