By Daniel Buck
Thursday, August 10, 2023
Christian Educators is a professional organization
that offers legal counsel and liability insurance for teachers who bristle at
typical union politics and agendas. Of every phone call that the organization
has received this year, executive director David Schmus has recorded a
one-sentence summary for his personal record. He showed me the extensive
bullet-point list.
One student threatened to shoot up the school and was
allowed to return the following Monday. Another student threatened a pregnant
teacher and her unborn child; he’s still in her class. A student brought a
knife to school; it was confiscated, but the student returned to class that
day. A student tried to choke a teacher and threatened to break her hand and
yet returned the following day. (You may have noticed a pattern.) The list
continued for pages.
I have a similar document just from my experiences as a
teacher this last year. A student threatened that her father would come to the
school and beat the sh** out of my colleague, but the school administration
didn’t bother to address it. Another student brought a hammer to school with
the intention of clubbing a hated classmate with it. She faced a suspension but
no expulsion. Eventually the girl was expelled for beating up a special-needs
student on the bus. Yet another ran into my classroom and tried to pick a fight
with a student; she began screaming “F*** your dead dad” while I held her back
from committing assault. She was in school the next day.
Violence, threats of violence, and disorder in schools
are nothing new. The old have been complaining about the behavior of the young
since biblical times. Our schools always have had to and always will need to
manage misbehavior, and some students will push any boundary you set for them.
But in the past decade, there have been policy changes — decisions to tear down
traditional disciplinary structures in schools across the country — that have
caused a sharp rise in misbehavior.
The result has been a double blow to education quality:
The retreat from discipline has directly degraded the learning atmosphere,
sowing chaos and stunting students; and it has demoralized and depressed
teachers, pushing them to leave the profession. As student behavior worsens,
more teachers leave, the school struggles to pick up the slack, student
behavior worsens yet more, and the cycle spirals downward.
Schmus, whose organization represents roughly 14,000
teachers, tells me that he’s fielding more calls than ever about behavior
problems. “Our members have been kicked, hit, scratched, and had objects like
globes or furniture thrown at them,” he says. Perhaps even more worrying, he’s
getting such reports about younger and younger students, “including a first-grader
threatening to kill other students.”
***
Two surveys from EAB, a large education consulting
firm, bear out Schmus’s observation. The company questioned over a thousand
teachers and hundreds of superintendents. The surveys unearthed that the
incidence of classroom violence has doubled since the pandemic. Eighty-one
percent of school superintendents say that behavior has become worse. Education
Week, the American Psychological Association, the Institute of Education
Sciences, and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools — an
ideologically diverse bunch — have all confirmed this reality with their own
investigations.
Statistics give a sense of the general chaos, but it’s
easy to overlook what the numbers mean in practice. Sometimes the results are
quite visible. A radio host in my area chronicled countless fights that
students had video-recorded in our schools — students beating each other bloody
while onlookers crowded around, cheering. A viral trend on TikTok had students
vandalizing school bathrooms for social-media clout; my own school had to lock
the restrooms for a time, and students could enter them only with an escort.
For most students and teachers, though, it is the
low-level chaos that is common and frustrating. Few teachers will face violence,
and few students will get into serious fights. But a great many students grow
impatient because they can’t hear their teacher over the classroom noise.
School buildings are full of students who are missing out on an education.
Debates about school choice and school funding often receive a lot of
attention, but, as influential professor of education John Hattie has pointed
out, the most consequential policies relate to in-school factors “such as the
climate of the classroom, peer influences, and the lack of disruptive
students” (emphasis mine).
There are several causes for this slide into pandemonium.
Disruptions from the pandemic surely caused much of it. Schmus blames not just
learning loss but also a “loss in self-control and an understanding of appropriate
group behaviors.” He also notes the toxic effects of the internet on students
who spent a year of their lives staring at screens. The fraying American family
— more children growing up in single-parent households — surely factors in, as
does permissive parenting.
Those trends are largely beyond a school’s purview. But
the abolition of school discipline is not, and it deserves special
condemnation.
***
The story begins in 2014, when the Obama
administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter that threatened districts and
schools with legal action if their discipline policies resulted in disparate
outcomes — that is, if a disproportionate number of minority students received
punishments. The Trump administration rescinded the letter, but it had already
set in motion a drift away from punitive discipline and toward other, less
effective methods of controlling student behavior.
The two most popular substitutes are “positive behavior
interventions and supports,” an approach that emphasizes incentives over consequences,
and “restorative justice,” which relies on conflict resolution and discussions
with counselors in place of detentions or suspensions.
Undergirding both approaches is a progressive view of
human nature. Misbehavior stems not from sin or human imperfection but from
broken systems and “root causes.” Johnny doesn’t push Timmy because he’s
selfish or still learning to control his anger, the argument runs. He does so
because of cultural conflict, hunger, or insufficient emotional support. Kids
might need a bag of chips or a hug, but certainly not a detention. In each
case, the cause of misbehavior is external to the student himself, and so we
ought not hold him accountable for his actions.
This view is wrong, both in its theory and in its
practical effect. The simple fact is that misbehavior is inherent to children
and to humanity in general. We cannot eradicate wrongdoing; we can only
disincentivize it and create systems that address it appropriately. Perhaps a
student is struggling at home, but punitive discipline and
exclusionary practices such as expulsions are still needed to protect and
secure the learning of the other students.
***
Exclusive reliance on nonpunitive approaches
communicates to the misbehaving student not high expectations and a belief in his
ability to overcome poor circumstances but condescension and a belief that the
adults expect nothing better.
This is not to deny that “positive behavior interventions
and supports” and “restorative justice” can have a place within an overall
approach that includes punishment. In my own classroom, I implemented aspects
of both: a point system that students could use to buy food or extra credit,
and conferences with students who had a detention or an in-school suspension.
The problem occurs when these additions replace traditional consequence
structures, a replacement that many guides to the implementation of restorative
justice encourage.
Entire districts and even states have made this mistake.
For example, in 2015, Illinois passed Senate Bill 100, which sought to address
the “school-to-prison pipeline” by eliminating zero-tolerance policies and the
use of suspensions for low-level disruptions. A survey of Illinois teachers
after the fact found that a majority thought school culture and behavior had
deteriorated after the bill’s passage.
Similarly, even before Obama’s “guidance,” Philadelphia
had limited suspensions for nonviolent conduct. One academic review of the
policy concluded that truancy had increased and academic performance had
plummeted because of the changes. Similar stories have played out in New York
City, California, and elsewhere across the country.
If anything, the new approaches incentivize low-level
disruption, as some districts even have “reset centers” where misbehaving
children can go have a snack in a beanbag chair. Soon the only transgressions
for which they will really be punished are violent crimes. If a school holds
the line on students’ talking out of turn or violating the dress code,
misbehavior is an untucked shirt. If there are almost no expectations,
misbehavior is hard-drug use or physical assault. Sure enough, the review of
Philadelphia’s policies warns that after the schools forwent punishment for
low-level disruptions, “serious incidents of student misconduct increased.”
***
What rigorous academic research we have on the
alternatives to discipline finds them wanting. The RAND Corporation ran two
randomized controlled trials on the implementation of restorative justice. On
surveys, students reported a deterioration in classroom culture and an increase
in bullying. What’s more, there were substantial negative effects on math
achievement for middle schoolers and for black students in particular. Though
restorative justice is billed as a means to fix the so-called school-to-prison pipeline,
the way it fosters disorder and depresses academic achievement could, I
believe, exacerbate that problem by making schools worse and thereby rendering
them less able to steer students down a better course.
At a time when schools are facing the consequences of
prolonged closures and pandemic policies, and students are pushing hard against
behavioral boundaries, schools have slackened their discipline and reduced
their rigor. It is like loosening the bolts when a machine is already under
unusual strain.
The policy corrective is simple in theory and difficult
to achieve politically: abolish any state mandates that tie the hands of
on-the-ground educators who would otherwise administer necessary consequences.
A continued emphasis on school-board elections is also essential. Even in my
own blue district, school-board members made discipline a central pillar in
their campaign platforms. “Keep kids from beating each other bloody” is a
pretty effective message. If schools cannot keep general order, no student will
learn a thing.
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