Interesting article about educational philosophies:
I didn’t read the whole thing - I gave up about halfway through. From the half I read - and the reason why I gave up - is that to me it seemed like the journalist equivalent of shaking your first and yelling at kids to get off your lawn.
It is an interesting contrast between Lean on Me and Dead Poet’s; the author makes some thoughtful points.
I did read the whole article, and I think the author is setting up straw men to advance an agenda that is all too real where I live – one where “structure” and “discipline” are used as excuses to remove certain kids from schools in order to “save” the rest of them. The author is so impressed by the fact that the Lean on Me principal immediately kicked 300 kids out of his school that he mentions it twice. There is, of course, absolutely no consideration of what happened to those 300 kids once they were excluded from their public school – apparently, these children are to be considered so utterly beyond help that we need not waste time thinking of them.
I don’t think you’ll find many people who look at Dead Poet’s Society and come away with the idea that that one teacher’s style should be emulated across the board, but we do find oh-so-many groups who are willing to claim that for a certain swath of the population, the only good schools are the ones that discipline kids strictly and who are quick to chase out or outright expel kids who don’t immediately respond to such treatment. These kinds of schools (Kipp, success academy) were the darlings of the 1990s and early 2000s, even as more and more actual students came forward to speak on how damaging that kind of education was for them.
Unfortunately, this model of education still persists, at least where I live. A significant number of the lawmakers on our Education Committees seem to think our schools would be wonderful if only we could get rid of all these students. They’ve been busy expanding the list of infractions that can get a kid suspended or expelled, even though there’s no evidence that removing a child from an education environment improves their education or anyone else’s.
Actually I think there is quite a bit of evidence that disruptive students hurt the learning environment for all the others.
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Really? Studies show that disruptive students have significant long term negative impacts on their peers:
It is of course difficult to decide how to deal with these kids. And some teachers or administrators may be more likely to stereotype certain kids as “difficult”. But mainstreaming all kids, whatever their challenges, is not a decision that is based on what is collectively best for children.
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So, how many kids is it ok to discard for some semblance of the greater good? And how much responsibility should be on the schools/the state to make sure they do everything possible to help a kid get an education before discarding them?
In a state like mine, that is unconstitutionally failing to fund schools to a bare minimum level, while logging multi-billion dollar revenue surpluses year after year after year, it seems like we could try a whole heck of a lot harder to provide schools, teachers and students with enough resources to make simply refusing to educate kids the last possible resort, not a first-line “solution” as our legislature keeps trying to impose.
Who said anything about “discarding them”? There’s a duty on the state (and on parents) to provide education for all kids (for want of a better term, a free appropriate public education). That doesn’t mean reducing education for all kids to the lowest common denominator, these kids need more resources not less to help them. So we could also try a whole heck of a lot harder to provide “alternative” schools with enough resources to educate the excluded kids in a separate environment without the negative side effects on their peers.
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We must keep the disruptive students in class at all costs. They are our future after all. The good students will not suffer. Right?………
Garbage.
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Sometimes they say of prison that you go in bad and come out worse. That’s what this proposal brings to mind. Taking all the “trouble” kids and segregating them, putting them then into an environment with a “trouble” dynamic, and expecting any of them to come out better for the experience seems unrealistic. Seems when you put a bunch of “trouble” kids together in an insular environment you’re just going to end up with exponentially more trouble. In the long run, this may not be best - not only for those kids - but for society as a whole. Disrupting that outcome would take way more funding than most schools systems can afford.
FTR, I have to note that I am slogging slowly through the paper cited above and if I am reading it correctly (and I freely admit I may not be; please feel free to correct), it did NOT actually study the effect of disruptive kids on their classmates. While the paper uses the term “disruptive” repeatedly, the researchers actually measured no such thing – they used students affected by domestic violence as an analogue for disruptive students, reasoning that other research shows that kids raised in DV situations often display disruptive behaviors.
So now we have a study that says it’s bad for kids to go to schools with other children who are living in DV situations (something entirely beyond the control of any of the children involved). I would think that the only moral conclusion to draw from such a paper is that we need to make sure families have the resources they need to avoid and to escape DV situations, not that it’d be good if our schools could then compound the issue by over-disciplining kids in school, and removing some kids from school entirely so that their misfortune won’t affect their peers.
On a completely unrelated note, the paper also gives me grave concerns about the privacy of Florida students. If I’m reading this correctly (see above), Florida keeps identifying information of each student who attends its public schools, up through their college graduation (including which classes they take and what grades they get) and on into their careers, maintaining some kind of database on their salaries while they live in Florida. That’s…extensive, and as a parent I would really not be ok with the State collecting so much identifying data on my kids (or on me, for that matter), let alone sharing it out to anyone who asks.