This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 13, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Kids who are unnecessarily disruptive in school ought to be punished.

The new Department of Justice guidance on school discipline suggests that school investigations under the guise of what's known as disparate impact.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, explains.

The Zero Tolerance policies have been around now for years and quite rightly have provoked quite an outcry from all across the political spectrum

for their irrationality, their zaniness, and we'll get to the incentives for why schools would adopt a policy as silly as thought.

I think a little bit later when we talk about this, but let's start by saying that libertarians

certainly have been leading the charge on some of the problems with school

discipline.

Zero tolerance is one. The police intervention in areas where it would have been

resolved by school officials or school district people.

Truancy, for example, why in some parts of the country do they run around treating truancy

as a matter for arresting people.

Why do many things that would have been resolved with suspensions or some other discipline

suddenly turning to police referrals.

So there's a lot that needs reconsideration and when Attorney General Eric Holder

and Education Secretary Arna Duncan got up to announce the new federal

policies, they did strike some cords that we could see, yes, this has gone way too far, and it's time to reconsider them.

If only we could stay on those points of agreement, but unfortunately,

the policies that they unveiled open up a whole bunch of new problems where it's

important we understand what they're trying to do because they will take us down

...