At the beginning of this school year, Ahmed Mohamed, a freshman at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, brought a makeshift clock to school to impress his teachers—and ended up in handcuffs. His teachers, it seemed, thought it could be a bomb, and Mohamed was interrogated without his parents present for hours. While the incident sparked outrage over Islamophobia and racial profiling (partially due to Irving’s earlier public embarrassments), it also revealed that Mohamed was far from an outlier: American students are frequently arrested for minor offenses like throwing paper airplanes, doodling, and burping. Despite the fact that data from the Department of Justice and the Department of Education shows serious behavioral issues in schools have been on the decline over the last few decades, teachers have ratcheted up their disciplinary reactions to the highest level.
[For more of this story, written by Jared Keller, go to http://www.slate.com/articles/...ns_biologically.html]
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