School Discipline

It's an axiom of leadership: you get more of what you tolerate.  When you don't enforce discipline at schools, often because it's in vogue to consider it "racist" to do so, you get more misbehavior.  It's bad for the adults, it's worse for the other students:

Alternatives to standard, punitive discipline, while glittering ideals in the abstract, are a resounding failure in practice. It's a story that parallels the rise and fall of "broken windows" policing in society more generally — an analogue through which we can understand the causes and consequences of the abolition of school discipline...

Intentionally or not, the theory of education that undergirded these schools' approach to discipline borrowed from the philosophy behind broken-windows policing: Eliminating small instances of disorder — replacing every "broken window" — helps fend off more disruptive disorder. And, as with every sort of approach that "defines deviancy down," the alternative is a slow slide toward chaos: A child leaves litter in the hallway. It's not picked up. Soon a student throws something down the corridor, but no teacher bothers to address it. Students begin to wander hallways during class. Their noise grows louder. A student mocks a teacher. Before long, students are berating teachers — and worse.

You can say that's a slippery slope, but it's a real slippery slope.  It exists, and we slide down it all the time. 

In many schools, disciplinary reforms have taken the form of "restorative justice," which focuses on mediation and restitution as opposed to punishment. The theory envisions schools as places where students are supported emotionally through various therapeutic and community-building prophylactics. Interpersonal squabbles result in community circles where students are asked deeply personal questions about their mental health and any trauma they've experienced. Classroom disruptions garner a chat with the school counselor. In Dallas public schools, misbehaving students kicked out of the classroom are sent to "reset centers" full of stress balls and bean bags.

Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the rigorous evidence we have on restorative justice finds that it doesn't achieve its promised goals. The RAND Corporation ran two studies on the theory, the first of which found that it decreased suspension rates — a trend that was already occurring in the district studied. At the same time, academics worsened while arrest rates remained the same. The second study found that restorative-justice techniques had negligible effects but still placed a heavy burden on teachers.

Stupidest idea in a long time, besides 'rona shutdowns.

Proponents of restorative justice reject punitive discipline because they worry that it pushes kids into the school-to-prison pipeline. But if restorative justice degrades academic performance while failing to reduce misbehavior — or, in some cases, fostering it — this proposed solution to the school-to-prison pipeline might actually worsen matters.

Critics of punitive discipline miss its purpose. Perhaps a suspension does little to reform the behavior of an individual student — suspend him once or a hundred times, and he'll likely act out again (though there is some evidence that suspensions increase individual achievement). But the purpose of a suspension isn't necessarily the reformation of the one, but the protection of the 30 other children in that student's class and the hundreds of others in the building. Suspensions may not always influence the individual student, but they certainly prevent community spread.

If preventing community spread is the best we can do, I'll take it over what we have right now.

An important aspect of our principal's strategy was implementing punitive consequences for absenteeism. When the bell for class rang, administrators and monitors patrolled every hallway and sent every tardy student to our building's theater. There, the students checked in. If they had been tardy fewer than three times, they were sent back to class with a monitor. If they had amassed more than three tardies, they spent an hour spread out across our school's theater. The punishment wasn't significant; students merely spent an hour sitting silently in a room. Nonetheless, it formed a pillar on which the school's cultural change stood. We had taken away what drew students to ditch classes: a chance to roam the halls while chatting and laughing with friends. If that was no longer an option — and if any attempt brought not entertainment, but boredom — class quickly became the preferred alternative.

At my school we have "roamers", students whose class is apparently named "Hallway".  Nothing is done. 

In her essay "The Crisis in Education," Hannah Arendt predicted that if we remove adult authority from schools, we don't get some utopian sharing of power among students and teachers; instead, the strongest students take charge and force a far more destructive environment onto their classmates. Schools become less an educational Eden and more Lord of the Flies. Much as we cannot destroy energy but only change its form, we cannot remove authority from a school building; we can only change who wields it and to what end.

Wow.  I hadn't heard that before, but it's undeniably true. 

Kicking a student out of school may seem unkind, but no child has a right to interfere with another child's education. When we abolish discipline, we're not abolishing consequences; we're merely asking other students and staff to bear them. How society ought to manage disruptive children is an unendingly complex and ethically fraught question, but we owe it to future generations to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to learn.

As identified in the article, much of the impetus for reducing school discipline is because of racial disparities.  What I've never seen demonstrated, though, is that disparities exist in punishment because of race, only that students of certain races are penalized more--which would make sense if they're causing more of the problems.  Race hustlers, however, have an incentive to ignore that latter issue, and well-behaved students of all races pay the price.  I don't care about the race of the students who are out of control, I care about their behavior--and I want that behavior excised from campus.

Schools don't have to be prisons to be well-disciplined, but they will be chaotic and dangerous if they're not disciplined.  It's time to restore reasonable discipline to America's schools.