Discipline, Part 1

How a recent Massachusetts law change will only lead to more chaos in schools

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Readers may recall an earlier post of mine entitled “The Administrators Have No Clothes.” In it, I detailed behavioral incidents that occurred in my class that resulted in remarkably few consequences. The culprit for this lack of accountability, I argued, was a new trend in education called “restorative justice.” From that post: Restorative justice “refers to a toolbox of community-building exercises like restorative circles and mediations between students and teachers with a neutral third party. These practices are designed to reduce the use of suspension and expulsion as punishments for various poor behaviors, which serves to keep those troubled kids in school and learning, while simultaneously building trust between teachers and their students.”

I went on to link this approach to consequences with a Massachusetts education regulation adopted in 2014 that intended to reduce the use of suspension in order to, among other things, reduce the disparities in the use of such punishment between different race and/or ethnic groups. This regulation explained that administrators responsible for issuing suspensions and higher-ups in charge of interpreting educational data could at any point review the suspensions and “identify schools that need assistance to reduce over-reliance on long-term suspension or expulsion as a consequence of student misconduct.”

This push to reduce suspensions, I argued, was counterproductive: “Instead of suspending these [misbehaving] students—demonstrating to their parents that the school takes this type of violent and threatening behavior seriously—our school administrators have allowed these students to stay in school and create a violent learning environment.”

I remind the reader of all of this because there has been a recent update to the Massachusetts suspension laws. And the Massachusetts legislators responsible for it are playing to type: Instead of making it easier for schools to suspend chronic misbehaving students, it just made it even harder.

The new law requires that schools must exhaust a variety of other remedies before resorting to suspension. “The alternative remedies required by the law,” according to a Boston-based law firm, “include but are not limited to: (1) mediation; (2) conflict resolution; (3) restorative justice; and (4) collaborative problem solving.” There are two exceptions to this suspension-as-last-resort policy: where those remedies “are unsuitable to the specific incident or are counter-productive,” or where the student’s continued presence in the building could likely lead to serious physical harm to others.

As you can imagine, I am not very happy with these changes. As I suggested in that previous newsletter, I think schools should suspend more students, not fewer. Moreover, the state suggests that schools use “restorative justice” as a remedy for students who misbehave so poorly that they would otherwise be suspended. I think restorative justice is mostly bogus. In an ideal world—where most students actually care about their education—these types of kumbaya circling activities may bring a school community closer together and reinforce the norms of being polite and respectful. It is, however, wholly inadequate to the task of creating that school culture in the first place.

My school certainly does not have that culture. And the students who were previously (before the law change) most likely to be suspended are the ones who will react the least positively towards this new program. They are the ones most likely to laugh it off and use it to get out of more serious punishments. And they are the ones who will bring down the entire school culture with them.

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There’s an interesting parallel between crime and punishment and school-based consequences. I’ve been wanting to write about it for a while, but haven’t quite had the opportunity yet. This recent law change provides such an opportunity.

Consider the similarities between rules and laws. A rule is a guideline established by an institution like a school that comes with consequences for anyone who breaks the rules. They are therefore like laws in that they are a code of conduct that has some sort of punishment attached to it. Obviously, law-breaking is more serious than rule-breaking; the former could land you a stint in prison, whereas the latter may only lead to a stern look or, at most, a suspension or expulsion.

These similarities lead to a similar psychology among the groups that deal with the codes. The punishments for breaking school rules deters many students from stepping out of line—not only are many students afraid of negative attention from their teachers or parents, but they also recognize that their peers will view them in a negative light if they are chronic miscreants.

Similarly, prison is often an effective deterrent against people committing crimes, and the stigma attached to being an ex-convict is perhaps even more frightening for some.

Because school rules and state laws have similar effects on groups of people, I think we should talk about how certain methods of law enforcement—certain theories—can and should be applied to school discipline in order to create a positive and academically-inclined school environment.

One criminal justice theory that has been very popular since the 1980s is called “broken-windows policing.” This was established by the political scientist James Q. Wilson, who popularized it in a 1982 Atlantic article called “Broken Windows,” co-written with George Kelling. The essential argument behind the theory is that if you see a broken window in an abandoned building and no one fixes it, eventually all of the windows will be broken. Therefore, Wilson and Kelling argue, police forces should be proactive and punish low-level law-breakers to create a sense of security among the people in a community.

Here’s the explanation of the window-breaking: “Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unprepared broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”

One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares. If that doesn’t apply to the school environment, I don’t know what does.

I hear this all the time from students. They complain that people who are constantly misbehaving—hitting others, running in the hallways, bullying other students—almost never get suspended or punished by their teachers or administrators. Meanwhile, some other students who slip up once can get suspended. This creates a feeling of unfairness and lawlessness, which lowers the morale of the entire school community, and fuels more misbehavior from the chronic offenders.

Here’s Wilson and Kelling again on the group psychology of a community like the one in my school:

A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

At this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly.

Again, almost this exact dynamic plays out in the school that I work at. If one kid slaps the back of the neck of the kid in front of him—this happens often—and the teacher (or administrator) does nothing about it, then other kids will interpret that as a signal that this type of behavior is going to be tolerated. Therefore, they slap other kids’ necks; the teacher lets it slide because last time she tried to do something about it, nothing happened; and then kids start to escalate their behavior. There are fights roughly every day or every other day at my school. Kids come to class 10 minutes late every class because they are running around in the hallways. They vandalize the bathrooms; they throw food at each other; they swear at each other and the teachers with abandon. 

Now, picture the good kids—the type of kid I was, and many of my readers were when they were in school. Everything that happens around them suggests an environment of extreme chaos. Other students are throwing pencils around the room, the teacher is yelling, kids are swearing, and not much learning is happening. Out in the hallways, they have to dodge the kids who are running pell-mell into each other and swim through a sea of kids who haven’t figured out that you’re supposed to walk on the right side of the hallways and not congregate in the middle of the walking path. In the cafeteria, they are surrounded by kids who won’t stop talking (or yelling) and throwing food.

That’s not the type of environment a good kid wants to be in. And many of their parents recognize this, and do everything in their power to remove their kid from the school. I would too—there’s no way I would have my kid go to the school I teach at. And so you have an exodus of the good kids, which only reinforces the behavior of the bad ones.

Broken windows theory has its flaws. For instance, when New York City adopted the approach in their attempt to prevent crime, it worked well—except for the people who were wrongfully stopped as part of the stop-and-frisk directive. It’s important to strike a balance between cracking down on behaviors that lead to a general feeling of lawlessness and the civil liberties of the people in those communities. In schools, the same applies. You don’t want to suspend kids for every little infraction.

But schools can certainly learn a lot from broken windows theory. Punishment has to be swift and sure for every rule-breaker if we want any semblance of order to be maintained in our schools. And yet the Massachusetts legislators have the cojones to effectively take away one of those instruments of punishment for the worst rule-breakers. Something’s not right here, and everyone seems to know it.

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I’m calling this part one of a two-part series. Next week, I’ll look at some of the things that teachers and administrators can do short of suspension that could lead to changes in school climate despite having one hand tied behind our backs, as well as taking a trip over the pond to look at how one school in Great Britain tackles the issue of discipline in schools.