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What, then, has made the Nevada education system go from good to average to less than average since the 1960s when Nevada's high schools won multiple awards for being the best in the nation....The state of K-12 education in the state of Nevada is where the public - that is you out there - has allowed it to sink. Your only relationship with the education system is to ship your unprepared kids to school not with the expectation of success, but with the demand that an education system, inadequately funded, develop and/or repair children that you as a parent did not prepare for school or support while your children attended school.And so on.
Teacher Anne's response caught my attention:
I have been a teacher for 35 years. When I started teaching, the children I taught were eager to learn, respected me, and other adults, had manners, and worked hard. Now, I have children who do not do homework, who have no bedtimes, who talk back, who have little or no desire to actually get an education, and who do not understand the values of hard work or accountability.I've been thinking about classroom discipline lately.
It seems to me that all students should be entitled to attend cheerful, orderly schools.
Period.
A cheerful, orderly school should be the bare minimum.
So, assuming that kids today really are more difficult to deal with (I don't doubt it), schools have to adapt. It's that simple. Teach the kids you have.
Someone else may have a better idea, but my thinking is that schools need to hire behaviorists to perform functional assessments of student behavior, create positive behavior plans for students who need them (regardless of whether those students are or are not "classified"), then teach teachers how to use the plan -- and support teachers while they're learning.
Since Palisadesk has told us that ed schools no longer teach classroom management (which seems to be the case), it falls to public schools to provide this training, which mean teachers must have real "professional development" when it comes to classroom management. By "real" I mean a person like Mary Damer who comes into the classroom, directly instructs teachers in how to keep a group of kids on task & well mannered, and supports the teacher while he or she is mastering the skills involved.
The behaviorist should also help administrators develop a school-wide plan for hallway, restroom, and playground calm, as well as for orderly and efficient trips to the principal's office.
Basically, I think schools should forget about hiring "school psychologists" and get into the business of hiring school behaviorists. We'd all be a lot better off.
Last but not least, students whose difficulties can't be managed by one teacher heading one classroom without help should be taught in smaller classes elsewhere in the building. That classroom, too, should be cheerful and orderly -- and this I know schools can do because my two autistic children have been taught in cheerful orderly classrooms by teachers who know what they're about.
Of course, that's not what's happening. I've heard from teachers who have worked in urban schools where children with severe behavior problems were kept in classrooms on the orders of central administration. Neither the teacher nor the building principal had the authority to remove these children, who in some cases were so violent and erratic that all learning stopped and classmates lived in a chronic state of stress and fear.
Such policies -- the teacher called them "radical inclusion" -- are unethical.
Students should be entited to attend school in a cheerful and orderly environment, and the people who are responsible for creating and sustaining that cheerful and orderly environment are the grownups in charge.
the parents
Which brings me to the parents.
Yes, in the best of all possible worlds children would have two-parent families in which Mom and Dad see eye to eye and the kids go to bed on time at night.
But we don't live in the best of all possible worlds, and there are limits to what a parent can do from home to control his child's behavior at school.
Special ed parents are always dealing with this. I remember talking to a mom who was working as an aide in her developmentally disabled daughter's special needs school. The daughter had all kinds of behavior problems in addition to delays (ditto that), and every time the child acted up in school the teacher would pick up the phone and telephone the mom, who was in another part of the school dealing with another child in another classroom. She'd get these calls all day long! Finally she finally told the teacher, "I am here, I'm not there. I can't do anything about my daughter's behavior over the telephone."
Of course schools should be pow-wowing with parents and working together with them on behavior issues if possible. But even when you have competent parents who are doing their best, the fact is that nobody trains parents, either, and because we parents are our own bosses, it can sometimes take a while to realize we're on the wrong track. At least, that has happened to me at times. "The bad gets normal," as Temple says: when problems develop gradually, you don't notice them. Instead, the new bad situation becomes the new normal. The parent may not even realize there is a problem.
That can happen with kids and families, and I know it's happened to me.
The point is: the school has to be responsible for student behavior while students are at school.
Whatever it takes.
32 comments:
"Neither the teacher nor the building principal had the authority to remove these children, who in some cases were so violent and erratic that all learning stopped and classmates lived in a chronic state of stress and fear."
That is absolutely ridiculous. Is it fair to the other students who want to learn and have the capacity to learn? If I were the parent of one of the "want to learn" students, I would be at the school demanding that MY child be transferred to another class away from confusion and fear. This is just wrong. If the school can't handle a child like this and/or the parents are no help, the child should be prevented from participating in class until they can behave - whatever that takes.
I'm sorry...I disagree with you. Dealing with behavior problems should not be the school's job. Schools should not have to hire behaviorists. Let the parents hire the behaviorists. Let the parents take parenting classes. Let them have special classes for kids with autism and learning disabilities, but to have a special class for kids with "behavior problems" is absolutely ridiculous. They would need rooms for these classes. They would need teachers for these classes and teachers aids. If these kids are dangerous - out they go. Sorry, but you have to think of the other students who are not problems. You have to think of the students who WANT to learn. Let the parents pay for military school for the kids with behavior problems if they can't cope. It is unfair to spend funds most schools don't have for services that most kids will not benefit from. That's why it's PUBLIC school.
the Jay Mathews interview talks about the founders of KIPP and says this:
"Mike had just gotten out of Penn, David was just out of Yale. They thought they were God’s gift to American education. They played basketball during their training sessions most of the time. They got in a car, they drove to Houston. By the time they had passed Blythe in the Mojave desert, they had completely reformed in their heads American education. They had solved all our problems. They thought they were really brilliant. And then they got into classrooms in Houston and they were terrible. They were in chaos. These were elementary school classrooms that they could not control. They were so ashamed of themselves, it was that shame that really led to KIPP, because they said to themselves, we’ve got to get better, at least we’ve got to get better enough so we could survive the two years we’ve committed to this program."
The main point: their classrooms were chaos. They were not in control.
So what did they do? They "lucked out", Mathews says, by having fabulous teachers across the hall and copying them.
So classroom management was taught to them as apprentices, and they recognized the need for it, because they were ashamed. Talk about all the bits of behaviorism ready! KIPP is committed to finding the best teachers. There's no chance, NONE, that the "best teachers" don't control the behavior of the classroom. (and don't confuse that kind of control with authoritarian behavior by a teacher.)
The notion that "kids today" are worse in urban settings than they were 40 years ago may or may not be true. But there have ALWAYS BEEN teachers who controlled their own classrooms even in inner cities, even in poor schools. so it isn't true that it's too difficult. it might be more difficult, maybe. But it's still possible.
I think one piece of this problem is that our new teachers have less experience with children than prior generations of teachers. Young women had been raising younger siblings, cousins, and other children long before they were old enough to become teachers. Nowadays, that;s not true. People in their 20s have much less experience interacting with children. they may have little insight into how to create behaviors they want in their charges.
--Dealing with behavior problems should not be the school's job.
But the reality is that it IS, because EVERY ONE deals with it. It's the job of every structure that has people in it.
McDonald's deals with behavior problems, both in its employees and in its customers. Disneyland deals with behavior problems, both in its employees and in its customers. All businesses do this, to varying degrees, whether it's the night shift worker at the gas station or the waitress at a bar filled with drunk people. Great business control behavior VERY WELL indeed! They use subtle mechanisms you may not notice, but they use them--everything from how to help people queue up without getting antsy, to how they should walk through a workflow to how to smile and say "can I help you?"
Businesses do it because it's reality. Schools ARE doing it, whether or not "it's their job", so they might as well do it WELL instead of poorly.
The notion that a parent can, and is the only entity that can control a child's behavior is bizarre, frankly. The bus driver does it. The coach does it. The storekeeper does it. Neighbors do it. Are there people who are psychopaths? Of course. But all of the above businesses have policies for minimizing the effects of psychopaths.
The school must be responsible for the student behavior while at school because THEY ARE CREATING IT. Seriously--their inputs ARE leading to this behavior. That's how behavior works.
It's as if schools are suggesting that behavior is immutable. It's false, and laughably so. Humans adapt all the time to their dynamic circumstances, and their behavior changes too, because what's "good behavior" is contextual.
Kicking your teacher is a bad behavior when you're talking to your teacher, but it's a fine behavior when you're playing soccer and trying to control the ball. Tackling is wrong in a classroom but not during a football play. Yelling out answers is appropriate during the assembly but not during a math test.
And kids learn all of the above immediately.
So, if there are behavior problems, the main reason is because THE SCHOOL HAS CREATED AN EVIRONMENT that promotes bad behavior.
The idea that a parent can fix the dynamic behavior in a different environment is silly. Children behave differently around one parent than the other, which is different than their behavior around the babysitter, grandma, grandpa, the mean next door neighbor, the cop, etc. Children manage JUST FINE at understanding when they can get away with X and when they can't.
So even if the child is PERFECT at home, the child could still be a problem at school because school is encouraging bad behaviors.
Now, they may not understand that they've encouraged bad behaviors. It took me a while to realize that when I gave my son a hug after a timeout, it was encouraging him to do wrong so he could get a timeout so he could get a hug, but it really is that simple.
more from the Mathews interview:
HH: And I spent 12 years in Catholic school, eight of which were in the Parochial schools runs by nuns, big classrooms. And what they have in common is discipline. In fact, on Page 73, you say the guys who founded this, Feinberg and Levin, started off saying they’re going to need the traditional rules of classroom decorum. And a lot of this book is about how they maintain that discipline. It’s a wonder thing to see and watch unfold, because without it, you’ve got nothing.
JM:..They learned after the pain of being awful in the classroom, they learned from Harriet Ball among others that you have to defend kids. The first thing you have to know is if you see one kid teasing or bullying or doing anything harmful to another kid, you’re on that right that second. You don’t let it go away. You surround the offender, you talk to them, you think you’re really that good? You think you’re a lot better than that person? At KIPP, they have a system where the kids who misbehave in that way or don’t bring in their homework and so on are put on the bench, or the porch, which means they’re isolated from other kids.
one more bit:
HH: One of the notes I made that I went back to a couple of times is a Harriet Ball saying early in the book, If you don’t protect your kids, they won’t respect you. And they do protect their…because there are kid predators, not gun-toting gang members who are killing kids, but they’re just bullies. There are bullies in every classroom.
JM: Right.
HH: And that will destroy the opportunity to learn.
JM: Yeah, there’s a myth out there that KIPP is as good as it is because they just throw out all the bullies. Absolutely wrong. One study in the Bar Area schools, there are five of them, found that there were only, in one year, only three kids expelled from five schools total, which is way below what you find in regular schools. They look at the bullies as special challenges. And they’re talking to them, they’re looking for ways that they could turn them around. Kenneth McGregor, the person, the kid in Houston you were talking about, was in that category. And they found something to connect with him. When he suddenly realized that these teachers were actually serious about his potentiality, when they got him interested in the basketball team of which he was very good, when he bonded with Mike Feinberg who was the principal and the basketball coach, that changed it. Kids are looking for an adult. They’re looking for someplace they can be happy and comfortable. Once they establish a relationship with an adult and a school, somebody who clearly cares about them, then that changes most of the bullies into something entirely different.
ed schools no longer teach classroom management
Not true! I had a 3 credit class at NAU called "Classroom Management" We learned how to align curriculum to standards, how to design procedures and enforce rules, and what a cum. (that's cumulative) folder was. Our texts were Ron Clark and Harry Wong, and our final was a mock first day of school... including interruptions from helicopter parents, clueless front office admin and disruptive children.
It gave several students nightmares for weeks!
Ed schools absolutely teach classroom management. I wouldn't be able to teach without the THREE classes I had on the subject.
Behavior management contracts are great, until you have 7 kids in a class of 30+ who need to be on one. And then there is no time to teach.
Inclusion is a HUGE problem. All it takes is one student in a classroom whose behavior problems are so severe that he/she should not be in a regular school classroom to throw off the whole mix of kids. And every year, almost every classroom, at least at my school, has one.
Until we're ready to be "politically incorrect" enough in school do deal, REALLY deal, with the few kids who WILL not behave, and whose parents WILL not back school up, those kids will continue to disrupt learning for everyone else.
When I was a kid, there was a big ol' paddle hanging on the principal's wall. I'm not saying we should return to that, but back then, real discipline problems were rare. We have no real deterrent now--we don't even hold kids back anymore if they refuse to try to learn.
Sad.
I'm in an elementary education licensure program right now which does not require any classroom management class. I thought it rather odd that while I dont' need to take "Classroom Management" I am required to take "Creativity in the Classroom".
"Now, I have children who do not do homework, who have no bedtimes, who talk back, who have little or no desire to actually get an education, and who do not understand the values of hard work or accountability."
First, I don't like "just one thing" answers to complex problems, and I don't like answers that don't define the exact problem and work backwards. However, I would like to comment on this quote.
Blame everyone else.
I agree with Allison. It IS the school's job. Parents of well-prepared children don't want to hear schools blame it on parents or society. There are lots of things that can be done.
Thirty-five years ago, lots of kids did not do homework. I remember kids who didn't have bedtimes who were very good students. Kids who talked back were sent to the vice-principal. That terrified kids. (That's the school's job.) There were lots of kids who never even thought about whether they liked education or not. They were in school because they had to be there. Kids don't appreciate the value of lots of things. They have to be taught, or learn the hard way. They get held back a grade.
Nowadays, schools, with their full-inclusion, developmentally-appropriate views, do not teach the value of hard work. Their social promotion ideas make problems worse. They think that learning should be fun and natural, but what they are teaching is laziness. If you expect less, that's what you'll get. But now, schools want to blame society without carefully defining the problem and evaluating their own contribution to it.
The lower results of education in Nevada are probably based on some hard test numbers that cover basic skills. You have to compare actual test questions then and now to see exactly what is going on. I'll wager that the test questions are so easy that it's more of a reflection of what goes on in the classroom than what goes on at home or in society. Look at sample NAEP questions. How bad does society have to be to screw this up?
*Some* ed schools have courses in classroom management, but many do not. The new hires in my district consistently report that the absence of such courses (as well as the lack of preparation in the area of assessment of student work) is the biggest gap in their pre-service training and a major reason for stress-related illness in their first years of teaching.
Inappropriate "inclusion" is a big part of the problem. As Cheryl points out, once a classroom includes a critical mass of children with severe behavior issues, effective teaching becomes nearly impossible. The teacher is required to maintain minute-by-minute behavior logs on each of these students in order to refer themfor further assistance. I have observed in classrooms where four or more students are engaged in behaviors the teacher is supposed to "log" simultaneously -- in the middle of a lesson -- and the teacher cannot possibly do six things at once. Often there is no one s/he can call on to remove the most disruptive or violent students, and nowhere to send students who are interfering with the lesson, having meltdowns or tantrums (throwing furniture, screaming obscenities).
Not long ago I was asked to assist with a newly-arrived student, aged six, who had little language. While I attempted to assess what language skills he had, he became agitated, ran around the room clearing tables and desktops, yanking electric wires, and grabbed scissors and threatened me and another staff person. Our emergency calls to the office were ignored for ten minutes. We were on the point of leaving the room and locking the stuident inside (we are not allowed to touch or restrain the student, so did not try to get the scissors away from him). However, this illustrated to me just how ineffective our ability to respond to a crisis situation is.
We have had situations where teachers have had to ask their entire class to go out in the hall and wait while they locked a violent student in the classroom, awaiting administrative action.
Now, in many of these cases, the parents have been asking for help for *years* but have not been able to access services for their child (long waiting lists at children's mental health services), or have availed themselves of every service available. Often the parent is also terrorized by the child. Yet, the laws are clear that the strudent must be provided with a public education, so the option of expelling an elementary-aged student is simply not on. Many of the most behavior-challenged children really belong in some kind of residential psychiatric setting, but there are not enough spaces available and the waiting lists are long. Even social work services are limited.
Mia Zagora's viewpoint is one probably shared by many, but not congruent with legal realities -- school districts have lost lawsuits on issues of excluding students with special needs (including students with behavior challenges), especially when they are from visible minority populations. So schools must deal with these students. Unfortunately, in many cases, districts choose a "see no evil, hear no evil" policy and do not provide appropriate backup such as behavior intervention teams (utilizing staff with a background in behavior science), special classrooms, or even a resource room in a school staffed by appropriately trained teachers or paraprofessionals.
Part of the problem I see is lack of appropriate adult supervision. Even if teachers have good classroom management skills (most in my school do), during lunch and recess periods there is inadequate supervision provided in unstructured situations. I have been in charge of supervising 300+ children in a 2-acre area, with no other adults within calling disatance. When two or more emergencies break out at once -- a fight over here, a child screaming and bleeding from the nose and mouth over there, a child leaping from the top of the jungle gym (not allowed) over yonder, I am not able to deal with all three in a timely manner and someone is likely to be injured. We don't have enough adults available to supervise the students adequately. We need not more teachers, but more paraprofessionals and youth workers for particular situations.
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I'll add that today's idea of appropriate inclusion in the regular elementary classroom doesn't work either. Even though there is a para for each included child, and a second classroom teacher trained in issues of the BD and ED children, the class lesson is disrupted and the learning atmosphere in the classroom is destroyed each time a child balks and persists to the point of a physical removal. Huge losses of learning time occur as the storm brews then breaks. My child, for ex., was able to read the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy in his fifth grade included class during the removals (being a 'good' kid entitled him to back row seating so he was out of projectile range and was able to distance himself from the violence by diving in to fantasy).
Let us also note that unclassified students are not entitled to emotional support from the school pysch, despite witnessing violence and physical takedown procedures that they normally wouldn't see until R rated movie time. Because of privacy concerns, the unclassified students are also not given training in dealing with some of the very specific issues of the included that arise during group and partner activities - the para is supposed to deal with, but of course that doesn't happen effectively.
Our middle school takes a totally different approach. Classified students that can't behave without para intervention are not included. The violent go down the alternative placement trail. It took three years for the new principal to go from chaos to safety...the word is out on the street that that this school doesn't put up with gangsta garbage or give a free pass to politician or district employees children. Even though it's overcrowded, the hallways are calm. I think the key was all the lawsuits that the parents of reg. ed. kids began....seemed to help the parents of the disruptors understand that the family court judge would be taking care of the issues if they could not and the district to understand that the majority of parents want safe schools.
Schools are not only unsafe for the "regular" kids in classrooms who are there to learn in an orderly environment, they are also dangerous places for the disruptive students, who also have a right to appropriate placement and treatment.
Here's a frightening report on the abuses meted out to disruptive students by possibly well-meaning but seriously untrained staff and administration:
Abusive treatment of students with disabilities
Kids are not "merely" abused, they are killed by some of these practices.
All our kids deserve better.
The report has some practical and do-able steps towards solutions.
Dealing with behavior problems should not be the school's job.
I should probably phrase it differently.
When a child is at school & is having behavior problems, the school has a responsibility to deal with it.
The parents aren't present; school personnel are the responsible adults on site.
Haven't read the whole thread yet, but jumping off from what Steve is saying: I hope I can get the teacher I've paraphrased to allow me to post her email.
We've got a situation now where teachers and building principals are required to keep even extremely disruptive students in the classroom.
For a teacher to blame parents in the aggregate for sending poorly brought up kids to school just can't capture the full scale of the situation.
When I was a kid we had class sizes of 35 students with 1 teacher.
Order had to be kept under those circumstances, and it was.
btw, Hogwarts seems to do a fabulous job of maintaining order. Yes, it's a parochial school & is somewhat selective. I imagine the parent population probably falls into the "authoritative" camp, as opposed to the permissive (although one of the guidance counselors complained about permissive parents at one event --)
Hogwarts isn't directly comparable to public schools BUT this is an entire high school filled with adolescent boys, and the population is highly diverse both in terms of income and in terms of race and ethnicity.
At school, those boys are on the straight and narrow.
They get points towards "JUG" ("Justice Under God," which is detention) if they fail to hold the door open for the person behind them!
Inappropriate "inclusion" is a big part of the problem.
Absolutely.
Speaking as the parent of two VERY disruptive kids (with autism), we have NEVER asked that our kids be included if that meant other kids' learning would be harmed. (In fact, we've never asked that they be included at all; the school has elected to include them where they could - primarily in art class & computer class, which I believe has gone OK. Also, they both have aides, so the aide could take them out of the class if they became disruptive.)
We've stressed to every school we've been involved with that our kids should not be disrupting other kids.
Of course, at some point not-disrupting-the-other-kids becomes a critical survival skill.
Now that we're looking at group homes for Jimmy, guess what?
They seem to like the disabled folks who can keep it together.
(I don't mean to criticize group homes, etc....all I'm saying is that I get the distinct impression that all else being equal group homes prefer the autistic 21 year old who can keep his anxiety under control and follow social norms to the one who can't.)
Dealing with behavior problems should not be the school's job. Schools should not have to hire behaviorists. Let the parents hire the behaviorists. Let the parents take parenting classes.
But schools are full of people who are paid to teach kids. If they don't know how to manage kids' behaviour, why should you expect parents to? Teachers have already taken years of education classes, if they're not being taught how to manage a classroom why do you think that parenting classes would fix the problems for parents?
I think we are likely to do far better getting every school in the world to manage behaviour better than trying to get every parent to manage behaviour better. Plus, of course, parents' abilities to control their kids' behaviours when their kids are out of sight is much more limited.
Stupid question time - what is best practice for dealing with violent behaviour that risks harming either others or the kid themself, according to the positive behavioural experts?
>>what is best practice for dealing with violent behaviour that risks harming either others or the kid themself, according to the positive behavioural experts?
It's a good question. Here's a reference: http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/osers/osep/gtss.html
In my experience with my district, many violent incidents in the elementary classroom are interpreted as being a normal response for where a child is emotionally and socially. Social services may be called, or not called depending on the other abuse indicators. There are no positive or negative consequences to the primary child that hurts others, except for peer isolation unless the parents agree to use the school pyschologist's services.
I personally would like to see legislation to require mandatory early intervention for those that have no empathy.
Our schools have a good reputation for full-inclusion. Many parents move to our town because of that, and the town has even talked about "tuitioning-in" students from other communities. Most people in town are very supportive, even though they have heard a number of stories of disruption and lock downs. Team teaching is used and all of the kids are in the same room.
Ultimately, this comes down to what you expect from K-8 education. In our town (especially for K-6), this results is lower and fuzzier expectations, everything we've talked about for years at KTM. What I don't like is that this trade-off between low and high expectations is not talked about openly. There is a desire to try and portray it as win-win situation; that conceptual understanding and problem solving skills (at each child's appropriate ability level) trumps rote facts and skills. It's good that kids all get to understand and work together, but it's wrong to think that it doesn't come at a price. Deep down, the school knows this, but they have made their choice. They talk about Differentiated Instruction, but it just doesn't do the job. The best kids and the ones supported at home will get by and mask the big problems for the kids in the middle. No one wants to know the details. In fact, there was a letter to the editor (from a parent-teacher group) praising our town's education and pointing to the fact that several of the Validictorians (of the high school in the next town over where our kids go) came from our town. I know most all of those kids and they got tons of support and teaching at home. It's tough when the argument comes down to telling other parents that their expectations are low and their ideas of education don't work for many.
lgm:
Thanks for the link, it does however seem a bit vague on the immediate response to a child who is a physical danger to themself or others.
There is one other thing you seaid that I'm unsure about. You said "I personally would like to see legislation to require mandatory early intervention for those that have no empathy."
I thought that there was a general lack of proven effective interventions for psychopaths?
I thought that there was a general lack of proven effective interventions for psychopaths?
According to Dr. Robert Hare, who developed the widely-used Psychopathy Index used to diagnose psychopathy in adults, this is true for adult psychopaths. Not only is there no effective intervention, therapy actually makes them worse -- they become more cunning and manipulative and able to fake appropriate social and emotional behavior in order to exploit others.
However, Dr. Hare also points out that there is so far no conclusive evidence that psychopaths could not be helped when they are younger and the brain is more malleable. It is possible that they might be socialized sufficiently to function within the normal range even though they might never become the most empathic persons alive. He describes psychopathic behavior as a spectrum, and many people who are law abiding and not a threat to others have some psychopathic characteristics. Perhaps if we invested some time and research into appropriate interventions with young children, we might prevent the full-fledged psychopath from developing.
He also points out that most psychopaths in his experience have both genetic and environmental factors involved. The genetics are beyond our ability to change but the environment, particularly for children, is quite capable of manipulation.
Fascinating post, and comment debate.
Best wishes
"McDonald's deals with behavior problems, both in its employees and in its customers. Disneyland deals with behavior problems, both in its employees and in its customers. All businesses do this, to varying degrees,"
What businesses and theme parks possess that schools do not is the ability to expel an offender from their premises. If you can't kick a thug off your property, then whose property is it, really?
--BrendaM
LOVE that last comment, BrendaM. Earlier in comments it was said that it is the school's job to deal with behavior,but you've put the problem in a nutshell. Lawsuits and legislation have tied our hands when it comes to dealing with many of our most severe discipline problems. Wouldn't want to offend anyone or leave them out, after all.
So in the long run, we end up with Virginia Tech.
Thanks Palisadesk. It sounds though like there are no proven interventions for child psychopaths (which is quite different from saying that it is impossible to change child psychopaths), so I'd be somewhat reluctant to mandate interventions. Unless, now I think about it, we are talking about removing them from where they can hurt other kids.
What can or can't schools do legally about removing or separating kids. I know that schools can suspend or even expel kids under specific circumstances, but what about separating kids by ability or willingness to learn? Are there any laws that prevent this?
"What can or can't schools do legally about removing or separating kids. I know that schools can suspend or even expel kids under specific circumstances, but what about separating kids by ability or willingness to learn? Are there any laws that prevent this?"
The teachers in my children's school in California insist that it is illegal to separate kids by ability and/or willingness to learn. However, no one has ever been able to provide me with the section of the Education Code that calls for this situation. I have no indication that this law actually exists, especially give that the Ed Code specifically mentions clustering GATE kids togher as a best practice.
My oldest daughter was in class with a violent child in third and fourth grade. We didn't even get notification from the school on any of the times when the violent child threw desks, threatened to burn down the school, and hit other children including our child.
Our child was understandably afraid of the violent girl, but there was no help for our child, or for the violent one either.
The violent girl is still in the school, they are now fifth graders. She still terrorizes her classmates. No one at the school seems to care.
Jane
>>It sounds though like there are no proven interventions for child psychopaths (which is quite different from saying that it is impossible to change child psychopaths), so I'd be somewhat reluctant to mandate interventions. Unless, now I think about it, we are talking about removing them from where they can hurt other kids.
Intervention usually means extra help, not a more restrictive environment or expulsion. I am thinking that the psych. could help troubled elementary students learn the social rules and how to appropriately cope emotionally, but presently the parent(s) have to give permission. Right now, the most the school can do is the preventative (offering the child breakfast and lunch, designating someone to aid the transition into the classroom, and providing continuous positive 1:1 adult support) and damage control (removing the child temporarily from the classroom during/after the violent incident, until the child calms and the other students relax). It's a shame that such a small percentage of the population can have no help, when the effects of their behavior destroys every nonclassified child's chance at getting an education that day.
It is unfair to spend funds most schools don't have for services that most kids will not benefit from. That's why it's PUBLIC school.
This comment really hit me. I would think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that inclusion policies, especially those directed to EBD or other violent kids, are very expensive. As the budgets tighten, which they have been for years now in our district, scarce resources are directed to NCLB-related initiatives and special ed. But there are so many kids--the ones who are well behaved, the ones who are middle of the pack, the quiet kids, the gifted--whose educational needs are being ignored. It *is* supposed to be a public education. Who speaks for these kids? Who has decided that it's acceptable for their education to be routinely compromised by, say, a violent kid (or kids) in the classroom? I do not need to put up with this in the workplace (there are legal causes of action against hostile workplaces!). And when unclassified kids cannot be counseled about how to deal with a dangerous or hostile kid because of privacy issues--well that's just twisted. No one disagrees that troubled kids are entitled to just as good an education as every other kid. But when the interests of various groups or types of children directly conflict, why is the education of behaviorally challenged kids consistently given priority over the others? When they disrupt the classroom or hijack the teacher's attention, it doesn't matter if they are eventually removed or subdued. The opportunity for learning is lost. When this happens every day, no one is getting a decent education. It's not always a win-win situation; it's more like a lose-lose. Or, it more resembles a zero sum game, and the quiet kid in the back of the room ends up with a net loss. Why is that okay?
And then, to complicate matters further, there is the viewpoint that behavior issues may in some cases be created or exacerbated by the schools themselves. I certainly don't doubt this--the types of projects, activities, instructional methods etc. in current use can definitely breed classroom chaos.
Oy. What a sticky mess!
"The teachers in my children's school in California insist that it is illegal to separate kids by ability and/or willingness to learn. However, no one has ever been able to provide me with the section of the Education Code that calls for this situation."
It may not be a law or part of the Education Code, but instead a court ruling involving:
*) Due process, or
*) Equal protection under the law
-Mark Roulo
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