A British school engaged in battle of wills with a parent has inadvertently turned a spotlight on the issue of student discipline. The school in Doncaster, England, won’t let an 11-year old return to class until he spends a day in the school’s “isolation room” for letting the air out of a classmate’s bicycle tires. But the boy’s father describes the room as a dungeon and compares it to a cell in Guantanamo Bay. He has threatened to remove his son from the school in protest.
The room is painted totally black. The walls, the partitions, the window blinds – everything was black,” said Andrew Widdowson. “The partitions down one side created four cells where school kids are expected to sit at a desk all day. My son has never been in trouble. The first time he’s done something and he gets told to go into isolation. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. I was shocked they were putting children into that room. It’s more like a prison.
“In my days as a young teacher, in the early 1990s, I was very trigger happy about sending irritating kids to such places,” former British teacher Francis Gilbert, writes in the Guardian. ”It gave me a huge feeling of power. However, I began to notice that it was always the same pupils going there. Increasingly, they became rather too happy to leave my lessons. Indeed, spending time in the ‘cooler’ – as one of my schools nicknamed it – was seen as cool.”
Gilbert’s observation is familiar to anyone who has ever taught in a school plagued by chronic disruption. There’s a familiar cast of characters in most schools that use “in-house suspensions” – typically off-the-books punishments not officially reported to districts. Nothing is expected of such kids, who are merely being warehoused on-site.
As the Children’s Rights Alliance for England has pointed out, by not expecting anything of them, the school is depriving them of the right to an education and contravening the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Moreover, these internal exclusions seem to disproportionately affect our most vulnerable children: looked-after children, pupils with special educational needs, children from poor and ethnic backgrounds. Experience suggests that internal exclusions have played a role in contributing to the rock bottom levels of achievement of our most deprived children.
As always, there’s another side to this coin. Profoundly disruptive children represent an enormous drain on educational resources in struggling schools, not the least of which is teacher and student time on-task. Certainly, letting the air out of another kid’s tires doesn’t seem to meet the definition of profoundly disruptive. But finding an effective way to safeguard the education of the many ready and able learners in even the most chaotic schools, while not giving up on the few disaffected and disruptive is a balancing act that very few if any struggling schools seem to get right. The problem is typically compounded by a knee-jerk “blame the teacher” response for failing to control his or her class. In this way, inexperienced teachers learn to place a premium on classroom management, and not much else. The net result is…pretty much what we have.
Thank you for helping us to recognize you are a disruptive student. We will begin your training for the juvenile justice system. Please report to your cell.
Comment by FeFe — October 15, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
I don’t doubt that Britain’s Children’s Rights Alliance is run by well-meaning people, but the effect of people with their mindset is pure evil. What follows is an excerpt from an outstanding science teacher from the north of England:
“The most disturbing recent development to me is the wholesale handing over of power to the kiddies, who not only have the ability to destroy observed lessons at will, but are also interviewed regarding the appointment of new teachers and the promotion of existing ones. Ours also have a direct line to the Principal himself and have been told in no uncertain terms that if they report dissatisfaction with a teacher and if that teacher does not subsequently improve, then that teacher will be replaced.
“Unfortunately, we’re between a rock and a hard place. A lot of teachers should be bloody replaced, and one of the reasons we’re all being subjected to such absurd pressure is that state education is riddled with talentless freeloaders who could barely scrape a living in any other walk of life. Even so, I’ve yet to meet a single parent or person outside of education who believes that children should even think they might wield power over the lives of their teachers. Most just seem to sympathise with our lot, and tend easily towards reminiscence about the cane.”
Comment by Tom Burkard — October 17, 2008 @ 6:18 am
So what do we do? I see the behavior problems in classrooms becoming more and more like you said: like “the kiddies” are having more and more of the control (plus, the teachers are just very tired and they can only do so much with one teacher to anywhere from 15 to 30 students in one classroom, and most of the time with no assistant). So my question is…what can we do? (It is refreshing to see that there are folks out there who are seeing the problem with discipline as well as the fact that students are receiving more control and teachers being blamed some of the time…this is one among several reasons we are seeing a very high teacher turnover, I believe).
Comment by Terri Liska — October 17, 2008 @ 11:28 am
I believe too many parents are in denial about their children’s behavior. I do not agree this room is where this child should be but I also acknowledge children are allowed to become monsters in light of “self esteem”. I think children need to be taught real world consequences. Making this child buy new tires with his own money or writing an essay on how to apologize in different ways and in different cultures, will not only give this young man a lesson to learn but also a new appreciation of what it means to take responsibility for his own actions. Parents should be required to sit in the classroom(s) with their ill-behaved children for a whole day. Children who are taught to acknowledge their disruptive behavior and are accountable for it will benefit by lessening the overcrowding of REAL Jail cells. Parents, Please stop excusing your children and start teaching them real life consequences. Teach them when they are young so when they are older they can make sound wise decisions.
Comment by TH — October 17, 2008 @ 2:04 pm