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"The goal of any effective disciplinary system must be to ensure a safe school climate while avoiding policies and practices that may reduce students’ opportunity to learn. Although the goals of zero tolerance in terms of ensuring a safe and disciplined school climate must be supported, the implementation of zero tolerance has created continuing controversy by threatening the opportunity to learn for too many students." (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force)

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"A large body of research shows these zero-tolerance measures are not the most effective way to prevent violence in schools. In fact, some experts say those measures can counteract what they consider a crucial tool for protecting students as well as the larger community: threat assessments. When carried out correctly, threat assessments sort out behavior intended to cause real physical harm from simply disruptive acts and provide troubled students with the help they need." (Swaby, Propublica)

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"Across the country, schools are moving away from zero tolerance and trying to reduce the number of students they're suspending. The turnaround is a response to a growing body of research showing that zero-tolerance policies resulted in a disproportionate number of kids of color suspended, expelled, and referred to law enforcement." (Winter, APM Reports)

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Credit: Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images

Zero-tolerance measures can counteract what some experts consider a crucial tool for protecting students and the larger community.

After a former student killed six people last year at the private Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, state leaders have been looking for ways to make schools safer. Their focus so far has been to ramp up penalties against current students who make mass threats against schools.

Months after the killings, legislators passed a law requiring students who make such threats to be expelled for a year (unless a school superintendent decides otherwise) and allowing schools not to enroll them afterward. This year, the legislature passed bills that make the offense a felony and that revoke driving privileges for a year.

But a large body of research shows these zero-tolerance measures are not the most effective way to prevent violence in schools. In fact, some experts say those measures can counteract what they consider a crucial tool for protecting students as well as the larger community: threat assessments. When carried out correctly, threat assessments sort out behavior intended to cause real physical harm from simply disruptive acts and provide troubled students with the help they need.

The Secret Service pioneered threat assessments to help identify viable threats against public officials. After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, a team of University of Virginia professors began adapting Secret Service and FBI threat-assessment recommendations for use in schools. They relied on reports from the two agencies showing that school shooters typically expressed their intentions well before acting violently, but that those statements and the underlying potential for harm were seldom thoroughly investigated.

In the course of their research, they learned that educators were concerned about overreacting to students who did not pose a serious threat.

"We also know that students frequently make threatening statements just in the routine course of their day. We have to be very careful that we don't confuse the two," said psychologist Dewey Cornell, who led the University of Virginia research and continues to study threat assessments. "And so we need a systematic process to sort out serious threats from threats that are not serious."

We spoke to Cornell about how schools are handling threat assessments and his concerns about their overreliance on harsh discipline. More than two decades after he began his research, a growing number of states, including Tennessee, require school districts to adopt threat-assessment policies. But Cornell worries that too many are not properly carrying them out.

How Threat Assessments Work

Threat assessments are intended to be an alternative to zero tolerance, giving school leaders a way to resolve problems before they escalate to violence and allowing them discretion over whether and how to discipline students.

Cornell helped create a process to help school administrators carry out threat assessments, starting by interviewing anyone involved with the threat to assess the risk of serious injury. His research shows that the majority of the time, the assessment reveals there was no threat or no serious threat. The threat-assessment team should warn the intended victims of any major threats it finds, take necessary precautions to protect them and seek ways to resolve conflict.

One of the most important parts of the process requires the threat-assessment team to refer students to mental health services they may need, no matter the level of threat. And the process states that law enforcement involvement and harsh disciplinary penalties should be reserved for the most serious cases.

Cornell's initial research in Florida and Virginia shows that, when done well, threat assessments reduce expulsions and keep more students in school. In 2013, Virginia was the first state to mandate that public schools adopt threat-assessment teams. By 2018, nearly 80% of schools in the state reported at least one threat-assessment case; about three-fourths of cases resulted in students being referred for counseling, mental health treatment or psychological assessments. Most students were not expelled, placed in an alternative school or juvenile detention, or hospitalized as a result of a threat assessment.

A 2024 study of Florida public schools conducted over three years found that the implementation of threat assessment had been "widely, but not uniformly, successful," with a third of cases resulting in a student being referred for mental health services and just 2% resulting in an expulsion.

"We're not just looking for the needle in the haystack, that rare student, the one in a million students who's going to actually shoot someone," Cornell said. "We're actually dealing with thousands and thousands of kids who maybe are angry or upset and so they say something threatening. Maybe they're being bullied. We have an opportunity to intervene and work with them long before there's any issue, if there is any issue at all."

Threat Assessments and Zero Tolerance Don't Work Together

According to Cornell, zero-tolerance policies and threat assessments are "antithetical" approaches to handling school safety. Tennessee legislators, however, passed a law mandating that school districts conduct threat assessments less than two weeks after they passed a law requiring expulsion for mass threats.

Zero tolerance requires school officials to automatically punish students who act out, no matter the circumstances. Threat assessment, on the other hand, requires officials to consider the context and motivation of the behavior before deciding how to respond.

There is no research showing that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer, according to a review of available evidence by the American Psychological Association. In fact, such policies can harm Black students and students with disabilities, who are more likely to be suspended or expelled from schools with zero-tolerance discipline policies and, by extension, more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, studies show.

"So we have a disciplinary practice that research tells us does not work, yet we keep doing more and more of it," Cornell said. "It's the educational equivalent of bloodletting. The medical field for years would bleed people, and when they didn't get better, they concluded they didn't bleed them enough."

After Tennessee lawmakers made "threats of mass violence on school property" a zero-tolerance offense last year, they received numerous complaints about students being arrested and disciplined even when they clearly didn't pose a serious threat. At a recent education committee hearing, a lawmaker referred to a case in which a middle schooler threatened to fly a plane into the school. "I don't know too many 12-year-olds that either A, have access to an aircraft, or B, know how to fly it," he said. Tennessee has not released statewide numbers on expulsions for threats of mass violence.

Lawmakers are now considering a bill that would require a threat assessment to be completed and the threat to be deemed valid before an expulsion. Cornell said that limiting expulsions to valid threats still could pose safety risks. "If I am really concerned that a child is dangerous, I don't want to turn them loose in the community without supervision," he said. "I want to try to reach them and work with them and convince them that there is a better way to deal with whatever problem or concern they have."

When Threat Assessment Goes Wrong

Civil and disability rights advocates argue that threat assessments can do more harm than good and point to examples of school officials referring students with disabilities and students of color for threat assessments more often. In Albuquerque Public Schools, for example, children with disabilities and Black children made up a disproportionately high percentage of those referred for threat assessments, according to a Searchlight New Mexico report. A study of four Colorado school districts found that Black students, Native American students, male students and students with disabilities were overrepresented in the threat-assessment data. No national study exists showing how schools are implementing threat assessments; Cornell has conducted studies in Virginia and Florida and is working on a national one with funding from the federal Department of Justice.

A Texas Observer investigation into threat assessments showed the vast majority of districts in the state failed to properly implement them. Only a small percentage of districts provided students with needed mental health support and other services as required by state law. In Tennessee, school officials are required to include law enforcement in their assessment of whether a student poses a threat - but including mental health professionals is optional.

"If you're installing threat assessment in a school that doesn't have a school psychologist, doesn't have a school social worker and has one counselor for every thousand students, you're gonna have a problem. It's like putting new tires on a car with a busted engine," Cornell said. "We have a school system that is strained and stretched to the limits."

But Cornell said the reports of schools failing to properly carry out threat assessments shouldn't serve to indict the entire idea. His research in Florida shows that Black students experienced slightly higher rates of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions than white students - a much smaller disparity than the national average. Students with disabilities did not receive harsher discipline or legal action than other students after a threat assessment.

"States seem to be willing to spend millions of dollars on security hardware, but almost nothing on training and coaching," he said. "The result is many schools are implementing threat assessment without adequate training, without the time allotted to them to carry out the procedures that are required. So they end up cutting corners."

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Tennessee Is Ramping Up Penalties for Student Threats. Research Shows That's Not the Best Way to Keep Schools Safe.

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Zero-tolerance measures can counteract what some experts consider a crucial tool for protecting students and the larger community.

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The president of the American Federation of Teachers recently issued a remarkable mea culpa.

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For years, Randi Weingarten supported "zero-tolerance" policies in schools. Under zero tolerance, students who break certain school rules face mandatory penalties, including suspension and referral to law enforcement. The approach gained popularity during the 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, most school districts in the United States had adopted some form of zero tolerance.

But at the end of 2015, Randi Weingarten wrote an editorial in American Educator saying those policies had been a failure.

"When you see that you're wrong, you have to say that you're wrong and apologize for it," Weingarten said in an interview.

Zero-tolerance policies were supposed to make schools safer and make discipline fair. But in practice, the policies "didn't help us get to the safe and welcoming school environments that every parent wants for his or her child," Weingarten said.

Across the country, schools are moving away from zero tolerance and trying to reduce the number of students they're suspending. The turnaround is a response to a growing body of research showing that zero-tolerance policies resulted in a disproportionate number of kids of color suspended, expelled, and referred to law enforcement.
School suspension rates, 2011-2012

Schools have little choice but to change.

In 2014, the federal Departments of Education and Justice issued a letter to state education commissioners warning that districts continuing to have a pattern of disproportional discipline risk a federal civil rights action. Already, a number of districts around the country are facing complaints or have entered into settlements with the DOE's Office of Civil Rights.

Many districts are struggling to figure out how to reduce suspensions and still maintain order in classrooms.

In some places, teachers have been frustrated by new discipline policies that they say don't allow them to suspend students in many cases, but don't offer them other options for dealing with disruptive students. Weingarten said changes in discipline policies need to be accompanied by training and support for teachers.

"We can't go from zero tolerance to zero discipline," she said.

Some school districts are finding some success in reducing racial gaps in discipline and maintaining order by taking different approaches to discipline, such as restorative justice.

In Denver, Tim Turley teaches teachers how to use restorative practices rather than removing kids from the classroom. He said he often meets with skepticism from teachers in his workshops. He reminds them that suspension is a temporary solution. They can remove a student, but "they always come back," Turley said.

Turley said suspension is a hollow threat for most kids. "Kids who are suspended don't sit home and read the Bible to learn the errors of their ways," he said. "To them a suspension is a legal three- to five-day holiday."

Research bears out Turley's observation. Recent studies show that suspension is ineffective at changing students' behavior and has serious long-term repercussions.

"When you deny kids learning time they fall behind academically because they're not in school," said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at UCLA. "Many times there's no provision to make up work you missed because you were in trouble. But, secondly, the longer you've been put out the more discouraged you become."

A student who is suspended in the ninth grade - even just once - is twice as likely to drop out of school later. Students who are suspended are also more likely to wind up in the juvenile corrections system.
Connection between suspensions and graduation

"School disengagement is one of the strongest correlates of juvenile delinquency," said Russell Skiba, professor of counseling and educational psychology at Indiana University.

Skiba said it's not just that kids who were headed for juvenile detention happen to get suspended on the way. It's that suspension itself appears to contribute to later trouble with the law. Take similar kids at similar schools who commit similar offenses. Suspend some but not others. The ones who are suspended are more likely to get suspended again, to drop out, and to get arrested.

Skiba began looking into the effects of zero tolerance soon after President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act in 1994. The act required states that get federal education money to pass zero-tolerance laws requiring the expulsion of any student who brought a weapon to school. But many states passed laws that went further, requiring suspension or expulsion for other offenses, too. Some school districts created zero-tolerance policies calling for suspension or expulsion for fighting, drugs, smoking, defiant behavior, tardiness and even truancy.

"The theory was that by providing severe consequences to even minor infractions, it would send a message to students that disruptive behavior was unacceptable," Skiba said.

But that thinking didn't make sense to Skiba. A tenet of behavioral psychology is that punishment alone can't shape appropriate behavior, he said.

He and other researchers started looking at data from a large Midwestern school district, "and began to see some troubling patterns in that data," Skiba said. "Suspensions were being used for relatively minor behavior. The majority of suspensions were not for the most serious offenses but rather for more minor behaviors. And we began to see a huge racial gap."

Kids of color were more likely to be suspended than white children. Skiba looked at other studies and found the same result.

And Skiba said it wasn't because African American kids are more likely to act up in school.

"We have not seen any evidence that African American students are engaged in higher rates of more serious behavior than other students in the same schools, in the same districts," Skiba said. "In fact what we found was that they seemed to be referred to the office more for subjective reasons than more objective reasons."

Skiba says there's not much difference between black and white students when it comes to concrete offenses, such as bringing a weapon to school. But when the infraction is something that's in the eye of the beholder - something like loitering, disrespect, or threatening behavior - black students are more likely than white students to be suspended.
Racial change among students, teachers, 1993-2011

Other researchers have found similar results. One study demonstrated that teachers' preconceptions about black and white students may be one reason for the disproportionate discipline.

Researchers Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua at Stanford University gave teachers a series of anecdotes about student misbehavior and asked whether the students should be punished. Different teachers got the same anecdotes, but the names were changed: Some teachers got a name that suggested that the child was white, like Greg or Jake. Others got a name that suggested that the child was African American, like DeShawn or Darnell. The teachers who got names like DeShawn and Darnell were more likely to suggest harsh discipline on a second offense and more likely to say they could imagine suspending the child in the future.

When zero-tolerance policies were first gaining popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, many people thought that strict, inflexible policies would result in fairer discipline. But the racial discipline gap got wider. In the 1970s, a black child was twice as likely to be suspended as a white child. Today, a black child is nearly four times as likely to be suspended - even a preschool child.

The other hope was that zero tolerance would make schools calmer and safer, but researchers say that didn't happen, either.

An American Psychological Association task force issued a report on zero tolerance in 2008 that said, "Rather than reducing the likelihood of disruption ... school suspension in general appears to predict higher future rates of misbehavior and suspension among students who are suspended."

The report also looked at the assumption that removing disruptive students would lead to a safer climate at school. "Although the assumption is strongly intuitive," the report said, "data on a number of indicators of school climate have shown the opposite effect, that is, that schools with higher rates of suspension and expulsion appear to have less satisfactory ratings of school climate."
Connection between jail time and suspensions

Weingarten said it was data like this that changed her thinking about school discipline.

She argues that it will likely never be possible to get away from suspension and expulsion entirely. Students who are dangerous will always have to be removed from schools. But she says less serious misbehavior should be dealt with in other ways.

"If we're only talking about suspension in discipline, we've lost our way," she said.

Producers: Catherine Winter, Laurie Stern, Suzanne Pekow and Ryan Katz
Editor: Stephen Smith
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Special thanks: Liz Lyon, Sasha Aslanian, Samara Freemark

Support for this program comes from the Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's American Graduate project.

A note of disclosure: The Spencer and Lumina Foundations supported some of the research that was referred to in this program. But the foundations had no influence on our coverage.

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Amid evidence zero tolerance doesn't work, schools reverse themselves

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A get-tough attitude prevailed among educators in the 1980s and 1990s, but research shows that zero-tolerance policies don't make schools safer and lead to disproportionate discipline for students of color.