Public school discipline policies fail teachers
A first-grade teacher asks what she
can do about a girl in her class who is completely undisciplined. After
nearly two months of this teacher’s best efforts, the child’s behavior
is no better. She is defiant, aggressive toward other kids, and often
gets out of her seat and crawls around on the floor. Several years ago,
she taught the girl’s older sister, who also had numerous discipline
issues. The home is chaotic, so the teacher doubts she can expect much
if any help from the parents.
The further problem is that the
public school in which she teaches forbids the use of “negative”
consequences. She can’t take any privilege, including recess, away from
the child. She is restricted to using a visual “red light, green light”
system that simply lets the child know what her behavior level is at any
given moment in time. At the end of the day, she sends home notices to
the parents of those kids who’ve had problems.
With great regret, I told the
teacher that I had no suggestions that I’d put any faith in. There are
two roadblocks to success in this sort of situation. First, a teacher
cannot be expected to get a child’s behavior under control without full
cooperation from the child’s parents. That cooperation has to include
unmitigated acknowledgment of the
problem as well as a commitment to follow through at home when there are
discipline problems at school. Lacking that, a teacher is limited to
containment strategies with a problem child. Furthermore, she will start
every day at pretty much square one. With parent cooperation, a
discipline problem can generally be solved quickly.
Unfortunately, there is widespread
reluctance on the part of today’s parents to fully acknowledge their
kids’ classroom behavior problems. Upon hearing of a problem, too many
parents toss the hot potato back at the teacher, claiming that her
management of or attitude toward the child is the issue, not the child’s
behavior.
The second roadblock,
described in this teacher’s
communication with me, is public school discipline policy. With rare
exception these days, schools tie the hands of teachers behind their
backs. As in this teacher’s case, they forbid “negative” consequences
like taking away recess or having misbehaving children write sentences.
They send teachers to seminars on behavior-modification based classroom
strategies that “work” only with kids who would be well-behaved without
them. The weaknesses inherent in public school discipline policy
virtually guarantee that far too many kids will end up being diagnosed
as having “disorders” of one sort or another and given potentially risky
psychiatric medications.
A 2004 study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
found that more than 1 in 4 public
school teachers put their children in private schools. At the time, that
was more than twice the figure for all parents. One of the top three
reasons cited by these teachers was better discipline policies. Neither
of the two national teachers’ unions would comment on the study. Fancy
that.
No one has more investment in
classroom discipline than a teacher. Public school teachers are highly
likely to opt out of public education for their own kids, in order that
they might be disciplined more effectively. It’s time the educrats put
those two facts together.
You can visit family psychologist John Rosemond’s website at
www.johnrosemond.com
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