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.
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