Chapter 2
The Mess
It's a jungle out there for behaviorally challenging kids. Many of the developments and initiatives that have come down the pike in the last twenty to thirty years have made it much harder for their teachers and other school staff to fulfill the role of helper.
Zero-tolerance policies have made things worse. The research tells us it's so. Those policies turned potential helpers into disciplinary robots, and caused them to respond to behavioral challenges with algorithms rather than rational thought, as adversaries rather than as partners, with consequences rather than collaboration. Although some school systems have abandoned those policies, they still resonate in the mind-sets of many educators. Perhaps this explains why, in the United States alone, we still expel over one hundred thousand students from public school annually, suspend more than three million times a year (that's probably an underestimate), dole out countless dozens of millions of detentions and discipline referrals every year, use restraint and seclusion procedures 270,000 times a year, and—in nineteen states—still apply corporal punishment hundreds of thousands of times a year (disproportionately to children of color). One of the most important doctrines governing interventions for students who receive special education in US public schools is the principle of the least restrictive environment. A similar doctrine—the least toxic response—should be applied to interventions for behaviorally challenging students. Detention, suspension, expulsion, paddling, and restraint and seclusion fall into the most toxic response category.
The least toxic response … should be applied to interventions for behaviorally challenging students. Detention, suspension, expulsion, paddling, and restraint and seclusion fall into the most toxic response category.
What the school-to-prison-pipeline research tells us is that the students who are most likely to access the school discipline program—the frequent flyers, as they're known—are the ones who benefit from it the least. Who, then, is benefiting from the school discipline program? Clearly not the behaviorally challenging students. But not the well-behaved students either. The well-behaved students aren't behaving themselves because of the school discipline program. They're behaving themselves because they can.
Doesn't a suspension at least give the teachers and the well-behaved students a break from behaviorally challenging students? Sure, for about three days. Then she's back, and with all of the same problems that set in motion the challenging behaviors that prompted the suspension in the first place. Along with, eventually, an attitude, which is what most of us would have if caregivers who were supposed to be helping continued to apply interventions that weren't helping and that, in fact, had the primary effect of pushing us away.
High-stakes testing hasn't helped. It has caused many educators to feel like test-prep robots. When we tell teachers that their job performance and security will be judged by how their students do well on mandated tests, we increase the likelihood that teachers will devote most of their energy to helping students do well on mandated tests. Anything that interferes with that mission must be dealt with immediately and severely. And where does this leave the students who are disrupting the class, interfering with the learning of their classmates, and consuming an inordinate amount of time? It leaves them being dealt with immediately and severely, which is both ineffective and unhelpful. And that, of course, just takes more time.
By the way, classroom teachers aren't the only ones stressed out by high-stakes testing and other indices of skill, achievement, and talent; a lot of students are stressed out by it too. The competition and pressure to obtain high test scores and get admitted into premium colleges are, in many communities, ridiculously intense.
But the societal shifts that have worked to the disadvantage of kids over the past forty or fifty years aren't limited to schools. Things are more stressful at home, too. It now takes two incomes to maintain the lifestyle that one income previously supported. The rate of kids living in single-parent homes has doubled in the last fifty years. So a lot of kids don't have the level of contact and interaction with their parents that they might have had three or four decades ago.
The budget cuts haven't helped. Class sizes in many school systems are larger—in some places, much larger—and in many places, extra support for kids with special needs has been cut. Those cuts have disproportionately affected schools in low-income neighborhoods.
Using diagnoses as the gatekeeper for services, placement, and funding simply guarantees that about 50 percent of the kids who we already know need our help won't get it.
The emphasis on psychiatric diagnoses as the gatekeeper for services, placement, and funding hasn't helped at all. Many kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges badly need help but don't meet diagnostic criteria for any particular psychiatric disorder. Indeed, using diagnoses as the gatekeeper simply guarantees that about 50 percent of the kids who we already know need our help won't get it. And those diagnoses—which are just long lists of maladaptive behaviors thought to cluster together—cause us to focus on behaviors rather than on the lagging skills and unsolved problems that are contributing to those behaviors.
The special education referral process often doesn't help. It has just dramatically increased the testing loads of school psychologists. For many classroom teachers concerned about a student, a psycho-educational evaluation often feels like the only option for obtaining additional information about the student's difficulties. But the evaluation process can take a long time, and is often geared toward determining only whether a student qualifies for special services, so the teachers are often disappointed in and underwhelmed by the information they've been waiting for.
The countless initiatives aimed at improving students' academic and social/emotional outcomes—many imposed by legislators, few of whom have spent any time in a school classroom—haven't helped. Well, maybe some of them have moved the ball forward, but there are just too many of them. Many teachers and administrators will whisper that their superiors are enamored with initiatives because it makes them look as though they're accomplishing something. But all those initiatives aren't necessarily good for the kids. And they're not good for the people who are on the hook for implementing them. And unless they're legislatively mandated, the initiatives tend to die after a quick burst of energy or enthusiasm, or when the funding runs out, or when an administration changes.
Many of the popular behavior initiatives that have come down the pike haven't helped, not enough anyway. They haven't been transformative enough to fundamentally alter the lenses through which we view behaviorally challenging students and the interventions that are applied to them. And the anti-bullying programs haven't necessarily reduced bullying. In many places, they've simply provided justification for bullying the bullies.
Classroom teachers have historically been among the most important agents of socialization for our children. But when we force teachers to become disciplinary and test-prep robots, we take the humanity out of the job.
Classroom teachers have historically been among the most important agents of socialization for our children. But when we force teachers to become disciplinary and test-prep robots, we take the humanity out of the job. Given the trends I've described here, we need to help teachers be humane and compassionate now more than ever. We need them to foster the skills in their students that bring out the more positive side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one's behavior is affecting others, taking another's perspective, honesty, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict. We need schools to be safe havens for learning and social development. Not just for the behaviorally challenging kids. For all kids.
No wonder schools are feeling less safe these days. As of this writing, there have been at least seventy-nine shootings in elementary, middle, junior, and high schools since Newtown. That's not a misprint. That's a signal.
There are many factors that stack the odds against educators that make it more difficult for them to help. Yet, helping teachers be helpers is imperative. There's a lot at stake.