Bill Ayers.

None of us would have heard about this case except that the people who were concerned about the lives of those kids came to Chicago and enlisted the support of Valerie Johnson, Jesse Jackson's educational director. Jackson went to Decatur and shined a light on the situation.

	What Happened in Decatur?
	In the fall of 1999, a story out of Decatur, Illinois captured the national headlines. Seven students at Stephen Decatur high school had been involved in a brawl at a football game that September; there were no weapons or injuries, but many participants threw punches and one teen was thrown down the steps. Under the new "no tolerance" resolution passed by the Decatur school board that August, all seven youths were suspended for two years, regardless of their degree of involvement in the fight or their previous records. The incident attracted the attention of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who arrived in Decatur in November. Jackson used the event to launch his crusade against "zero tolerance" policies, arranging for marches, protests and a federal lawsuit. In the end, the suspension was reduced to one year and the students won the right to alternative education.

When he arrived, the media, always diversionary and mocking in the beginning, wanted to know only two things: Why is Jesse Jackson here? And is he only here for race? Jackson kept saying, "I went to Kosovo. I got three white guys out. I'm here because this is a national issue," to which the school board responded that it's not a national issue, it's a local issue.

People demand that they have the right to solve problems, even if they're racially coded or patently unjust, in their own way. "It's a local problem," they said, "and you, Jesse Jackson, are stirring it up into a national observation."

What happened next was what we've seen in other cases before. The media is not only mocking and diversionary, but we had a situation where there was no limit to what people would do to win their case.

Jackson pointed out again and again that there can be no justice if you don't tell the truth, and that justice begins by telling the truth. It continues by paying a debt, by paying back, by making right what you did wrong. But instead of facing this case's injustice, there was escalating defensiveness.

Jackson showed up and the kids were brought up on criminal charges. The charges were thrown out before Jackson got there, but once he arrived the kids were charged with criminal felonious assault. When Jackson pressed his case and had a giant community meeting, a video of the kids fighting in the stands was released. Seventeen seconds, no weapons and no one hurt, but it was an ugly scene and in Illinois it seemed to play on television forever.

When the release of the video was countered with a federal lawsuit, the school board countered by releasing the boys' records. If you saw that report, then you saw that some of the kids were marginal students. What you didn't see was that one of them was a senior who had a 3.5 average, was co-captain of the basketball team and was being recruited by several colleges.

Jackson then took it to the secretary of education, Richard Riley, who called a meeting with James Comer, my wife, Bernadine Dorn and Charlie Ogletree. At the end of three or four months of push and pull over the fate of these kids, they won alternative education for these kids and a one-year suspension. It wasn't good enough. But it was a struggle that had to happen and, as Jackson has said, this is a national issue, and one that we must be concerned about.

Zero tolerance and the criminalization of American youth
Zero tolerance is posed as a solution for every problem. It has a history, coming from the Reagan administration's policy of seizing drug boats that were bringing drugs to the United States in airplanes and cars. The Clinton administration escalated this policy when it created gun-free schools, and it has captured the imagination of educators and school boards everywhere. But look at how zero tolerance plays out.

In Austin, Texas, there's an 18 percent black student enrollment and a 36 percent black student expulsion rate. In Durham, North Carolina, 58 percent of the students are black and 68 percent of the expelled kids are black. In Chicago, 53 percent of the students are black and 63 percent of the kids expelled are black. In San Francisco, 16 percent of the student body is black and 52 percent of the expelled students are black.

So you end up in this situation that is kind of a cat's claw. It's the cultural edge of what we're seeing in terms of the criminalization of youth. It's one way of organizing that criminalization.

	Discussion
	"Zero tolerance" policies, the immediate and severe punishment of minor infractions, are becoming increasingly common in today's schools. Are "zero tolerance" policies the solution to disciplinary problems in public schools?

What can educators do? We can resist the notion that zero tolerance has any place in our schools. In fact, some of us have little banners and little bumper stickers on our cars that say "Teach tolerance." Teach tolerance. But zero tolerance--how can those two things go together? How can schools and educators who are supposed to lift kids up simultaneously lock them out?

As a counter to this simpleminded notion of zero tolerance, we should put in its place something that I think I first learned from Harriet Cafarro, my teacher at Bank Street, which is the notion of "the teachable moment." That's something early-childhood educators have always understood.

When a kid pushes another kid off the slide, I mean, if he's 18 you wonder, but if he's 5 you say, "That's a teachable moment." That's a time when we can actually make some sense out of things. The same is true of adolescence.

If anyone needs our steady presence, it's adolescents. We need to substitute this notion of teachable moments for this notion of zero tolerance.

We have to remember, as we struggle around this question of the criminalization of youth, that children are children. Children are children. It seems like a simple thing, but we have to fight for it in our schools. First of all, we have to fight the legal notion of what constitutes a child.

Increasingly there is pressure to define younger and younger kids as adults for certain purposes. There are bills pending in Congress that want to make 14-year-olds or 13-year-olds able to be tried as adults for certain offenses but not able to sign contracts or have an abortion. It's an extraordinary kind of thing.

As teachers, we're in the best position to say that a child is a child is a child. And while things are different and complicated today, they're not so different. We know that children are immature. We know that they need opportunities for judgment and maturing in order to make sense out of the world, and in order to make good decisions.

We need to insist that a child is a child. We need to insist that a school is a site of public good. That is, a school is a place where we can create an environment for children to have experiences, make mistakes, recover, have a second chance, change their lives, open possibilities--and school has to be that for kids.

That means that we have to fight to keep kids in school and keep police and the criminal-justice system out of the school. They don't really have a place in the school, and yet, post-Littleton, we find ourselves increasingly looking to criminal-justice solutions.

Schools as training grounds for prisons

	Thinking Point
	Do high-security systems, such as surveillance cameras and metal detectors, increase or decrease safety in the classroom enviroment?

The parents in Evanston, Illinois, demanded a high-tech surveillance system even though all the research shows that the more locked-down your school is, the more unsafe it is. That's an odd kind of paradox, but it makes sense.

The most locked-down place in the state of Illinois is Statesville, the prison. It's a place where crimes are going on from morning till night. It's an illusory kind of safety. The kind of safety we want is the kind of safety where teachers have the opportunity to really connect with youngsters in teachable moments.

Several years ago, I was listening to the radio while I was going home from work and I heard about an execution that was taking place in Statesville. It was the kind of situation where the media was so excited about it and there was so much enthusiasm that I felt I had to just go down there and stand at the gate of the prison, as an opposition to the death penalty. It seemed the least I could do. It seemed fruitless, too, but I figured why not.

So I went down there all by myself, and as I got closer and closer to the prison it turned out I was entering what amounted to a rock concert. There were 10,000 young people with boom boxes and beer and rock and roll. I worked my way to the gate of the prison and there were nine elderly nuns burning candles; my friend Larry Marshall, who is a lawyer at Northwestern Law School; and his fiancée. There were about 12 of us there. And if I've ever felt marginal, and I often do, I really felt marginal there because we were surrounded by kind of a howling mob celebrating these things.

Larry Marshall went on to defend Rolando Cruz and win his total exoneration and then won two other exonerations that Northwestern spearheaded. The journalism school spearheaded the investigation into several death cases and found that these guys weren't just technically illegally convicted. They were actually innocent.

In Illinois in the past 20 years, where we've executed 13 people, 12 people on death row were found to be absolutely innocent by students at Northwestern University.

The reason this is an important story is that, beginning with Larry Marshall and then spreading to other educators and other students, they built a movement that just simply wanted to see the truth.

The message for all of us is that if you turned down all the lights in this chapel and covered the windows and it was completely dark, if someone lit a candle anywhere it would challenge the darkness everywhere. That's something all educators should hold on to and believe in our deepest hearts as we move forward.

Challenges to democracy
Every generation at every time faces challenges to democracy. America's democratic project is always under assault. The interesting thing is how easy it is to look backward, especially to the generation just gone by, and to know exactly what you would do facing those challenges. But that doesn't actually help us sometimes face today's challenges.

We all know what we would do faced with an unjust war. We all know what we would do if we could stand in the path of the bullet aimed at Martin Luther King. We all think we know that we would stop that from happening, but we don't.

The question is: What are we going to do with the challenges we face today, and what are those challenges?

Challenge number one is the perennial challenge of class. The separation of the rich from the rest is a tremendous challenge. How long can democracy survive with the kind of disparities that we see?

Challenge number two is the ongoing abiding central question of the racial stratification of society and the ways in which privilege and oppression are meted out based on that hierarchy of race.

Challenges number three and number four are somewhat new. Challenge number three is the wholesale retreat from public education, a project worthy of our attention, our investment and our concern. Linked to it, in a deadly embrace, is the full support for the criminalization of every problem that we face and for the incarceration of 2 million of our fellow citizens--and not just the incarceration of those citizens but, increasingly, the privatization of that incarceration.

Crime pays. If you had invested $10,000 five years ago in a corrections corporation of America, you would today have $41,000. I hope we are troubled by the fact that in a democracy we're handing over the notion that our fellow citizens will be under lock and key and that these private hands will manage that for us. That's a deadly and dangerous path that we are going down.

If these are the challenges, teachers and educators stand absolutely at the crossroads of those challenges. What we do or don't do, singly or collectively, can make an enormous difference in facing those challenges.