Checker Finn's editorial on "The Discipline Paradox" discussed several difficulties of maintaining classroom order - particularly when a classroom contains some students who don't want to learn. Having served on the Fairfax County School Board for eight years, sitting on literally hundreds of expulsion panels (and reviewing the written record of hundreds more), I was able to see firsthand the discipline challenges that some teachers and school administrators face each day. Below are two observations from my tenure.
First, in most classrooms, the worst threat to order is the "serial disrupter" - the student who acts out in class on a regular basis. Several years ago, in an effort to curb the behavior of these serial disrupters, Fairfax County (VA) devised a behavior modification program, whereby disruptive students are sent to "time out rooms" for the remainder of the class period or (in elementary schools) lesson. In the best of these rooms, students found themselves sitting on a hard chair, facing the wall and working on their lessons in a cubicle-like setting. What we discovered was that
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the students who remained in the classroom after the disrupter was excused suddenly discovered they could actually absorb some learning with their "colleague" out of the classroom,
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the disruptive student found it a very unpleasant place to go, and frequently engaged in "behavior modification" so as not to find him/herself back there, and
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the student who was disrupting class because she didn't understand the work in the classroom (Flash: kids who can't read act out in class!) could use this opportunity for some one-on-one help in learning the subject at hand.
We also found that teachers and administrators generally liked the program. So too did many of the students, including those students who acted out because they needed help.
Sadly, Fairfax County decided to reduce the scope of the program due to a spate of budget cuts, concerns about overrepresentation of minority students in time-out rooms, and the uneven application of the program. To me it would have been more logical to reform a program that had shown positive results, rather than cutting it in half, but that is yet another story of school board (and superintendent) politics.
Second, we shouldn't underestimate the impact of IDEA on discipline. In Fairfax County, we had any number of cases in which students who committed equal offenses (i.e., bringing a gun to school, committing a mob assault) in the same incident received unequal punishments because one of them was, say, dyslexic. This is true even when the offense has nothing to do with the disability, because the provisions of IDEA demand a dual system of discipline in the schools - one for "regular kids" and one for special ed students, the latter requiring a much higher level of documentation and paperwork at every stage of the process, at the end of which educational services must continue to be provided regardless of the infraction.
Given the growing number of students identified as special education (over-identification is another issue, to be sure), the paperwork burden of IDEA creates huge administrative complexities for educators. Many educators find it easier simply to shy away from, rather than confront, the expensive one-size-fits-all bureaucratic hurdles they're required to clear to discipline a special ed pupil. What's worse, all students - disabled or not - figure this out real quickly; the result is a continual stretching of limits that are almost nonexistent to begin with these days.
Christian N. Braunlich is vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy and a former member of the Fairfax County School Board.
