How School Bureaucracy Traded Classroom Order For Endless Excuses

Carolyn D. Gorman and Jennifer Weber:

The school year has started for nearly half the country, and most teachers are nervously expecting misbehavior. “Students have become apathetic toward school rules,” one teacher told EdWeek Research Center in a recent survey, “and feel emboldened to disrespect or clearly ignore their teachers.” If students feel emboldened, it’s because they’ve learned they’ll likely get away with it. Consequences depend on conditions other than their behavior.

The Trump administration just issued guidance suggesting they want to fix that. On August 18, the Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to states and school districts reminding them that discipline serves a purpose, and that school policies can’t intentionally “favor nor disfavor” students based on race. It’s the right message, but the administration is up against bureaucracy.

Discipline doesn’t exist solely to dole out punishment. Rules and procedures are necessary to maintain safe schools and orderly classrooms, which are prerequisites for learning. Discipline is also instructional. Children aren’t born with perfectly mastered patience, restraint, punctuality, and respect — skills and attitudes necessary for the adult world. Like any skill, those behaviors are learned by practice and shaped by consequences. School rules, or codes of conduct, make adults’ expectations for students predictable. Enforcement makes the consequences predictable when expectations aren’t met.

Over the past decade, the upsides of predictable discipline have taken a backseat to the perceived harms of punishment. In 2014, federal policy made discipline partly conditional on aggregate racial statistics after black students were found suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students, prompting questions about whether schools applied discipline fairly. Different rates of exclusionary discipline alone don’t prove discrimination; differences result from many factors, including differences in misbehavior rates. But schools were nonetheless threatened with federal investigations if their race-neutral policies, not intended to discriminate, produced a “disparate impact.” Administrators were motivated to reduce reported incidents, but misbehavior still happened.