At Ed Policy Thoughts, Corey Bunje Bower looks at a letter to the editor in the New York Times from a former teacher, who suggests the way to improve public education is to hire a ‘bouncer’ for every classroom to handle disruptive students. Corey is skeptical about the bouncer idea but points out “discipline was, far and away, the biggest problem in my school . . . and the main reason I left teaching.”
Frequent commenter Brian Rude suggests teachers sometimes need extra help with discipline in the classroom just like a stalled car sometimes needs a wrecker. “The wrecker provides a source of external power when needed, power in abundance, but only on those occasional times when the car cannot rescue itself,” he writes. “So applied to classroom discipline, a wrecker would be some way to bring in an excess of control from an external source to impose very tight control of a class once in a while when needed.”
Elsewhere, writing in the Montreal Gazette, high school teacher Freda Lewkowicz observes that the ability to effectively discipline students and control the school environment is the difference between private and public schools. Public schools, she writes, should have the same right as private schools to expel students.
Public schools don’t expel, even after repeated serious offences, while private schools do. Parents need to ask themselves why only private schools have this right to create a positive, nurturing and safe learning environment for all. All students deserve this, don’t they? The manacles thrust on public schools forbid them to use tough love….Most parents are pro-discipline, pro-safety, pro-high standards and anti-bullying. Public schools should be allowed to free themselves from the shackles of ineffective discipline and deliver these goods for free.
In U.S. schools, of course, discipline is reflexively viewed through its impact on the disruptor, rarely the disrupted. I’ve long wondered if the ability to control their learning environment isn’t the X Factor that allows high functioning charters to do so well. This, to me, was one of the unwritten lessons of David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff: Getting the school environment right matters, and that’s hard to do without the ability to expel. The usual counter-argument is that “no excuses” charters have low expulsion rates, so that’s not what’s happening. I’m not sure I agree.
The real power of consequences comes not from their execution, but from the certainty that they can and will be used. This simple premise explains why we never had a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union and why KIPP expels so few students. The change in behavior comes from the the potential bad actor’s knowing he won’t get away with it. Deterrence works. If the price to be paid is too high, a rational decision can be made that chronic misbehavior is not worth it.
Student discipline will probably never become the issue in ed policy that some teachers–and lots of ex-teachers–might wish. But it should be recognized as a major impediment to student achievement. The homily that effective instruction engages all learners at all times is lovely, but doesn’t reflect the reality many teachers face. Indeed, I have long believed that the achievement gap is in large measure a time on-task gap. Countless hours in chaotic schools are lost to disruption.
I couldn’t agree more. A “low” expulsion rate is not the same as a “zero” expulsion rate, which is what most public schools, even very troubled and chaotic ones, have. I believe expulsion would have a strong deterrent effect.
Kids don’t believe me when I tell them that playing around and time spent off-task will negatively affect their grades…until, of course, they see their grades. I don’t allow students to make up missed work or notes if they missed it simply because they weren’t paying attention. I also have actually done the math with students to show them how just a few minutes of chitchatting or daydreaming on a daily basis adds up over the course of a week, a month, or an entire school year.
The achievement gap is probably very much a time-on-task gap. How else do you explain high-achieving students from high-poverty, high-risk socioeconomic groups? Look at how hard they work. These students, as the students would themselves put it, “don’t play.” This is not to suggest that hard work alone can eliminate an achievement gap, but it does suggest that focus and discipline make a much bigger difference than most people seem to believe. Remove the chronic disruptions, reward strong effort, have the proper supports in place, and voila–achievement!
Not sure expulsion rates tell the whole story. Worked @ a charter that asked expelled students to voluntarily transfer instead of expelling them outright. Was told that we did this to keep black mark of expulsion off of student’s permanent record. Probably more to it than that but seems reasonable. Anyway, betting those expulsion numbers are slightly higher than expected.
Anyone know of any research on the connection between specific discipline policies– in-house suspension, expulsion rates, demerit systems, etc.–and student achievement?
And don’t forget that students can be asked to leave without officially being expelled.
A bouncer may not be the answer but this is one of the most sorely ignored topics in the education reform dialogue.
Disruptive kids ruin the opportunity for themselves and their classmates to use the much needed time on task in the classroom. They simply have to be removed if learning is to be realized.
In my arguments with my principal about discipline (he’s pro-”carrot” and against all “sticks”) I implore him to name one middle school that functions well without negative consequences. I tell him I will go visit that school and learn the errors of my cruel and medieval ways. He cannot name one school. And yet he is utterly unfazed by this embarrassing weakness in his argument. I tell him about KIPP and Catholic schools and he seems uninterested. It’s becoming clearer to me as I age that a lot of people are simply not very concerned about ferreting out the truth, or rejecting false opinions they might hold. People want to hold on to opinions they regard as beautiful and comforting, even if they’re false.
A punishment, whatever it is, can only work if it has some sort of legitimacy in the eyes of all concerned. If the legitimacy of the school, its teachers, its ethics, and traditions is always under scrutiny and critique, then it’s no wonder there is nothing productive happening in class.
The “carrot” advocates want to eliminate coercion by using incentives, but they ultimately foster a system in which the legitimacy of every authority, however rational, is trivialized and questioned. Eventually they realize what they’ve done (most of them), but only when they personally face the chaos they’ve created. Then they misuse their authority because they have no skills.
It’s interesting to note the references to the principals’ involvement in classroom behavior. I’ve observed a spectrum of behavior over the decades and while the school can define the boundaries, it’s still the teacher, the class and the time-of-day that rule.
In my “public school” we have the right to send a student to the office for a “24-hour removal”. Only when the office/principal get tired of the student do you see any action more permanent.
Well said Robert.
What makes people think that public schools don’t (can’t) expel people? Google “zero tolerance” policies. E.g., this NY Times story:
Maybe the real problem is that public schools expel kids for stupid and unpredictable reasons.
Fair point, Stuart, but the issue is less expulsion than the ability to control more tightly the school tone and environment. High functioning charters might “counsel out” a disruptive student well before it gets to the level of expulsion; public schools can expel, but it usually takes an extraordinary circumstance (drugs, weapons, not “mere” disruption) before that’s on the table. But the disruption is chronic in poor schools and is, I think, too easily accepted. Charters have more means at their disposal to address it. And that’s a good thing, by the way.
Indeed, I don’t think that a charter’s ability to control its environment is something they need to apologize for or pretend isn’t so. The comment by the Canadian teacher in the post that “most parents are pro-discipline, pro-safety, pro-high standards and anti-bullying” is exactly right. Charters should embrace this as part of their unique selling proposition to urban families.
Well, I guess my point would be that some public schools seem expel or suspend kids for circumstances that are the furthest from extraordinary (having a completely harmless pocketknife, for example), while not keeping a handle on the sorts of disruption that would actually be relevant.
Stuart–There have been a smattering of “zero tolerance” cases out there where students have been expelled from traditional public schools for stupid reasons. They’re so extreme that they end up in the papers. Can you find data to suggest that such expulsions are commonplace? The generally enrage parents and communities–quite rightly–and end up on CNN.
Robert is right about students who are “counseled out” of high-performing charters well before they are expelled. According to Nancy Flanagan’s most recent blog posting, the Providence Charter school’s principal quite openly acknowledged that policy in her own school. High attrition rates at other schools, like Boston’s charters and KIPP schools, suggest that students are leaving because they aren’t a “good fit,” sometimes because they lack motivation or self-control.
Well, I wasn’t claiming anything about how common such expulsions. The very fact that they happen at all proves how wrong it is to claim, “Public schools don’t expel, even after repeated serious offences, while private schools do.”
Public schools most certainly do have the power to expel. If they choose to exercise that power rarely, and for stupid reasons, that is yet another political dysfunction that shows the need for greater school choice.
One big reason our district is loathe to suspend or expel is that we’re trying to get dubbed a School to Watch (I’m not sure what organization bestows this dubious honor). One of the criteria for getting this designation is a low rate of suspensions and expulsions. Never mind that kids are dissing teachers with impunity, learning takes a back seat to social chit-chat, and the morale of staff is in the toilet –a low rate of suspensions proves that we are a School to Watch!
I tend to find that schools will expel for the big, isolated incident like bringing a knife to school. (And yes I agree that a Cub Scout pocket knife should not be cause for expulsion. Zero tolerance policies are problematic.)
What schools don’t deal with well, and what has the greatest negative impact on student learning, are the kids who never do the one big bad thing. They are the obnoxious punks who show up every day and have no interest in learning. Since these students never cross the line into the big 3 that get dealt with seriously (Sex, drugs, violence) they just disrupt the class day after day after day. It reminds me of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F1HMq3_eXU
Ha! I’ve observed the “cone of ignorance” in my classroom. (See Matt’s link to the Simpsons clip.) I’ll sometimes notice that a cluster of girls, some of them good students, bomb a test –probably because they’d been silently communicating with one another rather than listening.