Can the National Guard end the achievement plateau?

No, this is not a drill (sergeant).

1. Earlier this week, four Brockton, MA school committee members asked the city’s mayor to help deploy the National Guard to help curb issues of “violence, security concerns, and substance abuse.” The mayor and other local leaders have subsequently rejected that idea — thank goodness — and it’s still worthwhile to dissect this very strange/awful request. There’s a lot to unpack here, so please use the comments to fill in the gaps.

2. A history lesson. In 1957, the National Guard was called by Orval Faubus to “preserve the peace” as nine Black students attempted to enter Little Rock Central High School. Publicly he said the troops were there to prevent integration so as to protect the Black students from the angry white mobs opposed to integration. In truth, “preserve the peace” was code for “keep the Black students out,” as Faubus himself publicly opposed integration. Days later, President Eisenhower intervened, federalized the Arkansas National Guard, and used domestic military intervention to ensure Black students could attend the same school as white students.

3. We don’t need the military to protect Black students or keep teachers safe from them. The majority of students at Brockton are Black. Shame on the school committee members for fanning the flames of the racist thinking that only brute force can save students of color and those who work with them.

4. Students and staff deserve safe schools. There are plenty of studies (here’s an old one) that show that students learn less in schools with lots of discipline issues. Years ago I observed a math teacher who was writing equations on the board as students, like a scene from a Hollywood movie, pelted each other with paper balls behind him. I can assure you very little learning happened in that classroom.

5. We had been trending away from harsh, punitive measure of discipline. A few years ago, after the murder of George Floyd, many districts began scaling back the deployment of police officers and school resource officers. Just this week Chicago voted to remove officers from schools.

6. Have we gone “soft” on school discipline? Critics have argued this trend toward more “restorative justice” has been detrimental. Here’s one example of a commentary about how “lax school discipline” hurts teachers and students. Here’s another. Fordham loves harping on how discipline has gone awry.

7. I disagree with the above takes. While I’m not wholly opposed to having officers in schools, it’s a mistake to believe we need law enforcement in buildings to keep students and staff safe. Healthy school climates start with good classroom management techniques, something that’s woefully under-taught to teachers and under-prioritized in many districts. Those healthy classroom environments get supported by school-wide systems that encourage a positive overall climate — while still holding students accountable for poor choices. Accountability doesn’t need to be harsh and punitive, it just needs to be consistent. The climate gets reinforced with really great teaching, and all of this is undergirded by healthy adult cultures in schools.

8. How did Brockton High School get to this point? I could write extensively about creating a positive school climate, but I’m more concerned with how things got so bad there that military intervention is the best solution the school committee can come up with.

9. Bad climate data. One issue, that’s related to my previous posts on education data, is that we simply don’t collect good data on school discipline or climate. Districts and other agencies that collect data heavily rely on attendance and suspensions. But those aren’t always the clearest indicators.

10. Suspension data is easily manipulated. When I was a principal, it was common practice for school leaders to unofficially send students home to “cool off.” Some principals gently encouraged parents to keep their student home for a few days. Why? Because suspending students makes your school seem like a dangerous place. And because it negatively impacts school report cards. Beyond that, suspensions only highlight the really “big” incidents — they fail to capture the small instances of defiance or disorderly classrooms. Attendance is also not an ideal indicator of school climate. Sure, high absence rates tell you something about a school, but kids are absent for a lot of reasons beyond the control of the school.

11. Bullet-to-skin contact? Natalie Hipple is a Professor of Criminal Justice at Indiana University, and an expert on nonfatal shootings. I first heard her in this episode of Revisionist History, where she talks about bullet-to-skin contact as being a better measure of gun violence. Because not everyone who gets shot gets killed, just like not every student who engages in bad behavior gets suspended. (Forgive the macabre connection here — I hope you understand the larger point) And gun violence typically begets more gun violence, and eventually that violence becomes fatal. Here’s a commentary piece she wrote in the Washington Post making the case that the US pay more attention to nonfatal shootings because “they should be treated as the true indicator of a city’s violence problem.”

12. Focus on classroom-level discipline data. In my second year as principal, my staff held an emergency meeting about how our school climate was awful. Despite using a lot of punitive measures in my first year, I hadn’t created that school-wide system to encourage a positive climate. I had a great team that helped turn around our school’s climate (shout-out if y’all are reading!), and one of the best decisions we made was to regularly publish our classroom-level behavior data. Any teacher could fill out a Google Form to document a behavioral incident that required a consequence. That meant we got an accurate view of our climate from the classroom level. The transparency and immediacy of the data forced us to do the work to improve the school climate.

13. I feel awful for the students, staff, and families in Brockton. They deserve a safe and positive school climate. I hope they get the help they need to create such a climate. I just pray it’s not in the form of armed forces.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.