Their analysis was skewed by bias, but the columnists were right about high schools: they were hotbeds of all kinds of activity, not simply the racial clashes Evans and Novak singled out. A study released around the same time as the Dodd report by the National School Public Relations Association, titled “High School Student Unrest,” found that “59 percent of high schools and 56 percent of junior highs had experienced some form of protest by January of last year.”22 These public school protests did indeed mirror the college protests rocking campuses from Berkeley to Kent State to Columbia. In many cities and suburbs, high school students brought the spirit of protest inside the schoolhouse over the issues that were relevant to their lives and in ways that befitted their experience and circumstances. They walked out of classes as part of the nationally planned war moratorium of 1972. They protested dress codes as restrictions on their freedom of expression. Black students demanded black administrators and the inclusion of black history in their curricula. They staged walkouts when Reverend King was assassinated in 1968. In cities such as Washington, D.C., New York, and Chicago, where poverty and segregation fostered racial unrest, school violence and disruptions were also manifested as crimes against property and people. Alienation from schools that didn’t speak to their experiences could spark a walkout or just plain vandalism. All of it, though, was a sign of the turbulent times.
In the early 1970s, racial segregation in the public schools was addressed in a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that built on the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Interestingly, desegregation and the busing plans that often accompanied it did not produce a new round of school violence among black and white students. The Boston example of pitched battles between white residents opposed to busing and proponents of integration was the exception, not the rule. In his 1978 study of busing, Gary Orfield noted that “while the fear of violence often plays a large role in local debates over desegregation plans, a recent Justice Department report indicates that desegregation seldom produces increases in school violence and even lowers the level when a local plan specifically addresses the problem. . . . The Detroit school system had fewer racial incidents than before . . . students usually adjusted rapidly to desegregated schools, particularly at the elementary level. Most of the violence was among adults outside the school and it diminished after the transition.”23
As the activism of the 1960s and early ’70s receded, different currents outside the schoolhouse came flowing through its doors: the economic downturn of the mid-1970s brought with it a bubble in violent and property crimes. Schools were now permanently fixed on the radar of government officials and bureaucrats as one locus of crime trends worthy of study. So, in 1978, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano released findings of a three-year study of school crime. And like so many government-financed studies of school violence to come, Califano’s report offered an odd mix of scary statistics and sobering perspective. Teenagers ran a greater risk of being robbed, assaulted, or otherwise becoming victims of violence at school than at any other time, the report stated. Yet Califano also offered that while the problem of school crime “remains extremely serious,” the study found vandalism and violence little changed from 1971 to 1976, with some improvement in urban areas. The HEW study also found, not surprisingly, that in communities where violence and crime were high, schools also had higher rates of violence and crime—and that held true in urban, rural and suburban areas.24 Despite the nuanced findings and clear connections between what occurred outside and inside the schoolhouse, the HEW report reflected an emerging consensus among policy makers: school violence was a growing social ill, distinct from crime in general, and that youth engaged in it were a breed apart. But the statistical jump in assaults and robberies was more a blip than a tsunami, and a relative increase could not reverse the fact that the overwhelming majority of students then, as now, were safe in school and faced a greater likelihood of harm at home or in their communities.
SUPERPREDATORS AND STUDENTS GONE WILD
The decade of the 1980s ushered in an entirely new era, as conservatism began its ascension to power in government and out. Ronald Reagan began his two-term presidency and initiated radical changes in social and economic policy. A crack-cocaine epidemic infected many cities around the country with an accompanying spike in violent crime through the early 1990s. Between 1984 and 1993, arrest rates for homicides more than doubled; aggravated assault arrests in 1992 were nearly double the 1980 rate.25 The Reagan Administration made crime and drugs among its chief domestic and foreign policy issues, and school violence was part of the agenda.
In 1984, Attorney General Edwin Meese created the National School Safety Center to reduce crime and violence and improve discipline and attendance at schools. It was the first of what would be many public and private centers created around the country to address, study, prevent, and fix the problem—the seed of an embryonic school-violence industry, so to speak. The center was born in controversy, however, when Justice Department insiders leaked information to journalists that cast Meese’s actions in a different light. In a classic example of pork barrel spending, the $3.9 million grant went to George Nicholson, a close friend of the attorney general, to establish the center at Pepperdine University, which had received private donations from both Meese and Reagan that year.26 Nothing came of the revelations and the NSSC exists today as a sort of clearinghouse.
Reagan also launched the War on Drugs, heralded with the Drug-Free America Act of 1986. With it came the “zero tolerance” approach to sentencing offenders of drug-related crimes. That year, Congress passed the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, a program within the Department of Education that has funneled roughly half a million dollars a year to states and localities to reduce drug use. Given the federal drumbeat and frightening statistics, it’s not surprising that the national preoccupation became violent crime, especially drug-related violent crime and the escalation of gun violence associated with drug trafficking. Here’s a measure of how dramatically crime came to dominate the public psyche: In 1982, 3 percent of adults surveyed in a national poll named crime and violence as the country’s main problems. By 1994, more than 50 percent did, and violence was named as the chief problem of public schools.27 As shown by the statistics on reported incidents of violence and crime discussed below, the public fears of school violence and youth were disproportionate to any actual rise in the problem.
The Reagan years laid the foundation for the Lockdown High model. But it was during the Clinton administration, ironically, that the bricks and mortar of the school-as-prison theory and practice were applied to the problems of discipline and safety. Ironic both because Clinton was considered a liberal and because the actual incidence of school violence, as well as youth crime in general, was beginning to crest in 1992—the year he took office. By then, though, the criminal justice system was on growth hormones, revved up by draconian laws from Congress and state legislatures that were filling the nation’s ever-growing prison system, mostly with offenders of drug-related crimes. Young offenders, especially, came into the crosshairs of legislators and prosecutors who were egged on by the widely quoted criminologists James Q. Wilson, John DiIulio, and James Alan Fox. Wilson used dubious population projections to forewarn of a “cloud that the winds will soon bring over us,” tens of thousands of juvenile thieves, muggers,