When a six-year-old boy in the United States was suspended from school for singing the LMFAO song "I'm Sexy and I Know It" to a female classmate, the incident generated the kind of widespread bewilderment that only a story involving children, school bureaucracy, and pop culture can produce.

The boy, who by all accounts had simply internalized a song that was inescapable on radio stations and in grocery stores throughout 2011 and 2012, was singing words he almost certainly didn't understand. The song's explicit content — such as it is, which is to say: not very — had been sufficiently familiar background noise that a first-grader had absorbed its chorus the way children absorb everything they hear repeatedly. This is how six-year-olds learn: they parrot.

The school, applying a zero-tolerance policy around sexual harassment, determined that the incident warranted a suspension. The family was understandably baffled. The boy, by his parents' account, had no concept of the sexual connotations of the word he'd been singing. He was not a harasser. He was a child who knew a catchy song.

The story became a small flashpoint in a much larger debate about the application of zero-tolerance disciplinary policies to young children. Advocates for reform had long argued that such policies, designed with older students and more serious conduct in mind, produce absurd and sometimes harmful outcomes when applied rigidly to children in early elementary grades — children whose developmental stage makes it impossible for them to have the intent that the policies were designed to address.

A six-year-old suspended for singing a pop song is not a safety issue. It is a policy-design failure — and a reminder that rules applied without judgment can produce outcomes that defeat their own purpose.