The Core Knowledge Blog

The Gadfly the other day picked up on an interesting story out of Las Vegas, where school officials are struggling with record numbers of expulsions and wondering whether alternative schools are worth the cost. According to the Las Vegas Sun, Clark County, Nevada refers kids with discipline problems to special “behavior” schools, where the students stay for nine weeks before returning to their home campus. Hardcore troublemakers who are expelled end up at “continuation” schools. After their stints they are not permitted back at their original schools, and end up being passed around the district. Then came the eyebrow raiser:

“We think that if reasonable interventions aren’t working, if a student has clearly decided that he doesn’t want to learn and, moreover, is bent on discouraging his peers from learning, then he should exit the system for good,” the Gadfly opined. “That means spending the remainder of his days in academic boot-camp—no privileges, no fun, no free time, just hard learning and hard discipline. Attending the school one wishes should not become a “right” divorced from all responsibilities. It is a privilege and should be treated as such.”

It’s good to hear the language of personal responsibility balancing the rhetoric of rights for a change. But why not just take away the right to attend any school? If we agree that a student has a right to be educated on the public dime until a certain age, and the student for whatever reason has demonstrated an inability to function in a school environment, why not just tutor him at home for an hour or two a day? It would push accountability for the child’s behavior back to the home where it arguably belongs.

Expensive? Maybe not. What’s the cost in lost future earning power to students whose education is sacrificed to chaotic, disruptive schools? We’re used to viewing the problem of the disruptive student through that student’s eyes, rather than examining the price paid in lost time and wasted opportunity by the rest of a school community. The problem of disruptive students contributing to an environment in which learning is impossible is something of a silent epidemic in our worst schools. The silence is the product of the favored myth that if a student is disruptive, it must be the teacher’s fault for running an insufficiently engaging classroom. Thus to admit to a lack of classroom control is to admit to being a bad teacher. While this may be true in some instances—there is no shortage of bad teachers—in many others it’s clearly nonsense. As I write this, I can hear the inevitable response. The best teachers are both rigorous and engaging. Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so? Finding enough of those teachers to fill a school is a daunting task. Finding enough to fill entire school systems is a Sisyphean one.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the “engagement myth” is it puts the onus on teachers to plan lessons around classroom management instead of academic content. Student engagement becomes the alpha and omega of planning, with challenging and rigorous material shunted aside. Thus the need to manage a small handful of profoundly disruptive students can change the entire equation in a school for the worse. The classroom becomes a place organized around keeping kids entertained and on-task. Seen through this lens, disruption becomes a cause, not an effect of failing schools.

Meanwhile, back in Las Vegas, don’t be surprised if the radical solution to the problem of continuation schools is to close or curtail them and push the problem back to the home school. After all, if the teachers are doing their job, then discipline problems should be at a minimum. I had a principal once who announced at the beginning of the year that we had suspended too many children the previous year and that we were “really going to have to tighten up on discipline this year.”

I had thought all those suspensions were tightening up on discipline.