Tag Archive for 'disruption'

Classroom Management Problems? Hire a Bouncer

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 8, 2009 in Education Practice. 17 Comments

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.

One Bad Apple

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 12, 2009 in Education Theory, Educational Policy and Research and Reports. 18 Comments

bad-apple Children from troubled families perform “considerably worse” on standardized reading and mathematics tests and are much more likely to commit disciplinary infractions and be suspended than other students, according to a new study.  Writing in Education Next, Scott Carrell of UC-Davis and the University of Pittsburgh’s Mark Hoekstra offer evidence that  “a single disruptive student can indeed influence the academic progress made by an entire classroom of students.”

Carrell and Hoekstra, who are both economists, examined confidential student data from Florida’s Alachua County school district, consisting of observations of students in grades 3 through 5 over an eight-year period. The pair also had access to disciplinary records for every student in their sample, which they cross-referenced to domestic violence data from public records.  What emerged was a compelling set of data that indicates children exposed to domestic violence have more disciplinary problems at school, underperform academically and have a negative effect on peers–resulting in lower test scores and increased disciplinary problems in others.  In essence,  a ”one bad apple” syndrome.  Carrell and Hoekstra title their piece “Domino Effect.”

“A majority of parents and school officials believe that children who are troubled, whatever the cause, not only demonstrate poor academic performance and inappropriate behavior in school, but also adversely affect the learning opportunities for other children in the classroom,”  observe Carrell and Hoekstra.  The pair cite a Public Agenda survey which found that 85 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents agreed that the “school experience of most students suffers at the expense of a few chronic offenders.”  The study largely validates those concerns. 

Our findings have important implications for both education and social policy. First, they provide strong evidence of the validity of the “bad apple” peer effects model, which hypothesizes that a single disruptive student can negatively affect the outcomes for all other students in the classroom. Second, our results suggest that policies that change a child’s exposure to classmates from troubled families will have important consequences for his educational outcomes. Finally, our results provide a more complete accounting of the social cost of family conflict. Any policies or interventions that help improve the family environment of the most troubled students may have larger benefits than previously anticipated.

Poll teachers in struggling schools, and I will wager a substantial amount that classroom disruption is identified consistently as the primary barrier to student achievement.  Yet it is consistently glossed over or dismissed, typically attributed to a teacher’s lack of classroom management skills.  I have long believed that the time on-task lost to disruption and behavior problems is almost certainly one of the under-discussed root causes of the achievement gap.  This study does a great service by confirming what many teachers and parents have intuited for years: disruption matters and has a negative effect on all students.

School and classroom tone matter enormously–perhaps more than any other factor.  Get it right and everything seems to work.  Get it wrong and nothing does.  This study holds out the promise of sparking a very important discussion about the rights of the individual in the classroom versus the rights of the community.  It’s long overdue. 

(Image via Digital Eargasm)