Schools don’t conceive children. No one expected my eighth grade English teacher to help bring me up. She was just supposed to teach me English. When I misbehaved, it wasn’t considered an “educational” problem, except when it interfered with other people’s education.
Schools formerly coped with bad behavior by setting standards and enforcing rules. Breaking those rules sometimes warranted warnings and other times earned penalties. That’s because penalties discourage bad behavior. If you disagree, think back to the last time you saw a state trooper in your rearview mirror.
Schools weren’t the first to make excuses for antisocial behavior or to focus more on the offender’s problems than on the problems he caused others. Teachers didn’t invent the fiction that punishments are counterproductive. But in many schools keeping students after school is now considered repressive. Suspending chronically disruptive kids allegedly denies them their right to an education. Troublemakers no longer cause trouble. They’re “behaviorally challenged.”
One fashionable proposal, “Create a Caring Alternative to Suspension,” asserts that disruptive students “have the greatest need to know we care about them.” The author disapproves of “suspensions, detentions, and other punishments” because they have “no positive effect” on the offender’s “behavior or academic achievement.”
This expert needs a lesson in human nature. Punishment certainly does affect human behavior. I’m guessing he slows down like the rest of us when troopers appear in his mirror.
Besides, the offender’s wellbeing and his “academic success” can’t be our primary concern when there are twenty other children in the room. If you think suspending a disruptive kid can’t have a “positive effect” on learning, listen for the collective sigh of relief from his classmates on those rare occasions when it happens.
One “caring alternative,” the Student Activity Center, operates on the assumption that disruptive kids shouldn’t be kicked out of school. Instead, they spend their schooldays receiving counseling and “one on one” SAC attention while everybody else contends with overcrowded classrooms.
Most of us at times need a little extra attention, understanding, or help. The trouble lies in what you do to help, and what you do when helping doesn’t do any good. Everybody deserves some slack and compassion, but nobody deserves the right to return and return and return to wreak havoc in the classroom each time the SAC room rehabilitates him.
How about a caring alternative to inflicting serially disruptive students on other children?
According to advocates, only positive reinforcement is permitted in SAC rooms. “Negative statements are not used.” Somehow, though, SAC students “know that inappropriate behavior will not be tolerated.” Excuse me, but if SAC students really knew this, or cared, they wouldn’t be in SAC. If they were willing to live with rules like “Behave appropriately,” “Raise your hand,” and “No talking,” they’d still be in the classroom.
And what if they don’t follow SAC rules? SAC refers them to the office where “alternative consequences may be considered.”
“May be considered”? Now there’s strong language. As for “alternative consequences,” what’s left after SAC if you can’t suspend a kid or even keep him after school?
Speaking of consequences, SAC students are told “they’re free to make choices about how they behave” as long as they accept the consequences for their “poor choices.” I’m sorry, but it’s wrong to teach students they’re free to make “poor choices.” That’s because they’re not the only ones who bear the consequences. That very species of self-absorbed tunnel vision already characterizes kids who make other students’ lives unbearable. It also enables SAC enthusiasts to see only the problems their SAC student faces, and not the twenty-fold problems he causes the other children in the class.
When advocates tout their approach as “more student-centered,” they mean the student who’s disrupting learning and causing the trouble. They need to spend more thought and time centered on that student’s victims. Those children are students, too, and they suffer doubly, first at the hands of the offender, and then at the hands of officials who repeatedly re-inflict him on his class.
Advocates bizarrely assert that since a student’s bad behavior hinders his freely “accessing [his] education,” he has the right to be placed back “in the classroom.” Sadly, advocates lack the same high regard for the rights of all the other students to access their education in the classroom.
Advocates claim behavior is “just another skill that students are learning,” like math. Anyone who thinks disruptive middle and high school students misbehave because they haven’t yet learned what good behavior looks like shouldn’t be in charge of middle and high school students. Failing to understand algebra is an individual, intellectual problem. Failing to behave is willful and injurious to others.
A few years back a middle school principal suspended a rash of students. Their offenses ranged from physical assaults to chronic rudeness and disruption. Many parents applauded him, but his critics accused him of “waging war on children.”
I can’t speak for his judgment in each of those cases.
But this I can say.
If I remove a student from class, it’s not because I don’t care about him. It’s because I care more about his twenty classmates.
And it’s not because I’m waging war on children.
It’s because he was.
Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.