Just about everyone - principals, parents, students, the general public - knows that many U.S. schools have a discipline problem, that kids are often out of control, not to mention rude, inattentive, and sometimes violent. Nearly every survey of problems facing U.S. schools puts discipline near the top of the list. The No Child Left Behind act even has a provision (badly implemented, to be sure) that gives families the right to opt out of "persistently dangerous" schools, suggesting that this problem has even reached the corridors of Congress.
Yet a few weeks back, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer, "at Cramp Elementary School in West Kensington, . . . disciplinarian Fred Creel was removed from his post in part because he required children to write sentences 100 times as a form of punishment. School officials told Creel . . . that they considered such assignments a form of corporal punishment and detrimental to the education process."
Superintendent Paul Vallas does not agree. He thinks requiring disruptive students to write sentences repeatedly is an acceptable method of disciplining them. In fact, he rather likes it, noting that it was effective when he was a kid: "If you counted the lengths of the blackboards in miles, then I did about 10 miles of repetitive writing in my lifetime. It used to have an effect on me. It also improved my handwriting."
Mr. Creel did not get his job back, however. It seems he had other "issues," as we say nowadays, so Vallas did not reverse the principal's decision. Creel "has been moved to a teaching assignment," which is apparently how school systems now discipline their disciplinarians. Curious.
Still, this was but one of a spate of recent accounts of discord and creativity on the school discipline front. A Mississippi high school trains cameras on teachers so that suspended students, sitting in detention hall elsewhere on campus, can keep up with their classwork via computer. The Des Moines Register reports that "Southeast Polk High School will spend up to $80,000 this year to rent office space and hire private employees to work with students who otherwise would take five days off for out-of-school suspensions."
What's going on in the world of school discipline?
First and most important, schools are having to devise new (or reinstate ancient) discipline strategies because of severe limits on the most obvious methods. Corporal punishment is out. "Staying after school" is often impractical, due to bus schedules, tutoring programs, and teacher contracts. Parents cannot be counted upon either to discipline their own kids or to support educators who try to. And "suspension" is out of favor because it reduces learning opportunities and rewards youngsters who cause trouble precisely because they don't like being in school. Observes Kathy Christie of the Education Commission of the States, "I think there's been an increasing understanding that suspending kids from school is a bit like giving them what they want."
Looming over the entire topic are a spate of court orders and consent decrees, due process rights, and concerns about fairness in meting out punishments to minority students.
In other words, discipline has grown complicated and political, and today's teachers and principals have limited options. So they're trying to create new ones. The KIPP academies follow a sports model and send unruly youngsters to "the bench," which is in the classroom but apart from other students and where they are permitted to speak only to the teacher. Federal grants are trickling into other Iowa high schools to put students who need discipline to work on community service projects "from walking dogs at the local animal shelter to fetching parts at auto repair shops." Philadelphia has special "disciplinary schools," and its high schools all have metal detectors that students must pass through.
A lot of these arrangements are pricey. The firm selling web-based teacher-filming systems to Mississippi high schools charges about a quarter million dollars per school. (Uncle Sam seems to be covering much of that.) Metal detectors cost money, as do the people who supervise them. Community service projects carry a price tag, too, if only for the staff members who supervise them. At a time of tight school budgets, one must ask how much money should be spent on discipline.
Vallas was onto something when he endorsed "repetitive writing," a time-honored, low-cost method of making a disruptive kid sorry that he misbehaved. No, it's not powerful enough to counter major-league violence like teen-age gangs and guns in school. But like the "broken windows" theory of law enforcement, i.e. creating a culture of decent behavior in which minor infractions do not go unpunished, such profoundly boring punishments seem like a fine place to begin with younger pupils and lesser infractions.
As for serious miscreants, sooner or later society must ask at what point does a young person forfeit the right to a public education by disrupting the education of others, terrorizing teachers, and wrecking the learning climate of a school? We want to leave no child behind, but what do we do with youngsters who refuse to be educated?
"School rethinks discipline plan," by Staci Hupp, Des Moines Register, March 2, 2004
"Repetitive rewriting is fine as discipline, Vallas says," by Susan Snyder, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 24, 2004 (registration required)
"Suspended kids log on to web class," by Fredreka Schouten, Gannet News Service, March 1, 2004
