Responding, not Reacting, to the Education Crisis in our Classrooms

I have been dismayed by the number of posts I am reading about students not being punished enough for misbehavior and about the desire for more power to fail students for non-academic issues such as attendance.

Typically, people try to devolve this conversation into a false choice debate, with people who are for “respect and orderliness” on one side and the other side characterized as turning all power over to students and allowing a version of Golding’s Lord of the Flies take hold of the school.

Let’s start with the more pressing concern: student behavior. Nearly every school I have encountered this year has seen a moderate to a significant increase in disruptive student behavior. Everyone seems to understand that students have been hard hit by the pandemic and are suffering with degrees of trauma that emerge in various ways.

At a fundamental level, this acknowledgment is a recognition that the behavior is not rational choice behavior.

Underneath the screams for harsher punishment for students with cell phones, use of bad words, and even fights, is an underpinning of deterrence theory. The argument states that when students see someone suspended for doing a bad thing, they will be less likely to do that bad thing (general deterrence) and if they receive a suspension for a bad act, they will be less likely to commit that act (specific deterrence). Likewise, if there are no suspensions students will be more likely to commit these acts.

The problem with this rationale is that students generally do not construct a cost-benefit chart prior to committing one of these acts. Add to this the fact that adolescents are neurologically weak at planning and considering the consequences of behavior — they are natural risk-takers. Additionally, the evidence regarding the effectiveness of deterrence theory is weak, at best. In many cases, it increases the likelihood of re-offending and decreases the sense of safety in a school.

What does all this mean? Deterrence theory is a particularly poor choice to address student behavior. Instead, schools should pair a policy of exclusion from school only for safety reasons with a diagnostic and prescriptive therapeutic approach. We know that our children are in crisis, and we should also know that they are suffering in different ways and need different interventions.

Some students may need a course of Thinking for a Change, while others may need something more like Anger Replacement Training. Those that are really struggling may even need Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. The data behind these programs is far more promising and shows reductions in recidivism, dropping out, and other, unrelated, anti-school behaviors.

The point is that the desire to punish the misbehavior out of students is rooted in something other than a desire to fix the behavior. That desire to punish should be explored and addressed just as rigorously as the causes of student misbehavior.

The other argument I am seeing bubble up right now has to do with students who have been absent many times during the year and the desire to be able to fail them, regardless of their mastery of the course goals.

I believe school attendance is important and chronic absenteeism is a significant symptom, indicating there may be some deep issues with the student or their family dynamic.

The typical argument is something along the lines of “a student shouldn’t be allowed to pass unless they have been present for x% of the course meetings.” The rejoinder “what if they have mastered the course objectives without setting foot in your room?” is met with “They couldn’t possibly. The content is taught during class meetings.”

It is a really good idea to separate the concepts of attendance and grades. In doing so, we need to acknowledge that students walk into our classrooms with various degrees of prior knowledge and that they are more capable to learn the content away from us than ever before. Psychometrically speaking, the more things a grade represents, the less valid it is for any one of those things. It is generally accepted that grades represent a student’s mastery of the course content. Attempts to have the grade also represent “participation,” “attendance,” and “effort” all degrade the validity of the primary purpose of grading.

This is not to say that students should never receive a failing grade, but we should be very clear and careful in the construction of our grading formulas. We should also be very thoughtful about what we do when a student fails.

Sometimes, we deliver failing grades to communicate something other than mastery of the content. Specifically, when a student has received several zeros, there is an artificial suppression of their grade, and there is a shift from assessing content knowledge to assessing compliance, or the student’s willingness to attempt the work. These are two very different things and require very different responses from a school. A student who has attempted to learn and demonstrate learning but only knows 40% of the content represents a pedagogical puzzle for us, while a student who has refused to attempt these tasks represents a different puzzle for us and generally requires different resources to address.

Similarly, when a student does earn a failing grade, we should be careful that our response does not push them deeper into a hole. Sometimes the repeating of a course or a grade is the best solution, but not most times. Typically, the student has specific areas of need that can be addressed through targeted remediation or additional supports, like what we do for students with disabilities.

For leaders, these debates that are raging should indicate a significant level of frustration for staff. This doesn’t mean that staff are bad, mean, or have bad intentions. It does mean that staff need help and are feeling overwhelmed by the amount and the severity of student behaviors in front of them on a daily basis.

Staffs need a way to catch their breath and some respite from a situation that is many times more difficult than it was just three years ago. In addition to these long-term solutions to address student behavior, staffs need a way to get immediate help when a student is having a crisis and the teacher is supposed to be teaching. Having support staff trained in therapeutic crisis intervention for schools (TCI-S) is a great way to respond to students in crisis with support while empowering teachers to continue doing their primary job.

Let’s take a step back from the zero-sum arguments that oversimplify these issues and recognize that they are messy and complicated, and the solutions will also not be simple.