Can harsh school discipline end The Achievement Plateau?

We can hold students accountable without punishing them.

The scales of justice need not be tipped by suspensions. Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

1. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. It’s a record we’ve held since 2002, and we show no signs of giving up the lead. Our great nation jails 639 of every 100,000 citizens, up from around 500 per 100,000 a decade ago.

2. That’s important context to remember when you read pieces like this one, from the Fordham Institute, on why “lax school discipline” is a terrible, awful, no good approach that’s creating unsafe schools and driving teachers out of the profession.

3. The author, Jeremy S. Adams, has taught civics in California for almost a quarter century. On the importance of teaching civics, we are aligned. While I think he makes some valid points about school discipline, he’s missing the bigger picture: our schools need not mirror a criminal justice system whose default is retributive justice — making offenders suffer in jail. Let me explain with some notable quotes from his piece.

4. Many teachers feel that they are being held hostage to an ideological experiment that harms them and their ability to teach, that harms innocent students who are trying to learn, and that in the end harms the very people it is meant to help by not holding them accountable for their actions.

   • This is probably accurate. But that’s often because we put the cart before the horse in education. We implemented new “Common Core Standards” by first launching high stakes tests without providing teachers training and resources. We’ve done the same with restorative justice. We changed the outcome measures — demanding a reduction in suspensions —without first changing practice at the school and classroom level with extensive training, development, and additional staff.

5. It is only in the peculiar world of modern education that teachers are told to purposefully turn a blind eye to behaviors and actions that would be unacceptable in any other setting.

   • Inaccurate. While I’m sure some administrators “turn a blind eye,” they are the exception. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to poor behavior. When police decline to arrest violent offenders and school administrators allow students to repeatedly escape with just a verbal admonition, the message is that wrongdoings aren’t wrong — they’re tolerable. And that is, I believe, a bad message to send to the student body or population at large. And this isn’t the focus of restorative justice. Instead of punishing students, it aims to hold them accountable without suspending them.

6. Only in schools are we now told to “get curious, not furious” and where we recast “standing down” in the face of student misconduct not as a dereliction of duty on the part of teachers, not as tolerating the intolerable, but as acts of heroic compassion and sophisticated understanding.

   • Accurate. We should get “curious, not furious” at most transgressions. Making students suffer won’t fix their behavior. That approach simply does not produce the intended outcome of less crime. Consider that Philadelphia has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country — and its murder rate continues to rise. Incarceration/harsh retributive justice is a deterrent to some extent, but clearly not enough to create a civil society. Being curious about why students are behaving a certain way can lead to mental health support, special education services, and other “root-cause” treatments they deserve.

7. The breakdown of order, the absence of discipline, and the extinction of any concept of “tough love” is a brutal everyday reality for modern American educators.

   • Tough love is not extinct. I worked with many “tough love” teachers over the last six years, and they did it by building strong relationships with students, showing them they care about them as humans, and by holding high academic expectations. Not by indiscriminately berating them and kicking them out of class.

8. Certainly, within school, when abhorrent student behavior is tolerated, accommodated, and given endless indulgence, it proliferates.

   • Mostly accurate. Like I said, hen rules aren’t enforced, we encourage more misbehavior. This was certainly true at the school I led. Once students knew they’d be held accountable, we saw fewer egregious behaviors. Again, though, retributive justice isn’t the only means of accountability.

9. But our schools are not and cannot be cure-alls. They cannot make up for students’ unstable home lives, the drug addiction of parents, insufficient medical care, poor nutrition, poverty, or neighborhoods where violence and profanity are ubiquitous and trust is fleeting.

   • Accurate: they can’t be “cure-alls.” But they can be a part of the “drug cocktail” that builds a better society.

10. Adams also fails to acknowledge the systemic racial biases that retributive discipline perpetuates. Students of color are punished/suspended at higher rates that white students, even when they display similar levels of misbehavior. This disproportionality continues into our adult criminal justice system, where Black Americans receive longer sentences for similar crimes.

11. Suspensions have their place. Just like prisons do. Physical violence shouldn’t be tolerated in a civil society. But when we better meet the needs of our students and citizens, we create fewer reasons for poor behavior and crime. Still, it’s difficult for parents, teachers, and community members to imagine a world in which suspensions become more rare. Most of us grew up in a school culture that favored suspensions. But we can’t suspend our way to safer schools—students learn almost nothing while they’re sitting at home.

12. At my school, our suspension rate declined because utilized more restorative options, like conferences, community service, and community circles. But it also declined because the district and city government put behavioral health clinics in every school. At-risk students had behavioral health workers to support them, and many exhibited fewer and less extreme behaviors. We need more solutions like this that keep students in school.

13. The way forward is ensuring that we do “hold students accountable” for poor behavior without conflating accountability with harsh, retributive justice. If we start treating poor behavior as a symptom, build empathy in offenders through restorative justice, we can create safer, more inclusive schools — and perhaps a safer, more inclusive society.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.