Weak school discipline leads to family grief and neighborhood mayhem

I have previously written in this blog about the problem of poor discipline, or serious class misbehavior in New York City Public Schools. Highly frustrating and disappointing, from a professional stand-point is supervisors' or administrators' essential unwillingness to enforce punishments against disruptive students, violent students or students that "play" in a dangerous manner. Teachers are scolded against reporting violent misdeeds. Growing numbers of administrators in the era of Bloomberg/Klein/ Black and Walcott actually hold teachers responsible for the incidents-- propagating the notion that if only teachers did a better (read more entertaining) job of "classroom management" no violence would occur.

Furthermore, students pick up on how there are no punishments. Some crafty students pick up on the stock scolding phrase by supervisors against teachers, "you can't control your class." When administrators blame teachers for boring or alienating the students and then stone-wall against issuing any punishments against violent or otherwise disruptive students, then the charge about being unable to control the students becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But I have said this all before. It is important to remind the public, in light of recent public events, of the context around such misbehavior. First, this spring there were local television reports about how a middle school in East New York, Brooklyn was the site of a girl' jabbing another student with a hypodermic needle. It is no wonder that such outrages do not occur more often. For, administrators berate teachers when they alert the administration to warning signs that presage such behavior. A second telling anecdote was the riot trashing of one Greenwich Village, Manhattan, Dunkin Donuts shop by a mini-flash mob of teenagers. I would bet that one lesson that the students in each story had long ago learned in school was that there are few consequences for disruptive or aggressive behavior.

CHILDREN NEED SOME RULES AND CONSEQUENCES FROM PARENTS

The "b" word is not how I refer to students, but the following article makes some points that policy "leaders" and parents need to consider:
(July 2, 2011 LZ Granderson, CNN Contributor, "Permissive parents: Curb your brats")
The author addresses the "kind of parent who allows your 5-year-old to run rampant in public places like restaurants" or airplanes or grocery stores.

[W]e know you don't discipline them at home because you don't possess "the look." If you had "the look," you wouldn't need to say "sit down" a thousand times.

If you had "the look," you wouldn't need to say much of anything at all. But this nonverbal cue needs to be introduced early and reinforced diligently with consequences for transgressions, just like potty training. And whenever a kid throws a temper tantrum in the middle of the shopping mall it's just as bad as his soiling his pants to spite his parents, and it stinks just as much.

And teachers are supposed to create discipline in the classroom when there has been none outside of the classroom.

Numerous commenters spoke of this in the comments page to a New York Times article Thursday, July 18 that had an enabling tone for the students subjected to suspensions.

I am a parent. I want my children safe at school. I send my children to school for education, not so that they can take part in babysitting students. Teachers are supposed to "teach," not handle disruptions from unruly children and young adults. It does not seem appropriate to ask our schools to become "rehibilation" centers, like jails, for children who have no respect for themselves and others.

. . .

Teachers are there to teach, not raise kids. The curriculum should include scholastic subjects, not life skills. Those are parental responsibilities.

. . .

One New York City middle school teacher in Brooklyn, on her first year teaching:)
The principal's solution when I asked for help was to threaten me with dismissal if I couldn't control my class. The assistant principal suggested, when I pleaded for guidance, that I just quietly move next to the disruptive student and stand there; not touch the kid, just make sure he or she knows that he or she is out of order. This was somewhat less effective than the useless call home. . . . We need to understand why other countries are able to teach their school children in quiet, controlled classrooms.

. . .

I find it profoundly significant that the word "parents" never occurs in this article. As long as parents continue to abdicate their responsibilities to others (schools, the government, churches) the dysfunction illustrated in this article will either stay the same or get worse.

Classroom disruption accommodation, and DoE's unprofessional role

800-pound weight in the New York City classrooms is the problem of "classroom management." The NYC Department of Education's accommodation of classroom disruption has wide-ranging deleterious ramifications.
First-most, the student disruptions have a profoundly negative impact on the classroom. The disruptions make teaching difficult. They make it difficult for children to learn. The ability of children to disrupt without consequences establishes a destructive precedent for the disruptors' peer students. The paucity of consequences makes the arena of the classroom is the disruptive student's true nirvana.
So, do administrators go after the disruptive, oppositional students? Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the answer is: hardly.
THE DUE PROCESS RIGHT-TO-DISRUPT
Are you say ... over 35 years of age or from outside "the city"? When you misbehaved terribly your principal probably called your home. This of course, probably turned over a whole mess at home. You saw immediate consequences to your non-sense.
These days, something has to happen pretty extreme, such as putting another student into an unconscious or making blood spill, to get a call home from the principal. No, there is a terrific shield that gives the disruptive student a tremendous cushion against any immediate consequences. That shield, "the ladder of referral." Essentially, if Johnny bullies or sexually harasses or non-sexually harasses or loudly and continuous disrupts a lesson or engages in dangerous rough-housing, weeks will pass before Johnny sees repercussions between his actions and any kind of punishment. Click here for the multi-page booklet, "Discipline Code," in a range of available languages.

No call from the principal or suspension; no, if you've done something egregious, no, the victims of the harassment or disruption will have to put up with things." The undergirding philosophy of what the discipline code calls "interventions" is that there is no urgency to stopping disruption, harassment or violence, and secondly, that the teacher needs to contact a bunch of people before the principal is contacted, and then maybe the student might get suspended. The teacher needs to do a plethora of things, use psychology to a pointless exercise of making like Mr. Rogers, "Now, if Yesenia says that she doesn't want you to touch her and she pushes you away, she probably won't be your friend anytime soon." And then you have to appeal to the parent a few times, and then, inform the guidance counselor or dean, and then the assistant principal and then the principal. Schools' formal "classroom removal process" of menacing or disruptive students includes following this kind of process.

The code has a bunch of letter and number code combinations which sound empowering to the teacher seeking peace and respect in the classroom." The various aforementioned offenses are grounds for some serious punishments.
The problem is that administrators at best frown upon reporting of incidents, and at worst, will go after the reporting staff member with a ferocious vengeance. For, the ultimate problem is that schools get negative ratings or reviews if incidents are reported. This is the crux of the problem. This aspect should be removed and principals might become more of partners in disciplining students. The absence of immediate consequences for disruption creates the self-fulfilling prophesy, "You can't control your classes."

SOURCE OF THIS ACCOMMODATION OF DISRUPTION
In recent decades court cases have resulted in advances for the cause of the disruptive student. In the interest of not depriving the disruptive student his due education and his fair treatment, state governments placed restrictions on the disciplining of students. This has particularly been true in New York State. Perhaps this enabling of disruption and dysfunction has contributed to New York's position of lagging performance behind other states such as North Carolina or Georgia. (Albeit, there has been a national underpinning of protections, understandably, for accused students' right to an uninterrupted education. See Goss v. Lopez (419 U.S. 565) (1975).)
This present post has been occasioned by the editorial today in the New York Post, "Rx for Classroom Chaos."
TREMENDOUS ADMISSION IN THE POST
The New York Post published the following:

classes can't be run without discipline. Denying them [school administrators] the right to run their own schools then becomes an act of collective punishment.

No one knows better than teachers and principals just what their students need -- and what an orderly class demands.

EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES
I would contend that significant educational gains could be accomplished if the disruption accommodation pattern were turned on its head.
Years past, teachers set the bar of their expectations, both in terms of classroom material and behavior.
Now, administrators fall into the classroom management philosophy that legitimizes student disruption, and more frequently so under Bloomberg's vindictive Leadership Academy principals and assistant principals. The most cynical administrators take the posture that teachers have the disruption coming to them because the classes are boring. This posture has intensified with the elimination at the secondary school level of assistant principals that have authority over specific subjects. Now, we have administrators with little familiarity in subjects that teachers under their authority teach. Again, the more cynical and less intellectually curious of these administrators want entertainment and educational superficiality and trivialization over substance.
(An eyewitness of a NYS Education Commissioner David Steiner lecture last year heard him observe that in other countries surveyed teachers say that they are in education because of a love of the content of their topic, and in the United States they report that they are in teaching because they love teaching. Given the anti-intellectualism of too many principals and assistant principals, is it any wonder that the latter orientation prevails.) Too bad he is not saying this in public, away from college campuses.)
Now, the teacher is not in control of the classroom. The student is.
State laws, school system codes of discipline and administrator policies and policies need to change, to reflect a respect for education and learning, rather than edutainment and disruption.
The compulsion to blame the teacher provides an indispensible tool by which to eliminate teachers (particularly experienced [read, higher salary] or politically undesirable teachers). Shamefully, the United Federation of Teachers plays along with this. They will not challenge the use of "classroom management" as a tool by which to pursue the biased and highly selective U rating of teachers.